Collected Essays

Greetings from Idiot America

2006-01-31T17:41:00.000-08:00

Greetings from Idiot America
by Charles Pierce
Nov 01 '05

There is some undeniable art—you might even say design—in the way southern Ohio rolls itself into northern Kentucky. The hills build gently under you as you leave the interstate. The roads narrow beneath a cool and thickening canopy as they wind through the leafy outer precincts of Hebron—a small Kentucky town named, as it happens, for the place near Jerusalem where the Bible tells us that David was anointed the king of the Israelites. This resulted in great literature and no little bloodshed, which is the case with a great deal of Scripture.

At the top of the hill, just past the Idlewild Concrete plant, there is an unfinished wall with an unfinished gate in the middle of it. Happy, smiling people are trickling in through the gate this fine morning, one minivan at a time. They park in whatever shade they can find, which is not much. It's hot as hell this morning.

They are almost uniformly white and almost uniformly bubbly. Their cars come from Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio and Illinois and as far away as New Brunswick, Canada. There are elderly couples in shorts, suburban families piling out of the minivans, the children all Wrinkle-Resistant and Stain-Released. There is a clutch of Mennonite women in traditional dress—small bonnets and long skirts. All of them wander off, chattering and waving and stopping every few steps for pictures, toward a low-slung building that seems from the outside to be the most finished part of the complex.

Outside, several of them stop to be interviewed by a video crew. They have come from Indiana, one woman says, two toddlers toddling at her feet, because they have been home-schooling their children and they have given them this adventure as a kind of field trip. The whole group then bustles into the lobby of the building, where they are greeted by the long neck of a huge, herbivorous dinosaur. The kids run past that and around a corner, where stands another, smaller dinosaur.

Which is wearing a saddle.

It is an English saddle, hornless and battered. Apparently, this was a dinosaur used for dressage competitions and stakes races. Any working dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of ranch work and herding other dinosaurs along the dusty trail almost certainly would wear a sturdy western saddle.

This is very much a show dinosaur.

The dinosaurs are the first things you see when you enter the Creation Museum, which is very much a work in progress and the dream child of an Australian named Ken Ham. Ham is the founder of Answers in Genesis, an organization of which the museum one day will be the headquarters. The people here today are on a special tour. They have paid $149 to become "charter members" of the museum.

"Dinosaurs," Ham laughs as he poses for pictures with his visitors, "always get the kids interested."

AIG is dedicated to the proposition that the biblical story of the creation of the world is inerrant in every word. Which means, in this interpretation and among other things, that dinosaurs coexisted with man (hence the saddles), that there were dinosaurs in Eden, and that Noah, who certainly had enough on his hands, had to load two brachiosaurs onto the Ark along with his wife, his sons, and their wives, to say nothing of green ally-gators and long-necked geese and humpty-backed camels and all the rest.

(Faced with the obvious question of how to keep a three-hundred-by-thirty-by-fifty-cubit ark from sinking under the weight of dinosaur couples, Ham's literature argues that the dinosaurs on the Ark were young ones, and thus did not weigh as much as they might have.)

"We," Ham exclaims to the assembled, "are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!" And everybody cheers.

Ham then goes on to celebrate the great victory won in Oklahoma, where, in the first week of June, Tulsa park officials announced a decision (later reversed) to put up a display at the city zoo based on Genesis so as to eliminate the "discrimination" long inflicted upon sensitive Christians by a statue of the Hindu god Ganesh that decorated the elephant exhibit.

This is a serious crowd. They gather in the auditorium and they listen intently, and they take copious notes as Ham draws a straight line from Adam's fall to our godless public schools, from Darwin to gay marriage. He talks about the triumph over Ganesh, and everybody cheers again.

Ultimately, the heart of the museum will be a long walkway down which patrons will be able to journey through the entire creation story. This, too, is still in the earliest stages of construction. Today, for example, one young artist is working on a scale model of the moment when Adam names all the creatures. Adam is in the delicate process of naming the saber-toothed tiger while, behind him, already named, a woolly mammoth seems to be on the verge of taking a nap.

Elsewhere in the museum, another Adam figure is full-size, if unpainted, and waiting to be installed. This Adam is recliningpeacefully; eventually, if the plans stay true, he will be placed in a
pool under a waterfall. As the figure depicts a prelapsarian Adam, he is completely naked. He also has no penis.

This would seem to be a departure from Scripture inconsistent with the biblical literalism of the rest of the museum. If you're willing to stretch Job's description of a "behemoth" to include baby brachiosaurs on Noah's Ark, as Ham does in his lectures, then surely, since we are depicting him before the fall, Adam should be out there waving unashamedly in the paradisaical breezes. For that matter, what is Eve doing there, across the room, with her hair falling just so to cover her breasts and midsection, as though she's doing a nude scene from some 1950s Swedish art-house film?

After all, Genesis 2:25 clearly says that at this point in their lives, "And the man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed." If Adam courageously sat there unencumbered while he was naming saber-toothed tigers, then why, six thousand years later, should he be depicted as a eunuch in some family-values Eden? And if these people can take away what Scripture says was rightfully his, then why can't Charles Darwin and the accumulated science of the past 150-odd years take away all the rest of it?

These are impolite questions. Nobody asks them here by the cool pond tucked into a gentle hillside. Increasingly, nobody asks them outside the gates, either. It is impolite to wonder why our parents sent us all to college, and why generations of immigrants sweated and bled so their children could be educated, if it wasn't so that we would all one day feel confident enough to look at a museum filled with dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Belmont and make the not unreasonable point that it is all batshit crazy and that anyone who believes this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects and his own money.

Dinosaurs with saddles?

Dinosaurs on Noah's Ark?

Welcome to your new Eden.

Welcome to Idiot America.

LET'S TAKE A TOUR, shall we? For the sake of time, we'll just cover the last year or so. A federally funded abstinence program suggests that HIV can be transmitted through tears. An Alabama legislator proposes a bill to ban all books by gay authors. The Texas House passes a bill banning suggestive cheerleading. And nobody laughs at any of it, or even points out that, in the latter case, having Texas ban suggestive cheerleading is like having Nebraska ban corn. James Dobson, a prominent conservative Christian spokesman, compares the Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan. Pat Robertson, another prominent conservative preacher, says that federal judges are a more serious threat to the country than is Al Qaeda and, apparently taking his text from the Book of Gambino, later sermonizes that the United States should get with it and snuff the democratically elected president of Venezuela.

The Congress of the United States intervenes to extend into a televised spectacle the prolonged death of a woman in Florida. The majority leader of the Senate, a physician, pronounces a diagnosis based on heavily edited videotape. The majority leader of the House of Representatives argues against cutting-edge research into the use of human stem cells by saying that "an embryo is a person. . . . We were all at one time embryos ourselves. So was Abraham. So was Muhammad. So was Jesus of Nazareth." Nobody laughs at him or points out that the same could be said of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or whoever invented the baby-back rib.

And, finally, in August, the cover of Time —for almost a century the dyspeptic voice of the American establishment—clears its throat, hems and haws and hacks like a headmaster gagging on his sherry, and asks, quite seriously: "Does God have a place in science class?"

Fights over evolution—and its faddish new camouflage, intelligent design, a pseudoscience that posits without proof or method that science is inadequate to explain existence and that supernatural causes must be considered—roil up school districts across the country. The president of the United States announces that he believes ID ought to be taught in the public schools on an equal footing with the theory of evolution. And in Dover, Pennsylvania, during one of these many controversies, a pastor named Ray Mummert delivers the line that both ends our tour and, in every real sense, sums it up:

"We've been attacked," he says, "by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture."

And there it is.

Idiot America is not the place where people say silly things. It's not the place where people believe in silly things. It is not the place where people go to profit from the fact that people believe in silly things. Idiot America is not even those people who believe that Adam named the dinosaurs. Those people pay attention. They take notes. They take the time and the considerable mental effort to construct a worldview that is round and complete.

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents—for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

In the place of expertise, we have elevated the Gut, and the Gut is a moron, as anyone who has ever tossed a golf club, punched a wall, or kicked an errant lawn mower knows. We occasionally dress up the Gut by calling it "common sense." The president's former advisor on medical ethics regularly refers to the "yuck factor." The Gut is common. It is democratic. It is the roiling repository of dark and ancient fears. Worst of all, the Gut is faith-based.

It's a dishonest phrase for a dishonest time, "faith-based," a cheap huckster's phony term of art. It sounds like an additive, an
artificial flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine. It's a word for people without the courage to say they are religious, and it is beloved not only by politicians too cowardly to debate something as substantial as faith but also by Idiot America, which is too lazy to do it.

After all, faith is about the heart and soul and about transcendence. Anything calling itself faith-based is admitting that it is secular and profane. In the way that it relies on the Gut to determine its science, its politics, and even the way it sends its people to war, Idiot America is not a country of faith; it's a faith-based country, fashioning itself in the world, which is not the place where faith is best fashioned.

Hofstadter saw this one coming. "Intellect is pitted against feeling," he wrote, "on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical."

The Gut is the basis for the Great Premises of Idiot America. We hold these truths to be self-evident:
1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
2) Anything can be true if somebody says it on television.
3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

How does it work? This is how it works. On August 21, a newspaper account of the "intelligent design" movement contained this remarkable sentence: "They have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive."

A "politically savvy challenge to evolution" is as self-evidently ridiculous as an agriculturally savvy challenge to euclidean geometry would be. It makes as much sense as conducting a Gallup poll on gravity or running someone for president on the Alchemy Party ticket. It doesn't matter what percentage of people believe they ought to be able to flap their arms and fly, none of them can. It doesn't matter how many votes your candidate got, he's not going to turn lead into gold. The sentence is so arrantly foolish that the only real news in it is where it appeared.

On the front page.

Of The New York Times .

Within three days, there was a panel on the subject on Larry King Live , in which Larry asked the following question:

"All right, hold on. Dr. Forrest, your concept of how can you out-and-out turn down creationism, since if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?"

And why do so many of them host television programs, Larry?

This is how Idiot America engages the great issues of the day. It decides, en masse, with a thousand keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the poor biologist's words carry no more weight than the thunderations of some turkey-neck preacher out of the Church of Christ's Own Parking Facility in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an "expert" and, therefore, an "elitist." Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He's brilliant, surely, but his Gut's the same as ours. He just ignores it, poor fool.

This is a great country, in no small part because it is the best country ever devised in which to be a public crank. Never has a nation so dedicated itself to the proposition that not only should its people hold nutty ideas but they should cultivate them, treasure them, shine them up, and put them right there on the mantelpiece. This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. The right to do so is there in our founding documents.

After all, the Founders were men of the Enlightenment, fashioning a country out of new ideas—or out of old ones that they excavated from centuries of religious internment. Historian Charles Freeman points out that in Europe, "Christian thought . . . often gave irrationality the status of a universal 'truth' to the exclusion of those truths to be found through reason. So the uneducated was preferred to the educated, and the miracle to the operation of natural laws."

In America, the Founders were trying to get away from all that, to raise a nation of educated people. In pledging their faith to intellectual experimentation, however, the Founders set freedom free. They devised the best country ever in which to be completely around the bend. It's just that making a respectable living out of it used to be harder work.

THEY CALL IT THE INFINITE CORRIDOR, which is the kind of joke you tell when your day job is to throw science as far ahead as you can and hope that the rest of us can move fast enough to catch up. It is a series of connecting hallways that run north through the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The hallways are lined with cramped offices, their doors mottled thickly with old tape and yellowing handbills. The Infinite Corridor is not a straight line. It has branches and tributaries. It has backwaters and eddies. You can get lost there.

One of the offices belongs to Professor Kip Hodges, a young and energetic North Carolinian who studies how mountain ranges develop and grow. Suffice it to say that Hodges's data do not correspond to the six-thousand-year-old earth of the creationists, whereupon dinosaurs and naked folks doth gambol together.

Hodges is recently returned from Nepal, where he rescued his research from encroaching Maoist rebels, who were not interested in the least in how the Himalayas became the Himalayas. They were interested in land, in guns, in power, and in other things of the Gut. Moreover, part of Hodges's duties at MIT has been to mentor incoming freshmen about making careers in science for themselves.

"Scientists are always portrayed in the literature as being above the fray intellectually," Hodges says. "I guess to a certain extent that's our fault, because scientists don't do a good enough job communicating with people who are nonscientists—that it's not a matter of brainiacs doing one thing and nonbrainiacs doing another."

Americans of a certain age grew up with science the way an earlier generation grew up with baseball and even earlier ones grew up with politics and religion. America cured diseases. It put men on the moon. It thought its way ahead in the cold war and stayed there.

"My earliest memory," Hodges recalls, "is watching John Glenn go up. It was a time that, if you were involved in science or engineering—particularly science, at that time—people greatly respected you if you said you were going into those fields. And nowadays, it's like there's no value placed by society on a lot of the observations that are made by people in science.

[End Part 1]
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Part Two

"It's more than a general dumbing down of America—the lack of self-motivated thinking: clear, creative thinking. It's like you're happy for other people to think for you. If you should be worried about, say, global warming, well, somebody in Washington will tell me whether or not I should be worried about global warming. So it's like this abdication of intellectual responsibility—that America now is getting to the point that more and more people would just love to let somebody else think for them."

The country was founded by people who were fundamentally curious; Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, to name only the most obvious examples, were inveterate tinkerers. (Before dispatching Lewis and Clark into the Louisiana Territory, Jefferson insisted that the pair categorize as many new plant and animal species as they found. Considering they were also mapping everything from Missouri to Oregon, this must have been a considerable pain in the canoe.) Further, they assumed that their posterity would feel much the same as they did; in 1815, appealing to Congress to fund the building of a national university, James Madison called for the development of "a nursery of enlightened preceptors."

It is a long way from that to the moment on February 18, 2004, when sixty-two scientists, including a clutch of Nobel laureates, released a report accusing the incumbent administration of manipulating science for political ends. It is a long way from Jefferson's observatory and Franklin's kite to George W. Bush, in an interview in 2005, suggesting that intelligent design be taught alongside the theory of evolution in the nation's science classes. "Both sides ought to be properly taught," said the president, "so people can understand what the debate is about."

The "debate," of course, is nothing of the sort, because two sides are required for a debate. Nevertheless, the very notion of it is a measure of how scientific discourse, and the way the country educates itself, has slipped through lassitude and inattention across the border into Idiot America—where fact is merely that which enough people believe, and truth is measured only by how fervently they believe it.

If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress, we have done so by moving the debate into the realm of political and cultural argument, where we all feel more confident, because it is there that the Gut rules. Held to this standard, any scientific theory is rendered mere opinion. Scientific fact is no more immutable than a polling sample. This is how there's a "debate" over the very existence of global warming, even though the preponderance of fact among those who actually have studied the phenomenon renders the "debate" quite silly. The debate is about making people feel better about driving SUVs. The debate is less about climatology than it is about guiltlessly topping off your tank and voting in tax incentives for oil companies.

The rest of the world looks on in cockeyed wonder. The America of Franklin and Edison, of Fulton and Ford, of the Manhattan project and the Apollo program, the America of which Einstein wanted to be a part, seems to be enveloping itself in a curious fog behind which it's tying itself in knots over evolution, for pity's sake, and over the relative humanity of blastocysts versus the victims of Parkinson's disease.

"Even in the developing world, where I spend lots of time doing my work," Hodges says, "if you tell them that you're from MIT and you tell them that you do science, it's a big deal. If I go to India and tell them I'm from MIT, it's a big deal. In Thailand, it's a big deal. If I go to Iowa, they could give a rat's ass. And that's a weird thing, that we're moving in that direction as a nation."

Hence, Bush was not talking about science—not in any real sense, anyway. Intelligent design is a theological construct, a faith-based attempt to gussy up creationism in a lab coat. Its fundamental tenets cannot be experimentally verified—or, most important, falsified. That it enjoys a certain public cachet is irrelevant; a higher percentage of Americans believes that a government conspiracy killed John F. Kennedy than believes in intelligent design, but there is no great effort abroad in the land to include that conspiracy theory in sixth-grade history texts. Bush wasn't talking about science. He was talking about the political utility of putting saddles on the dinosaurs and breaking Ganesh's theological monopoly over the elephant paddock.

"The reason the creationists have been so effective is that they have put a premium on communication skills," explains Hodges. "It matters to them that they can talk to the guy in the bar, and it's important to them, and they are hugely effective at it."

It is the ultimate standard of Idiot America. How does it play to Joe Six-Pack in the bar? At the end of August 2004, the Zogby people discovered that 57 percent of undecided voters would rather have a beer with George Bush than with John Kerry. Now, how many people with whom you've spent time drinking beer would you trust with the nuclear launch codes? Not only is this not a question for a nation of serious citizens, it's not even a question for a nation of serious drunkards.

If even scientific discussion is going to be dragged into politics, then the discussion there at least ought to exist on a fairly sophisticated level. Again, the Founders thought it should. They considered self-government a science that required an informed and educated and enlightened populace to make all the delicate mechanisms run. Instead, today we have the Kabuki politics and marionette debates best exemplified by cable television. Instead, the discussion of everything ends up in the bar.

(It wasn't always this way. Theodore Roosevelt is reckoned to be the manliest of our manly-man presidents. He also was a lifelong science dweeb, cataloging songbirds, of all things. Of course, he shot them first, so maybe that makes all the difference.)

It is, of course, television that has allowed Idiot America to run riot within the modern politics and all forms of public discourse. It is not that there is less information on television than there once was. (That there is less news is another question entirely.) In fact, there is so much information that fact is now defined as something that so many people believe that television notices it, and truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.

"You don't need to be credible on television," explains Keith Olbermann, the erudite host of his own show on MSNBC. "You don't need to be authoritative. You don't need to be informed. You don't need to be honest. All these things that we used to associate with what we do are no longer factors.

"There is an entire network [the Fox News Channel] that bills itself as news that is devoted to reinforcing people's fears and saying to them, 'This is what you should be scared of, and here's whose fault it is,' " Olbermann says. "And that's what they get—two or three million frustrated paranoids who sit in front of the TV and go, 'Damn right, it's those liberals' fault.' Or, 'It's those—what's the word for it?— college graduates ' fault.' "

The reply, of course, is that Fox regularly buries Olbermann and the rest of the MSNBC lineup in breaking off a segment of a smidgen of a piece of the television audience. Truth is what moves the needle. Fact is what sells.

Idiot America is a bad place for crazy notions. Its indolent tolerance of them causes the classic American crank to drift slowly and dangerously into the mainstream, wherein the crank loses all of his charm and the country loses another piece of its mind. The best thing about American crackpots used to be that they would stand proudly aloof from a country that, by their peculiar lights, had gone mad. Not today. Today, they all have book deals, TV shows, and cases pending in federal court.

Once, it was very hard to get into the public square and very easy to fall out of it. One ill-timed word, even a whiff of public scandal, and all the hard work you did in the grange hall on all those winter nights was for nothing. No longer. You can be Bill Bennett, gambling with both fists, but if your books still sell, you can continue to scold the nation about its sins. You can be Bill O'Reilly, calling up subordinates to proposition them both luridly and comically—loofahs? falafels?—and if more people tune in to watch you than tune in to watch some other blowhard, you can keep your job lecturing America about the dangers of its secular culture. Just don't be boring. And keep the ratings up. Idiot America wants to be entertained.

Because scientific expertise was dragged into political discussion, and because political discussion is hopelessly corrupt, the distrust of scientific expertise is now as general as the distrust of politicians is. Everyone is an expert, so nobody is. For example, Sean Hannity's knowledge of, say, stem-cell research is measured precisely by his ratings book. His views on the subject are more well known than those of the people doing the actual research.

The credibility of Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania on the subject of the cultural anthropology of the American family ought to be, well, minimal. He spent the summer promoting a book in which he propounded theories on the subject that were progressively loopier. "For some parents," he writes, "the purported need to provide things for their children simply provides a convenient rationalization for pursuing a gratifying career outside the home." He goes on later to compare a woman's right to choose an abortion unfavorably with the institution of slavery. Nevertheless, he's welcome in the mainstream, at least until either he's defeated for reelection or his book doesn't sell.

"Somewhere along the line, we stopped rewarding intelligence with success and stopped equating intelligence with success," Olbermann says. We're all in the bar now, where everybody's an expert, where the Gut makes everyone so very sure. All opinions are of equal worth. No voice is more authoritative than any others; some are just louder. Of course, the problem in the bar is that sooner or later, for reasons that nobody will remember in the clear light of the next morning, some noisy *chocolate* picks a fight. And it becomes clear that the rise of Idiot America has consequences.

ON THE MORNING of September 11, 2001, nobody in the American government knew more than Richard Clarke did on the subject of a shadowy terrorist network called Al Qaeda. He had watched it grow. He had watched it strike—in New York and in Africa and in the harbor in Yemen. That morning, in the Situation Room in the White House, Clarke watched the buildings burn and fall, and he recognized the organization's signature as well as he'd recognize his own. Instead, in the ensuing days a lot of people around him—people who didn't know enough about Al Qaeda to throw to a cat—wanted to talk about Iraq. What they believed trumped what Clarke knew, over and over again. He left the government.

"In the 1970s and 1980s, when the key issue became arms control, the traditional diplomats couldn't do the negotiating because that negotiating involved science and engineering," Clarke recalls. "Interagency decision papers were models of analysis, where assumptions were laid out and tested.

"That's the world I grew up in. [The approach] still applied to issues, even terrorism. Then these people come in, and they already have the answers, how to spin it, how to get the rest of the world on board. I thought, Wait a minute. That isn't analysis. It's the important issues where we really need analysis. "In the area of terrorism, there is a huge potential for emotional reaction. The one thing I told my team [on September 11]—they were mad and they were crying, the whole range of emotions—was that we didn't have time for emotion that day."

Nothing that the administration of George W. Bush has done has been inconsistent with the forces that twice elected it. The subtle, humming engine of its success—against John Kerry, surely, but most vividly against poor, cerebral Al Gore—was a celebration of instinct over intellect, a triumph of the Gut. No campaigns in history employed the saloon question with such devastating success or saw so clearly the path through the deliberate inexpertise of the national debate. No politician in recent times has played to the Gut so deftly.

So it ought not shock anyone when the government suddenly found itself at odds with empirical science. It ought not shock anyone in the manner in which it would go to war. Remember the beginning, when it was purely the Gut—a bone-deep call for righteous revenge for which Afghanistan was not sufficient response. In Iraq, there would be towering stacks of chemical bombs, a limitless smorgasbord of deadly bacteria, vast lagoons of exotic poisons. There would be candy and flowers greeting our troops. The war would take six months, a year, tops. Mission Accomplished. Major combat operations are over.

"Part of the problem was that people didn't want the analytic process because they'd be shown up," Richard Clarke says. "Their assumptions would be counterfactual. One of the real areas of expertise, for example, was failed-state reconstruction. How to go into failed states and maintain security and get the economy going and defang ethnic hatred. They threw it all out.

"They ignored the experts on the Middle East. They ignored the experts who said it was the wrong target. So you ignore the experts and you go in anyway, and then you ignore all the experts on how to handle the postconflict."

One of those experts was David Phillips, a senior advisor on what was called the Future of Iraq program for the State Department. Phillips was ignored. His program was ignored. Earlier, Phillips had helped reconstruct the Balkans after the region spent a decade tearing itself apart with genocidal lunacy. Phillips knew what he knew. He just didn't believe what they believed.

"You can just as easily have a faith-based, or ideologically driven, policy," he says today. "You start with the presumption that you already know the conclusion prior to asking the question. When information surfaces that contradicts your firmly entrenched views, you dismantle the institution that brought you the information."

There was going to be candy and flowers, remember? The war was going to pay for itself. Believe.

"We went in blindfolded, and we believed our own propaganda," Phillips says. "We were going to get out in ninety days, spend $1.9 billion in the short term, and Iraqi oil would pay for the rest. Now we're deep in the hole, and people are asking questions about how we got there.

"It's delusional, allowing delusion to be the basis of policy making. Once you've told the big lie, you have to substantiate it with a sequence of lies that's repeated. You can't fix a policy if you don't admit it's broken."

Two thousand American lives later, remember the beginning. One commentator quite plainly made the case that every few years or so, the United States should "throw a small nation up against the wall" to prove that it means business. And Idiot America, which is all of us, cheered.

*chocolate* right. Gimme another. And see what the superpowers in the back room will have.

AUGUST 19, 2005, was a beautiful day in Idiot America.

In Washington, William Frist, a Harvard-trained physician and the majority leader of the United States Senate, endorsed the teaching of intelligent design in the country's public schools. "I think today a pluralistic society," Frist explained, "should have access to a broad range of fact, of science, including faith."

That faith is not fact, nor should it be, and that faith is not science, nor should it be, seems to have eluded Doctor Senator Frist. It doesn't matter. He was talking to the people who believe that faith is both those things, because Bill Frist wants to be president of the United States, and because he believes those people will vote for him specifically because he talks this rot, and Idiot America will take it as an actor merely reciting his lines and let it go at that. Nonsense is a no-lose proposition.

On the same day, across town, a top aide to former secretary of state Colin Powell told CNN that Powell's pivotal presentation to the United Nations in which he described Iraq's vast array of deadly weapons was a farrago of stovepiped intelligence, wishful thinking, and utter bullshit.

"It was the lowest point in my life," the aide said.

That it has proven to be an even lower point for almost two thousand American families, and God alone knows how many Iraqis, seems to have eluded this fellow. It doesn't matter. Neither Frist with his pandering nor this apparatchik with the tender conscience—nor Colin Powell, for all that—will pay a substantial price for any of it because the two stories lasted one day, and, after all, it was a beautiful day in Idiot America.

Idiot America is a collaborative effort, the result of millions of decisions made and not made. It's the development of a collective Gut at the expense of a collective mind. It's what results when politicians make ridiculous statements and not merely do we abandon the right to punish them for it at the polls, but we also become too timid to punish them with ridicule on a daily basis, because the polls say they're popular anyway. It's what results when leaders are not held to account for mistakes that end up killing people.

And that's why August became a seminal month in Idiot America.

In its final week, a great American city drowned and then turned irrevocably into a Hieronymus Bosch painting in real time and on television, and with complete impunity, the president of the United States wandered the landscape and talked like a blithering nitwit.

First, he compared the violence surrounding the writing of an impromptu theocratic constitution in Baghdad to the events surrounding the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Undaunted, he later compared the war he'd launched in Iraq to World War II. And then he compared himself to Franklin Roosevelt. One more public appearance and we might have learned that Custer was killed by Hezbollah.

Finally, we saw the apotheosis of the end of expertise, when New Orleans was virtually obliterated as a functional habitat for human beings, and the country discovered that the primary responsibility for dealing with the calamity lay with a man who'd been dismissed as an incompetent from his previous job as the director of a luxury-show-horse organization.

And the president went on television and said that nobody could have anticipated the collapse of the unfortunate city's levees. In God's sweet name, engineers anticipated it. Politicians anticipated it. The poor *chocolate* in the Ninth Ward certainly anticipated it. Hell, four generations of folksingers anticipated it.

And the people who hated him went crazy and the people who loved him defended him. But where were the people who heard this incredible, staggeringly stupid bafflegab, uttered with conscious forethought, and realized that whatever they thought of the man, the president had gotten behind a series of podiums and done everything but drop his drawers and dance the hootchie-koo? They were out there, lost in Idiot America, where it was still a beautiful day. Idiot America took it as a bad actor merely bungling his lines. Nonsense is a no-lose proposition. For Idiot America is a place where people choose to live. It is a place that is built consciously and deliberately, one choice at a time, made or (most often) unmade. A place where we're all like that statue of Adam now, reclining in a peaceful garden of our own creation, brainless and dickless, and falling down on the job of naming the monsters for what they are, dozing away in an Eden that, every day, looks less and less like paradise.

AMERICAN IDIOTS

2006-01-10T22:28:00.000-08:00

by NANCY FRANKLIN
Seth MacFarlane’s animated empire.
Issue of 2006-01-16
Posted 2006-01-09
New Yorker

Animated television shows and the economy of the United States have something in common—they both depend on a precious natural resource. But, while the oil the country relies on will run out someday, the fuel that keeps TV cartoons going, natural gas, is endlessly renewable. As long as there are human beings—particularly boys and overgrown boys—around to fart, and make fart jokes, there will be cartoons. Of that you can be sure. This is not at all a criticism of boys or what they turn into; it just happens to be a fact, and a diamond-hard one, that boys aren’t subject to the depredations of the Four Horsemen of Appropriateness—Received Notions About Femininity, Fear of Not Being Perceived as Nice, No Boy Will Ever Want You If You Act / Look / Talk Like That, and Caring Too Much What Other People Think of You. These soul killers, having been loosed on the world by all the manufacturers of pink toys and spaghetti-strap toddlerwear, and sometimes by well-meaning, anxious mothers, come after girls before they even start elementary school and turn them into polite (if sometimes mean) little beings. So it’s easier for boys not to lose sight of the important facts of life: that bathroom humor is hilarious (if you don’t believe me, call an ancient Greek playwright), and that “butt” really is the funniest word in the world. It’s a place from which all manner and degree of embarrassment, shame, and humiliation emanate—a quality it shares with the body parts that are its neighbors down there, though mention should also be made of those parts’ pleasurable aspects, since they, too, provide so much opportunity for comedy. Adults, if they’re honest with themselves, know that this is true, and if they’ve forgotten it they’ll certainly get a reminder when they have children. (There is a series of Japanese children’s books about the bodily functions that children tend to become preoccupied with; the most famous volumes in the series—“Everyone Poops” and “The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts”—got that way because adults buy them as gag presents for other adults. At least, they do in one family I know.) For better or for worse, though, girls are encouraged to be dignified and self-contained, and while women play a role in TV animation (voicing characters, writing, and, sometimes, producing), all but one of the high-profile cartoons that have aired since “The Simpsons” débuted, in 1989, were created by men—and watched mostly by teen-age boys. (“Daria,” whose protagonist is a smart, sardonic teen-age girl, was co-created by Susie Lewis Lynn.) Even the three little dynamos in “The Powerpuff Girls” were brought to life by a dude.

Currently, the blue ribbon for pull-my-finger comedy goes to Fox’s “Family Guy,” on the basis of both ribaldry and popularity; it’s the most watched show among teen-age boys and college-age men. It can’t be said—not by me, anyway—that “Family Guy” has surpassed “The Simpsons” in terms of quality and reach, but the show is definitely having a moment in the sun. And it isn’t only a fartfest, of course. It’s also a slapstick sitcom about a middle-class suburban Rhode Island family, headed by Lois and Peter Griffin, she a standard-issue loving housewife who married down and he a hugely fat happy idiot. The show, which was created by Seth MacFarlane, a now thirty-two-year-old graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, débuted in 1999, and didn’t do well in the ratings, though it did last for fifty episodes before it was cancelled, in 2002. Reruns began airing on the Cartoon Network, during the block of programming called “Adult Swim,” which runs late at night six nights a week. “Adult Swim” features three dozen or so shows aimed at post-pubescent viewers, including odd, arty, anime-inspired shows, series that are familiar from their network runs, such as “Futurama,” and ones that throw the history of TV cartoons into a blender and serve up pastiche on wry bread, such as “Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law,” which brings an old Hanna-Barbera character into a contemporary setting. (Comedy Central has done something similar, but much more wicked, in “Drawn Together,” an animated “reality” show featuring cartoon archetypes—a musclebound superhero, a Betty Boop look-alike, a Pikachu wannabe—living together in a house and displaying the undiscriminating libidos and tiny minds that seem to be prerequisites for most reality shows. It’s filthy, and sometimes it’s even funny.)

“Family Guy,” which had never had a consistent time slot when it was on Fox, became a hit on the Cartoon Network, and then it became a hit all over again when it was released on a series of DVDs: the first volume was the best-selling TV series in 2003, and it’s the all-time best-selling DVD of any animated show. In 2004, Fox announced that it was bringing “Family Guy” back; it was the first time that DVD sales had driven a show’s return to the airwaves. Then, to capitalize on the show’s success, MacFarlane was asked to come up with an additional package of three linked episodes that were released on DVD last fall, before airing on TV; if you do the math, you’ll see that you pay much more per episode for this set—and they’re episodes that you can later see for free—than you did for the previous collections. To make a long story short, when it comes to “Family Guy” Fox is rolling in it.

Several characters on the show have become stars—they’re on T-shirts and mugs, and can be bought in ringtone form. There’s Stewie Griffin, the one-year-old baby of the family, whose voice is modelled on Rex Harrison’s in “My Fair Lady”; he’s foppish and maniacal, and creepily pansexual, and he’s always plotting to kill his mother. Brian, the dog (an overfed Mr. Peabody), is the smartest member of the family, though he is a little too fond of Martinis. But describing cartoon characters is a losing business—so much depends on the voices. “Family Guy” is almost like a radio show, and that’s one of its pleasures. (As it happens, MacFarlane himself voices Peter, Stewie, and Brian. His real voice, low and resonant, sounds like Brian’s.)

MacFarlane and his writers deserve every penny they make—except maybe some of the pennies they pocket from their new series, “American Dad!,” a satirical take on the bland family shows of the fifties, when father knew best and mother stayed home, which premièred on Fox last year. Here the dad, Stan Smith, is a C.I.A. agent (and also not all that bright), emotionally vacant, unreflective, and cheerfully overbearing—the personification of America and its actions on the world stage. One problem with “American Dad!” is that it comes on right after “Family Guy,” and the effect is of both too much and not enough of a good thing. The two shows have a lot in common in terms of look and sound and sensibility, and yet “American Dad!,” six years younger than “Family Guy,” seems stale already. Watching a cartoon sendup of American values and establishment attitudes makes us restless now; the comedy is too broad. (The exclamation point in the title virtually announces that.) We want to know what the real lies and the real facts are, and for that we’ve got Jon Stewart.

“Family Guy” is laugh-out-loud, timelessly loopy—it’s a Dadaesque vaudeville turn, often literally. Peter will be talking about something, anything, and all of a sudden the show cuts to a song-and-dance team in straw boaters and red-and-white striped jackets capering in response. And then they’re gone. “Family Guy” takes so much from “The Simpsons” that it’s impossible to count all the ways, though it’s very easy to spot them—the dim-witted dad, the (mostly) sensible housewife, an obsession with TV and celebrity, preening local newscasters, musical production numbers, and on and on. The show’s signature is its constant cutaways to scenes packed with inspired non sequiturs and references to everything that was thought up by Hollywood and Madison Avenue in the past hundred years—from Fatty Arbuckle to the DuMont Network, Mister Rogers, “Laugh-In,” and the Hope-Crosby “Road” pictures. The show pokes fun at every race, color, creed, interest group, and nationality, and throws in physical disabilities, too. In an episode a couple of months ago, Brian got a job at The New Yorker. On his first day, he found out that there were no toilets in the bathrooms; the people who worked there, he was told, didn’t need them, because they didn’t have anuses. Later that day, Brian was fired when the editor discovered that he hadn’t graduated from college. We’re all terribly sorry that Brian had such a bad experience, and we’d like him to know that he can come back anytime. There will always be a toilet here for him.

Nightmare in Paradise

2006-01-03T10:13:00.000-08:00

By BRYAN BURROUGH
The disappearance of beautiful, blonde teenager Natalee Holloway in Aruba last May became America's most tragic reality show. Sorting fact from rumor, with new information from the police, the author cuts to the heart of the case

It had been a soccer mom's dream weekend, just the three women lying around the lake house at Hot Springs, Arkansas, sunbathing, relaxing, and luxuriating in the fact that, for three entire days, they were free of teenagers, dirty laundry, and housework. Now, on Monday, May 30, they were driving home in Beth Twitty's Chevy Tahoe, barreling east out of Memphis, looking to make it back to suburban Birmingham, Alabama, in time to get dinner on the table by nightfall.

A little after 11 a.m., Beth's cell phone rang. "Hello, this is Beth," she said in her soft southern accent. It was Jody Bearman, one of seven adults who had escorted a group of 124 students from Birmingham's Mountain Brook High School on a senior trip to the Caribbean island of Aruba. Twitty's 18-year-old daughter, Natalee, a hard-driving, straight-A student who was heading to the University of Alabama on a full scholarship, was on the trip. Beth's brow furrowed as she tried to digest Bearman's message: Natalee had not appeared in the Holiday Inn lobby for the return flight to Alabama.

No one, in fact, had seen her since the night before. Another mother might have surmised that her daughter was still out partying, maybe passed out in a hotel room. Not Beth Twitty. "I knew immediately that my daughter had been kidnapped in Aruba," she says today. "Natalee has never been late in her life."

Beth didn't panic. She became, in her words, "extremely focused." From her cell phone she called 911, telling the dispatcher her daughter had just been kidnapped and she was driving 110 miles an hour straight through Mississippi, and she wasn't stopping for anything. She called her husband, Natalee's stepfather, George "Jug" Twitty, and the F.B.I. By the time Beth reached Birmingham, a family friend had already arranged for a private jet. By five o'clock she was on board, along with Jug, the general manager of a Birmingham metals-industry facility, and two of Jug's longtime friends. They left a seat empty for the return trip—for Natalee. The jet landed at Aruba's Queen Beatrix International Airport around 10 p.m.

Thus began a long night's search that brought the Twitty family face-to-face with the Dutch teenager they would come to believe was responsible for the disappearance of their daughter, a search that within days would captivate America, or at least that sizable part of it that watches the nightly "justice shows" on cable television. Soon Beth Twitty would become a recognizable media fixture, giving interviews or meeting with everyone from Greta Van Susteren to Diane Sawyer to Dr. Phil to Condoleezza Rice. She has never wavered in her search for Natalee or in her belief that a boy named Joran van der Sloot knows her daughter's fate and that the corrupt police and government of Aruba have conspired to cover up the truth. The Twittys and others, including Bob Riley, the governor of Alabama, have called for American tourists to boycott the island.

Yet a deeper look at the investigation into Natalee Holloway's disappearance suggests the case is more complicated than it might appear on television. The Twitty family's obsessive quest has proved to be a national trauma for Aruba, a Dutch possession that has been repeatedly depicted in the U.S. media as overrun by drugs and crime. Stung by criticism they view as unwarranted, many Arubans, including a number who were once the Twittys' closest allies, have turned on the family, depicting them as Ugly Americans.

"They're killing Aruba," says Aruban businessman Charles Croes, a former ally. "That girl, Natalee, I wish she'd stayed home. I hope she's found alive there. Because no one would care. No one. The kid is just not worth all this trouble, this heartache. Is Natalee worth it? Is she?"

The Aruban police have reached a breaking point. In a wide-ranging interview, Gerold Dompig, the deputy police chief in charge of the case, says the biggest obstacle to solving it has been the Twitty family itself. Among other things, Dompig charges that pressure from the family sidetracked the investigation from the outset, forcing the premature arrests of the main suspects and destroying the best chance police had of gathering evidence to solve the case.

"They brought out their big guns on the very first day, and they started shooting," grouses Dompig, seated in a tiny office inside his neat, European-style police station. "They didn't understand the way things are done in our system. They didn't want to understand. They act like they came from a world where you can just crush people. It was very harmful to our investigation."

Dompig traces these difficulties to the first hours of his probe, when he met with the Twittys to assure them that everything possible would be done to find Natalee. Instead of gratitude, he says, he was met with angry threats. "Jug and his Alabama friends, they basically came out and said they would bring hell to our island if Natalee wasn't found—'burn it down' were the exact words. That's when I knew we were in serious trouble." (Jug Twitty denies this happened. "Where would he get that?" he asks. "We thought he was a nice guy.")

The Holloway case is now one of the most popular reality shows in America thanks to the hosts of cable television's nightly justice shows, chiefly Greta Van Susteren on Fox News, Rita Cosby on MSNBC, and Nancy Grace on CNN Headline News. The story has all the elements the justice shows adore: an innocent victim, missing or murdered; avenging loved ones; and a handsome, white-male suspect. Throw in a gaggle of luckless cops and colorful minor characters, set it all in an island paradise, and you have the kind of real-life mystery that keeps Americans glued to their sets.

And make no mistake: Natalee Holloway has been very, very good for cable television. Van Susteren all but moved her show to Aruba this summer and saw her ratings jump nearly 60 percent. The case helped Rita Cosby leap to No. 1 at MSNBC. At CNN Headline News, Holloway served to introduce viewers to the frightening former prosecutor Nancy Grace. Not to mention the endless hours of programming by Bill O'Reilly of Fox, and Dan Abrams and Joe Scarborough of MSNBC.

But not without flak. The coverage has been assailed from all sides, for crowding out real news and for de-emphasizing the searches for other missing persons, especially blacks, Latinos, men, and the poor. In August, Bob Costas bowed out of a stint to be the guest host on Larry King Live rather than pore over the case's details. On CNN, Anderson Cooper lambasted the coverage as overblown. The mainstream media have mostly demurred, sharpening the line between their definition of news and that of the justice shows, which don't hesitate to traffic in rumor and speculation.

How did we come to a moment when a single missing teenager draws as much television coverage as the war in Iraq? Matthew Felling, of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a Washington think tank, traces the Missing White Women boomlet not to the JonBenét Ramsey case of 1996, as some have, but to a set of murders three years later. In 1999 three women—Carole Sund, her daughter, and a family friend—were found gruesomely murdered in Yosemite National Park. In the wake of the killings, Sund's parents established a foundation in Modesto, California, to publicize the plight of missing persons and offer rewards for information leading to the arrest of violent criminals.

The foundation might have faded into obscurity but for the disappearance in May 2001 of former Washington intern Chandra Levy. The case initially attracted scant media attention outside of Levy's hometown, which happened to be Modesto. Brought into the case, the Sund/Carrington foundation mobilized a team of publicists who invented a new kind of grassroots effort: the missing-person campaign. Whereas JonBenét Ramsey's parents zealously avoided the press, Chandra Levy's family, with the help of the Sund/Carrington publicists, appeared for regular press conferences in their driveway, furnished quotes with an eye toward media deadlines, and even doled out bits of home movies so that cable producers would always have new footage to air. Levy's murder was never solved—even though her body was found a year later—but the press coverage succeeded in entangling Congressman Gary Condit, and made the case headline news for much of 2001.

By then cable producers had discovered that Missing White Women were ratings gold. The phenomenon is "now an established genre of news, much the way that the O. J. Simpson case enshrined the celebrity murder case as a whole genre," says Felling. "I don't think that's likely to change anytime soon." Today the reigning princess remains Natalee Holloway. For that, cable television can thank Beth Twitty, who has proved willing to do almost anything to find her daughter.

One afternoon I reach Beth on her cell phone. "I'm in Columbus, Ohio, on a secret mission," she says. "I'm putting together another strike against Aruba. I tell you, Bryan, those people down there, they'll never know what hit them. They should never have messed with me."

Beth must be very tired; one can only imagine the stress she is under. Back in Mountain Brook, the Twitty home, a modest brick split-level in Birmingham's most fashionable suburb, has been turned into a war room. Neat stacks of mail line the dining-room floor, most of it unsolicited letters of sympathy. The mail is sorted each morning in a friend's basement; every sender receives a response card Beth has drafted. One of her friends, Carol Standifer, walks me through the operation, our discussion interrupted only by the incessant ringing of the kitchen phone. A machine answers, allowing the caller's message to echo through the house.

By and by Beth walks in, dressed in faded blue jeans, and takes a seat on the living-room floor. "Somebody said it's time to start cleaning it all up," she says, glancing into the dining room, "but I said, 'No, I don't think so. Not yet.'" She has lost count of how many interviews she has given—it's in the hundreds—and she has repeated the same things so many times her answers have an artificial quality. Until all this, the Twittys had led an unremarkable suburban life. Raised in Arkansas, Beth married a State Farm employee named Dave Holloway and, after a move to Jackson, Mississippi, was divorced in 1993. She raised Natalee and her brother, Matt, as a single mother until marrying Jug Twitty in 2000 and moving to Mountain Brook, where she is a special-education teacher in an elementary school. Beth became part of Jug's social group of hunting buddies and their wives, and today the Twittys' support network consists of seven couples who call themselves "the Fabulous Seven." Most have been to Aruba multiple times. All spend their off-hours sorting mail and returning calls.

According to her mother, Natalee was a typical American teenager, more driven than most, maybe, a fixture on Mountain Brook High's dance team who, Beth insists, never drank, never had a boyfriend, and never had sex. She is emphatic about this. Left unsaid is the assumption that this gave Natalee little experience in the kind of tequila-fueled revelry for which Aruba is famous. "Natalee was very smart, but," Beth acknowledges, "very naïve."

Still, Beth had no doubts about letting her daughter go on the Aruba trip. It was something of a tradition at Mountain Brook High School, and Jug's son, George, had been several years earlier. On Thursday, May 26, Beth dropped Natalee at a friend's house at four a.m. for the flight to Aruba. She promised to pick her up at the airport the following Monday night. It was the last time she saw her daughter.

When the Twittys' private jet arrived in Aruba that first night, it was dark. The group piled into two vans driven by workers from Aruba's general-aviation office, a ramshackle trailer at the back of the airport. The vans wound their way through the quiet streets of the capital, Oranjestad, and made for the island's northwestern corner, where dozens of resorts sprawl along the white-sand beach.

While its main business is tourism—72 percent of visitors are American—Aruba is not a typical Third World Caribbean island. Eighteen miles off the coast of Venezuela, Aruba has a multi-racial population of 70,000. Its infrastructure is well developed, its streets are clean, and the culture has been thoroughly Americanized since Standard Oil built what was then one of the world's largest refineries, at the island's southeastern tip, in 1924. There are McDonald's, Pizza Huts, Taco Bells, and a Hooters. While palm trees have been planted in the tourist areas, the climate is arid, and pencil-like cacti line the inland roads.

At the Holiday Inn, Beth and Jug found another of the senior-trip escorts, a teacher named Paul Lilly, waiting with the only American official Lilly had found, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent. They had no news of Natalee's whereabouts. From all indications, she had never returned to her hotel the night before; her passport and luggage lay where she had placed them in preparation for the return flight to Alabama. She had last been seen, around midnight, at a bar and grill called Carlos 'n Charlie's. Some of her fellow students had noticed her talking with a tall Dutch teenager, and were under the impression she had left with him. The day before, Jug's nephew Thomas had played poker with the young man at the Holiday Inn's casino and thought his name was Joran something.

Beth took a hotel employee aside and described him. "She knew exactly who he was: Joran van der Sloot," Beth remembers. "And then she said—these were her exact words—'He tends to prey upon young female tourists.'"

Within minutes everyone headed to Carlos 'n Charlie's. Inside, the men fanned out and began asking questions. Beth showed around a photo of Natalee, but no one recognized her. Frustrated, the Americans returned to the Holiday Inn to regroup.

By now they had been joined by Charles Croes, a wealthy Aruban who owned a cellular-phone rental company on the island. According to Croes, who was summoned to meet Beth in a darkened gas-station parking lot, Natalee had made a cell-phone call to an American number, and Beth was curious to know to whom. It turned out to have been an accidental call to a friend.

They decided to split up. The Twittys' friends wandered the beach behind the hotel, showing Natalee's photo to anyone they encountered. Beth and Jug headed upstairs; they wanted to see what Joran van der Sloot looked like, and the casino manager offered to find a video of his poker game the day before. When he did, Beth memorized everything about him: the close-cropped hair, the pimply face, the sloe eyes. Croes, meanwhile, drove north up the beach road and, just below the lighthouse, found a group of teenagers drinking cheap wine. They knew Joran, and two volunteered to lead Croes to his home, in the nearby town of Noord. Five minutes later Croes was at the modest ranch-style house, down an unpaved alley and behind a chest-high wall. One of the airport workers, sitting beside him, telephoned the Holiday Inn.

It was time to bring in the Aruban police. The main group of Twitty-family members and friends, now numbering a dozen, met Croes at the police station in Noord. Two uniformed officers agreed to accompany them to the van der Sloot residence. At the house, Beth waited in the van while the officers sounded the patrol car's siren. Across the neighborhood, lights blinked on. There was no movement inside the van der Sloot home. The officers sounded the siren once more. Staring blearily, people began emerging into their yards. After a few minutes, a man in his early 50s came outside. This was Paulus van der Sloot, Joran's father.

Beth watched as the officers spoke to him. She saw van der Sloot take a cellular phone from his front pocket and make a call. He then told police Joran was out gambling, at the Wyndham resort's casino. Van der Sloot climbed into the police car, and the group headed back into the night. At the Wyndham, just down from the Holiday Inn, the group again fanned out in search of Joran. Beth walked behind Paulus, watching him closely. There was no sign of his son. Van der Sloot flipped out his phone and made another call. When he hung up, he said, "He's at home now."

The group returned to the van der Sloot home. Joran and a friend, a young Surinamese man named Deepak Kalpoe, were waiting in the driveway. The two policemen took the two of them aside. Jug Twitty and his two friends stood by as Joran answered questions. At first he denied any knowledge of Natalee, insisting he didn't even know the name. Twitty began to grow impatient. "Don't say you don't know who she is," Jug said. "We have eyewitnesses who saw you both in the car."

"Just tell us where she is," one of the Alabama men snapped.

"Don't be so rude," Paulus van der Sloot responded. "This is not America. You can't act like that."

Sensing the increasing tension, Croes decided to try to mediate. "So I went over to the father and the police and I said, 'Is it O.K. if I talk to him?'" he says. "[The policemen said,] 'Sure, we're not even a part of this yet. She can't be considered missing for 48 hours.'"

Looking Joran in the eyes, Croes lowered his voice. "You know you're in a whale of shit if you don't tell the truth here," he said.

"I am telling the truth," Joran said.

"Why don't you tell me what happened?" Croes said.

Joran considered this for a moment, then began talking. He said he had met Natalee in the Holiday Inn's casino Sunday afternoon. In the early evening she asked him to join her later at Carlos 'n Charlie's. He declined, saying it would be dead on a Sunday. A little before 11 he headed home with his father, who had picked him up at a McDonald's. At home, Joran said, he had second thoughts. He called Deepak Kalpoe, who drove over with his younger brother, Satish, to get him.

"So I snuck out of my house and went over to see her," he said. "She came on to me huge. Dancing suggestively. Like a slut. I did belly shots on her, on the bar. [Eventually she said,] 'Could you take me home?' So we left." When they piled into Deepak Kalpoe's silver Nissan, Joran said, Natalee seemed nonplussed to find the two Kalpoe brothers, who are black, sitting in the front.

"What are these guys, your slaves?" she supposedly asked Joran. By all accounts, Natalee was very drunk.

"What happened then?" Croes asked.

"We took her back to the Holiday Inn, to the front door. When she got out of the car, she stumbled and fell. I went to help her, but she got up and walked on through the lobby." It was the last time, Joran insisted, that he had seen Natalee.

"O.K.," Croes said. "Is that the truth?"

"Yes."

"That's the truth? Look, Joran, you need to be truthful with me. You need to tell me everything. Where'd you go?"

Croes could see Joran's mind working. Finally, he said, "We didn't go directly to the Holiday Inn. She wanted us to drive around. The girl was crazy. She was just crazy." According to Croes, Joran said Natalee then told him three things as they drove north past the Holiday Inn: that her mother was "like Hitler," that she was a virgin, and that she was a lesbian. She begged him to take her to a beach where she had heard she could see sharks, but Joran told her that was a local myth. She told him she wanted to have sex.

"Did you have sex with her?" Croes asked.

"Yeah," Joran said. "She gave me a blow job."

"Where'd that happen?"

"In the backseat of the car."

"So where'd you take her?"

"I took her to the lighthouse. For a while. We didn't get out."

According to Croes, Joran said that Deepak was increasingly uncomfortable at the lighthouse, fearful that Natalee would "make a mess" in the car, presumably by vomiting. Croes could feel Joran opening up; he appeared to be on the verge of an admission. Then, from the driveway, the voice of one of the Alabama men rose: "Well, you Aruban assholes better get your act together, and now!" (Jug Twitty, while acknowledging his group's impatience, denies the word "asshole" was used.)

Joran's head turned. "That's it," Paulus said. "This is no good." The decision was made that the entire group would return to the Holiday Inn, where Joran promised he would point out a security guard who had helped Natalee. Once there, however, he was unable to do so. The atmosphere again grew heated, as Jug Twitty demanded to know what happened to his stepdaughter. "Don't tell them anything," Deepak Kalpoe told Joran. "You don't have to tell them anything."

By now it was almost five o'clock in the morning. The policemen told Beth to wait at her hotel. A detective would come by and see her at eight. Detective Dennis Jacobs arrived at 8:15, took down Natalee's description, and led Beth to the police station. Beth sat in the lobby for three hours until Jacobs spoke to her again. She rose, eager to pour out everything she had learned. Suddenly, Jacobs said, "We won't be needing you." Beth stood there, stunned, uncertain what to do. After a moment she walked outside, where she ran into the first of the hundreds of television crews she would soon encounter. "That was the moment," she says today, "that I realized we were in serious trouble."

Relations between the desperate Twittys and the Aruban police had gotten off to an atrocious start and never recovered. When Beth and Jug returned to the police station the next morning, they found Officer Jacobs's behavior cavalier in the extreme. "Wait, I haven't had my Frosted Flakes, and I haven't shaved yet," he said as they were about to give him their statement. What the Twittys didn't yet understand was that missing tourists are hardly unusual in Aruba. Barely a week goes by without an American failing to return to his or her cruise ship, or deciding to stay a little longer in paradise. Almost all turn up within days. When a tourist goes missing, the last thing the police expect is a murder.

The Twittys, in turn, struck the Aruban police as rude, arrogant, and demanding. "I didn't really know who I was dealing with; I thought it was just a regular American family," recalls Dompig, an F.B.I.-trained veteran who worked as a police officer for 10 years in the Netherlands. When he promised to mobilize every available resource to find Natalee, "Beth was wonderful, really understanding," Dompig says. "She asked us to do everything possible, as any mother would. But Jug and the other guys, they started saying they didn't trust us, because we're not capable, and they've been here 48 hours! You know, 'What kind of show are you running here?' These are the words they used to try and scare me. They were trying to intimidate me."

In those tumultuous first days, Beth's most valuable allies were Julia Renfro, the 37-year-old American-born editor of an English-language daily, Aruba Today, and one of her reporters, Angela Munzenhofer, a tough-talking American whose family runs one of the island's popular restaurants. When Beth walked into the paper's office the day after she arrived, Renfro, a statuesque blonde, stopped the presses to run a front-page photograph of Natalee. Renfro and Munzenhofer both have children, and they identified with Beth's desperation; the three women became inseparable. The first flyers posted around the island carried two numbers people could call with tips: Renfro's and Munzenhofer's cell phones. "At the beginning, I was the one Beth trusted," says Munzenhofer. "She called me her angel. We were with them day and night. We weren't reporters. We were family. Beth told us that."

Wednesday morning, as Beth gave her statement to police, Renfro and Munzenhofer met in the Holiday Inn's lobby to organize the first search teams. After a series of radio announcements, a hundred tourists showed up, along with a smattering of Arubans and policemen. Jan van der Straaten, the crusty Dutch police superintendent who would end up working the case, was not happy. "Van der Straaten walks up and tells me, 'You can't do this,'" Renfro recalls. "I said, 'Yes I can. I'm going to find this girl.' He told me she wasn't even considered 'missing' for 48 hours. In fact, he told me just to go to Ladies' Night at Carlos 'n Charlie's that night, that she would probably show up there. Anyway, he talked to the group. And his message was, he asked us not to cause any traffic problems. I just wanted to fall out of my pants I was so mad."

At dusk the searchers returned to their hotel rooms, having found no sign of Natalee. Then, early the next evening, Munzenhofer took an urgent call from a source, who said Natalee was staying in a downtown house with certain unnamed "friends" who wanted to "protect" her. But, the source went on, her friends had agreed to turn her over to the family for $4,000—a quasi-ransom. Renfro relayed the message to Beth, and within an hour everyone had met at the Buccaneer, the restaurant Munzenhofer's family owns. Jug had a thousand dollars, and the Munzenhofers volunteered to donate the other $3,000 from the cash register.

By now more of "the Fabulous Seven" had arrived. Eight men were in the group, and Munzenhofer's husband took them to scout the downtown house where Natalee was supposed to be. It turned out to be what Arubans call a choller house—a crack house. When the men returned, everyone headed downtown to stake it out. "We were scared—scared to death," Renfro recalls. "We didn't know these people, how dangerous they were, whether they had guns and knives. So we called the cops. It took them 45 minutes to come a quarter-mile. They went in and looked around." Natalee wasn't there. The group spent the rest of the evening searching the neighborhood, and by midnight Renfro realized she had missed all her deadlines. "The print guys—I don't know what happened—they decided to print the previous day's paper again," she remembers.

At 10 o'clock the next morning and every morning for the next two weeks Renfro and Munzenhofer organized search parties. They traipsed through cactus-strewn vacant lots and windswept beaches from the Holiday Inn, north past the Marriott, all the way to the lighthouse at the island's northwestern tip. One morning Munzenhofer took Jug Twitty to the island's Dutch military base to request help from the Dutch Marines, who joined the search with helicopters and four-wheel-drive vehicles. Another day the justice minister gave all Aruban government employees the day off to join the search. But no one returned with anything other than sunburn.

The first American cable crew—MSNBC—arrived on Friday, following the first correspondent to the island, from the syndicated show A Current Affair. That night Renfro was working late when she received a call from a source—a former policeman—who had just heard on police radio that an American girl matching Natalee's description had been seen stepping into a Kia sedan outside an ATM in Oranjestad. Immediately the newspaper office emptied; at least 10 cars, packed with staffers and Alabamans, fanned out across the downtown area, looking for the car. When it was sighted, Renfro used cell phones to orchestrate a covert pursuit. A half-dozen cars followed the Kia for 15 minutes until it parked outside a house just blocks from the newspaper office. Renfro could just make out a man and two women, one of them blonde, inside the car.

They watched the car for 15 minutes before one of Renfro's friends, a volunteer named Carlos, took the initiative, walked to the car, and exchanged words with the driver, who was puffing on a marijuana cigarette. "Carlos came back and said, 'I don't think it's her; she was too happy,'" Renfro recalls. "We said, 'Come on! She's on drugs! Of course she's happy.' [He said,] 'No, she's too heavy.' [We said,] 'Maybe she gained weight!' [He said,] 'But there's a baby in the car.'"

As they discussed what to do, the Kia drove off. The Aruba Today caravan followed it to another house, where the three of them remained in the car. Forty minutes went by. Police were called. Finally, another volunteer, named O.J., pulled his Bronco in front of the car. When he got out, the driver emerged with what appeared to be a baseball bat and took a swing at O.J., who dived into his car and drove off. One of the women ran inside the house with the infant, but the Kia continued on, eventually stopping at a convenience store.

Soon the police appeared and took the driver and the other girl into custody. By the time the patrol car reached a nearby police station, a crowd of 100 onlookers, including camera crews from A Current Affair and MSNBC, were waiting. Renfro's spirits rose when, listening to the police radio, she heard an officer say he was "98 percent" sure the blonde girl was Natalee.

Beth and Jug were called. One of the Alabamans emerged from the crowd, gave Renfro a bear hug, and shoved $10,000 in reward money at her. Renfro declined it. In minutes the Twittys appeared and entered the station. When they returned outside, their faces were impassive. The girl turned out to be an American woman on extended vacation. "It was the saddest moment of my life," Renfro says.

Two days later the first arrests were made.

When the police first questioned Joran and the Kalpoe brothers, they told of dropping Natalee off at the Holiday Inn. They mentioned seeing a security guard approach her, so that Sunday the police detained two local men who were former hotel security guards. Beth, who had focused on Joran and the Kalpoes from the outset, angrily told the police they were arresting the wrong men. The deputy chief, Gerold Dompig, insists today that police considered the three teenagers suspects from the outset; in fact, he hints that the boys' phones were tapped as part of a surveillance as early as that first weekend.

When Beth began giving television interviews the following week, she suggested that the police were protecting the van der Sloots because they were a prominent family. They are hardly that. Paulus has been a minor official in the Aruban justice department; he has trained to be a judge, but isn't one yet. Joran was a high-school soccer star and an honor student; he was planning to attend Saint Leo University, near Tampa, Florida, in the fall. By Wednesday, June 8, hints of a cover-up had grown so widespread that the Aruban prime minister, Nelson Oduber, released a statement denying it.

Dutch criminal investigations differ from American ones in small but important ways. By and large, Dutch detectives do not speak to journalists, on or off the record. In the Holloway case, this created an information vacuum that not only irritated an already suspicious American press but also led to rumor and speculation on the justice shows. Moreover, plea bargaining does not exist under the Dutch system. Whereas an American detective might arrest all three teenagers and cut a deal with one to squeal on the others, this isn't an option in Aruba.

Aruban investigations tend to move at what can seem a leisurely pace. "First, we investigate around [suspects]. We try to establish the facts, look at their backgrounds," says Dompig. "We want to keep them on the outside, where we can watch them, listen to their calls, see what they're saying to each other. If we have to pick them up, we can't look at them, other than in a cell."

But the pressure to make an arrest—any arrest—was overwhelming. "The pressure was so … so … just, you could feel it on a daily basis: 'What is the press saying today? What is Beth saying today?'" says Dompig. "The Aruban government is very image-conscious. America is basically our bread and butter. The government, well, everyone was on our case. They wanted the case solved as soon as possible. And then you had the Aruban Hotel [and Tourism] Association, which is a very powerful group, that started putting pressure. 'Guys, what about the tourism! The jobs in the hotels!' Imagine how a law-enforcement team functions with all this. Imagine that pressure! We got calls all the way up to the White House! They called the prime minister!"

Reluctantly, Dompig gave the go-ahead for the arrest of Joran and the Kalpoe brothers on Thursday, June 9. Joran emerged from his house with a blue-and-green towel wrapped around his head. After initial questioning, he was taken into custody. Today, Dompig says pressure from the Twittys, the media, and his own government forced police to prematurely make the arrest. "Yes, yes, yes," he says. "Under normal circumstances, we would have taken much more time to monitor them. We would have had much more evidence had we waited."

Dompig expected the arrests would please the Twittys. They didn't. Beth and Jug were intent on keeping the pressure on. "It was like nothing could satisfy them—nothing," Dompig gripes. "Basically, Jug wanted us to come over and beat a confession out of these boys. We couldn't do that. These guys are hardheaded, especially Joran. We couldn't get a confession."

Under questioning, however, Joran did change his story. Instead of leaving Natalee at the Holiday Inn, he now said, the Kalpoes had dropped him and Natalee off at the beach beside the Marriott, a half-mile north of the Holiday Inn; the area is a lovers' lane of sorts. He said Natalee was so drunk she was drifting in and out of consciousness. Joran said he left her at the beach and walked home. During weeks of questioning, the Kalpoes backed up his new story.

As the Twittys' desperation grew, On the Record, Greta Van Susteren's show, became the preferred outlet for their frustrations. Beth's nightly appearances, however, created tension among her new friends. "Everything changed when Greta came," says Angela Munzenhofer. "All you heard [Beth say] was Greta, Greta, Greta."

"The way Beth talked to us, the local press, was totally different—you know: 'We're getting so much help,' how wonderful everyone was being, how helpful," says another Aruba Today reporter, Dilma Arends, "but at night, on television, we would hear a totally different person, how no one was helping her at all."

"She was saying a lot of this on Fox, on Greta, and most of the island doesn't get Fox," says Julia Renfro. "But I got DVDs sent to me from friends in the States, and I saw her there. She was totally different."

"That's how she is," says Arends. "She's a two-faced woman."

"We tried to avoid going on those shows," says Renfro.

"Because they wanted lies," says Munzenhofer.

"Theories," explains Arends. "'What is your take? What is your take?' We're reporters. We're not going to talk about theories."

The tensions came to a head in the wake of an appearance Renfro made on the Van Susteren show. "Nobody knows this, but the family were the ones determining who goes on the shows," she says. "It was all them." That night, when Van Susteren asked about Joran, Renfro described the teenager as an excellent student with a good reputation and "an idol for the younger kids" at school. The next day Renfro was in the Marriott lobby, holding her baby daughter, when she saw Beth and Jug.

When she went to give Beth a hug, "Jug attacked me, verbally and physically," Renfro recalls. "He pushed me! I'm holding a sleeping baby. He just starts screaming and yelling. Words you can't print. 'Fuck you! Get the fuck away from my wife! I never want to see you again.' I was just so stunned. I had put my heart and soul into finding their girl." Afterward, a Fox producer explained that the Twittys were furious over her comments on the Van Susteren show. Renfro was so shaken she filed a complaint with the police against Jug Twitty. (Jug acknowledges losing his temper and cursing at Renfro, but denies pushing her.)

Renfro attempted a reconciliation with Beth, going as far as suggesting that the Twittys were trying to "protect" her from local criticism by pushing her away. "Beth said, 'That's the blondest thing I've ever heard,'" says Renfro, a blonde. "After that, I just said, 'I can't deal with this person anymore.'" Beth says she doesn't recall any pushing incident. Of Renfro, Beth says only, "She's a witch."

Both Charles Croes and Angela Munzenhofer say they broke with the Twittys after angry confrontations with Jug. They, and many other Arubans, have since turned on the family, and viciously. The Aruba Today staff, once the Twittys' most fervent supporters, has morphed into the unofficial clearinghouse for everything anti-Twitty.

"We met Beth that first day, and Beth was like glue to us for about a month," Munzenhofer says. "But then we just had to let her go, because I did not agree with what she was saying. She was lying. She got caught in too many lies. I understand it. She's a grieving mother. I'm not against Beth. But, come on, her girl's not a virgin. The girl's an alcoholic. She was drinking.… I have personally talked to people who say Natalee bought drugs. I've seen the photo of that girl chugging from a bottle of 151 [rum].… Beth, I told her, you have to look at different answers. Drug dealers. Taxi drivers. Ex-boyfriends. But she looked at one place only: Joran."

It's true that some of Beth's stories don't hold up. Before I went to Aruba, she told me that the Kalpoe family had been embroiled in the odd death of a former maid, and that Mrs. Kalpoe had been detained; it turned out the case had involved another family. She also told me that a person on the island had fathered an illegitimate child with a friend's wife, and that the friend had committed suicide. That, too, does not appear to be true.

"People understand what Beth is going through; they do," Julia Renfro told me. "But it's no excuse for misconstruing all the facts. She's hurt a lot of people down here. A lot of people."

By the end of June, with both Joran and the Kalpoe brothers in custody for three weeks, it appeared the case was nearing a climax. Rumors flew that charges were imminent. On Friday, July 1, the government spokesman Ruben Trapenberg said they could come as early as Monday. On Sunday, police were seen walking with Joran on the beach north of the Marriott as he guided them through what he said happened that night. Expectations were soaring Monday morning when a clerk stepped outside the courthouse in Oranjestad and read an announcement to American reporters and cameramen. A gasp shot through the crowd when she came to the point: Not only were none of the three teenagers being charged, the two brothers were being released, indicating that the judge had found insufficient evidence to justify their further detention. Joran was ordered held without charges another 60 days.

The Twittys were outraged. Beth tearfully denounced the judge's decision as a travesty, terming the Kalpoe brothers "criminals." She called on the nations of the world to reject any efforts they might make to flee the country. All over television, the cable hosts piled on, endlessly castigating the Aruban justice system. For many Arubans, this was the last straw. The next afternoon a former government minister named John Merryweather helped organize a demonstration in front of the courthouse to protest the media's depiction of Aruba.

One of the Kalpoes' attorneys, meanwhile, attacked Beth's statements as "prejudicial, inflammatory, libelous, and totally outrageous." Caught off guard, Beth went back before the cameras at the end of the week and apologized "to the Aruban people and to the Aruban authorities if I or my family have offended you in any way."

But the damage was done. "That woman needs help," an angry John Merryweather told me as we sat on his terrace. "This is just a concerted attack on Aruba. A terrorist attack. Why blame the whole island, a whole country, for something that is out of our control? She attacks our justice system? What about yours? JonBenét. Was that ever solved? Michael Jackson—he gets off. O.J. That's American justice, and the woman is criticizing us?"

By mid-July, with Joran still languishing in the San Nicolas jail, undergoing daily questioning by Aruban, Dutch, and F.B.I. officials, a motley crowd of television producers, search teams, private eyes, and beach bums each determined to solve the case. One was Arthur Wood, a retired Secret Service agent who lives outside Ocala, Florida, and who spent his evenings glued to the Holloway coverage. In mid-June, Wood e-mailed some thoughts to Jossy Mansur, managing editor of the Aruban newspaper El Diario, who had latched onto the Twitty bandwagon as part of his own feud with the Aruban government. Eager to develop leads, Mansur invited Wood to Aruba, and put him on his payroll.

Wood began chatting up photographers, stringers, and reporters. The most intriguing lead, he decided, was a rumor that one of the Kalpoe brothers had confessed to killing Natalee—sort of—to a fellow prisoner while in the Aruban jail. The prisoner had heard that a relative's gardener, named Cumpa, had seen Joran and the Kalpoes burying Natalee's body in a vacant lot near the Marriott. When the Kalpoe brother was told the story, he supposedly went ashen and flipped over the dominoes they were playing with. Wood spent most of July tracking the elusive Cumpa. There were stories that he had fled to Venezuela, that he had disappeared, that he might have been killed.

The Mansur "investigative team," including Wood, Eduardo Mansur, and other Mansur employees and family friends, began holding nightly strategy sessions at the team's de facto headquarters: Hooters. One night they were inside poring over rumors when a Mansur cousin's teenage son suddenly blurted out, "I know Cumpa! He's my uncle's gardener!"

The boy hopped in Eduardo Mansur's truck and led Wood to a large seaside home owned by Jossy Mansur's cousin Eric Mansur, a wealthy importer. Wood found Cumpa, whose name turned out to be Carlos, in the yard. "He tells me that on that night, May 30, he couldn't sleep," Wood recalls. "It was 2:30 and it was so hot—he didn't have air-conditioning—he said, 'I got up, I told my wife I'm going to my boss's house,'" which was air-conditioned.

According to Carlos, while driving to Eric Mansur's home a little before three that morning, he took a shortcut, a dirt road through a vacant lot beside the Marriott. To his surprise, he found a car blocking the road. Beside the car were two large mounds of dirt. When he peered into the car, Carlos said, he recognized Joran and the Kalpoes. He said they covered their faces. He then drove on.

Carlos reluctantly climbed into Wood's truck and allowed himself to be driven to police headquarters. He disappeared inside for four hours.

Three days later, a crowd of reporters gathered in the vacant lot by the Marriott to watch the police begin draining a pond near where the gardener, as he came to be known, claimed he had seen Joran and the Kalpoes digging. The effort quickly degenerated into farce. The first pumper truck, reportedly supplied by the Mansur family, bogged down and died. Then reporters, trying to get a better view of the pond, twice broke a water main. When the pond was empty, police found nothing at the bottom but trash. Gerold Dompig ended up discounting everything the gardener had said. "The gardener['s story]," he says, "was a concoction."

The pond episode, however, gave Beth the cover she needed to begin a simultaneous excavation at a landfill behind the airport. The family had hired its own private investigator, an Atlanta man named T. J. Ward, who like Art Wood was soon a staple of the nightly talk shows; in fact, the two became rivals and began sniping at each other. Wood had been sent to interview a homeless man named Poom Poom, who was hounding police with a tale of seeing a woman's body in the landfill. Beth wasn't sure whether to believe the story until T. J. Ward announced Poom Poom had passed a lie-detector test. "T.J. looked me in the face and said, 'Beth, he's telling the truth,'" Beth says. "That's what sent all the people to the dump!" It took weeks for the search teams to decide there was no body there, though a team of Texas volunteers briefly renewed the search in late October.

The gardener and Poom Poom episodes were followed by the jogger—a story made the rounds in August that a late-night jogger had seen Joran and the Kalpoes digging near the same spot the gardener had identified. Police made a public appeal for the man to contact them, and he eventually did. Unfortunately, "the jogger had some problems," Art Wood says, sighing. "He was a convicted sex offender. Apparently he was a murderer or rapist or something." Gerold Dompig confirms this story. He says neither the jogger nor his story panned out in any way.

Every day in July and August seemed to bring a new dead end. One time a park ranger found on a beach a piece of duct tape attached to several human hairs; a test suggested the DNA from the hair wasn't Natalee's. Another day hundreds of tourists gathered behind the Marriott to watch volunteers drag out a barrel that had been seen in the ocean. It was empty. Nothing was too outlandish to investigate. The Dutch military brought in three F-16s that flew over the island using infra-red photography in an effort to identify a grave. They, too, came up with nothing.

Throughout the summerlong circus, the Twittys remained at the Holiday Inn and later at the Wyndham, whose owners gave them use of the hotel's Presidential Suite. During the day they emerged to pass out prayer cards and photos of Natalee, and at night they sat for interviews. One afternoon Beth was walking through Noord, handing out prayer cards with Greta Van Susteren, when she realized she was near the van der Sloot home. She walked to the gate, thinking she would leave a card. That's when she saw a pair of legs—it was Paulus—in the bushes. She called for him to come out. As he did, his wife, Anita, appeared at the front door, and the couple invited Beth inside for what became a tense 90-minute meeting.

In the first half-hour, Beth listened as Joran's parents lavished praise on their son, though they eventually admitted they had been having trouble with him. According to Beth, the van der Sloots acknowledged that Joran had been seeing a psychiatrist. "Anita told me that," Beth says. "She was saying they were beginning to have trouble with Joran [for a] defiant attitude. The father acknowledged they could not control him. He would sneak out, go gambling, in the pre-dawn hours. They had no control over him."

At one point, Beth decided to press. "I told Paulus van der Sloot that he was responsible for Aruba being trapped in hell; until he came forward, I told him, his country would continue to be trapped in perpetual hell," she recalls. Paulus, while insisting he could remember almost nothing of the night Natalee disappeared, began to sweat profusely. "These beads of sweat were rolling down from his head onto the kitchen table," Beth remembers. "Beginning in the last 30 minutes, Anita had to get up and go get a kitchen towel. The sweat was pooling on the table. She had to pat him down." (The van der Sloots' attorney didn't return phone calls for comment.)

On August 8, Beth forced a similar confrontation on Deepak Kalpoe, who was working at a downtown Internet café. She entered with an Alabama friend and an MSNBC film crew. "I walked up to the counter and I just stood there for about 15 minutes and stared at him," she says. "He did nothing. That head went right down. All I saw was his white scalp. Then I began speaking with Deepak. I began questioning him. 'Were you a participant or did you help her?' I was very graphic.

"And I think it just shocked him. I can't even say what I said. He told me his attorney advised him not to talk. I told him repeatedly to hold his head up and look at me. I kept offering [him the choice of a] $250,000 reward or life in prison. He said he didn't need the money. Deepak finally looked up at the very end, and said, 'The media hasn't seen this side of you.'" Beth replied, "I've been saving it for you, Deepak." Afterward, Kalpoe filed a complaint with the police over the incident.

By mid-August, as Beth continued her crusade, communication between the police and the family had broken down entirely. Beth characterizes this as evidence of the ongoing cover-up; Gerold Dompig says his men just got tired of being yelled at. Still, Beth slogged forward, meeting with Nelson Oduber, the Aruban prime minister, on August 20. As much as it irked the police, her campaign appeared to work when, on Friday, August 26, the Kalpoes were suddenly re-arrested.

No explanation was given, leading to another spasm of speculation on cable and the Internet blogs dedicated to the case. Beth told me the brothers had been re-arrested because the gardener had crippled their alibis. In fact, Dompig says, this was not the case. The police decided to take a risk—a large one, as it turned out.

"Once we got a statement from Joran that [Natalee] passed out several times while he was sexually fondling her, we thought we had something," Dompig says. Under Dutch law, this could be viewed as sex without consent; anyone who enabled the crime could be judged an accessory. "We tried Deepak and Satish with that point; someone passed out in the back of your car, you're an accessory," Dompig says. "We were doing this to apply pressure. We felt Satish was the weakest link. We wanted to squeeze Satish. Deepak wants to protect Satish. But when we put that pressure on, it didn't work. Deepak is too strong."

The gambit blew up in Dompig's face. "Then the very same people who wanted us to solve the case—the family and the media—worked against us," he says. "There was all this criticism that we should never have released the [Kalpoes] in the first place. Unfortunately, the judge, you know, he heard this, and he didn't agree with us. So we lost the Kalpoes. When [they are] walking, Joran's lawyer says, 'Well, what about my client?' When that started rolling, that was the beginning of the end."

On Wednesday, August 31, the judge ordered Joran released; the next day the brothers were released as well. "It was all about Hurricane Katrina," Beth charges. Her anger is as fresh today as it was that day. "All the cameras were gone to New Orleans," she says. "So it was time to let the boys go under the curtain of Hurricane Katrina. Right there. There's your corruption and collusion."

Maybe. But a more likely explanation for the judge's decision is that the police had no body, no evidence of murder or any other crime. They had kept Joran in jail for nearly three months, and he hadn't cracked. Get some evidence, the judge said, or let the boy go.

Freed, Joran traveled with his father to the Netherlands, where he enrolled in college and was briefly accosted by a producer working for A Current Affair, to whom he repeated much of the story he had told Charles Croes in his driveway months before. The Kalpoes returned to their jobs. The Twittys retreated to Alabama for several weeks, but Beth returned to Aruba at Halloween as a new group of searchers began using sonar to hunt for the body off the northern beaches, only to quit in despair, citing a lack of cooperation from the Aruban authorities.

Since Joran's release, the only real news in the investigation has come from, of all places, the Dr. Phil show, which sent a team of investigators to Aruba. There, in a taped interview, a California lie-detector specialist named Jamie Skeeters seemed to get Deepak Kalpoe to admit to having had sex with Natalee. The tape is being examined by Dutch authorities, but Gerold Dompig, for one, finds it inconclusive.

"I'm skeptical," he says. "It seems like a big hoax."

In an effort to sort fact from fiction, Dompig agreed to discuss the case in detail for the first time. Surprisingly little is known of how Natalee spent her time on Aruba, he says. At least initially, Dompig says, Beth asked investigators to refrain from debriefing the Alabama students. Not for weeks did the F.B.I. begin to interview them, and even now, Dompig says, police have not seen these statements. They have, however, taken statements from hotel managers.

"This group of students was a very—I don't want to demonize them—but the group really went far, very far, in terms of having a good time," Dompig says. "Wild partying, a lot of drinking, lots of room switching every night. We know the Holiday Inn told them they weren't welcome next year. Natalee, we know, she drank all day every day. We have statements she started every morning with cocktails—so much drinking that Natalee didn't show up for breakfast two mornings."

Despite reports to the contrary, Dompig feels certain Natalee didn't meet Joran until her final day on Aruba, Sunday. He confirms that there have been numerous reports that she may have been involved with other young men on the island. "We have taken two statements, from Julia Renfro and a Holiday Inn worker, that Beth told them she had gotten a call from her daughter, and that she was in love with a tall, blue-eyed Dutch teenager. So [Beth] had contact with her daughter. But she denies it. The question is why. If [the Twittys] don't level with us, how can they talk about a conspiracy? We need to know the truth. Joran did not have blue eyes. So who was this boy?" Beth denies making any such statements, or even having talked with Natalee while she was in Aruba.

The Twittys have accused Joran of changing his story more than 20 times. Dompig says that, while Joran has indeed made small changes in some of his more than 20 statements, he has given just three versions of what happened. The first, discarded in early June, ended with Natalee dropped off at the Holiday Inn. The second had Joran leaving her at the beach by the Marriott. In a third, given to police in August, Joran claimed Deepak had actually dropped him off near his home and disappeared with Natalee in his car.

"This latest story [came] when he saw the other guys, the Kalpoes, were kind of finger-pointing in his direction, and he wanted to screw them also, by saying he was dropped off," Dompig says. "But that story doesn't check out at all. He just wanted to screw Deepak. They had great arguments about this in front of the judge. Because their stories didn't match. This girl, she was from Alabama, she's not going to stay in the car with two black kids. We believe the second story, that they were dropped off by the Marriott. But then the time line [Joran has given] starts to get into trouble."

Aruban detectives have repeatedly interviewed witnesses in an effort to establish that time line. It's been widely reported, for instance, that Joran returned to his home that morning around four. In fact, Dompig says, "nobody knows what time he got home." Nor is it clear how he got there. "He says he walked," Dompig continues, a distance of about two miles. "That is very unlikely."

The tennis shoes Joran wore that night have never been found, which police find suspicious. Another missing item involves a break-in that night at one of the low-slung fisherman's huts that line the beach north of the Marriott. Reported taken were a machete and perhaps a lobster trap. The police do not have a single witness who claims to have seen Joran that morning.

Moreover, Dompig says, this summer F.B.I. profilers completed a detailed psychological evaluation. "He struck us, and the F.B.I., as a guy who can make you believe he's God's gift to mothers-in-law," Dompig says. "But if you look at his actions, he's anything but. The F.B.I. profiled him as a person who never has been corrected by his parents. He's the boss of what happens in that house. He's the boss in the family. He is allowed to do anything.… If a person like that is in a position where a person says, 'No,' well, that person may change completely. Maybe he blew a fuse when she wouldn't have sex with him, and something happened."

Leaving aside Dompig's explanations and excuses, and ignoring some of the Twittys' behavior toward Arubans, one can't help but share Beth's outrage that the principal suspects in her daughter's disappearance are free. Yet, absent a body or any physical evidence, the situation is unlikely to change anytime soon. It's entirely possible, in fact, that the mystery may never be solved.

What do I think? I think Natalee died on the beach that night a couple of hundred yards north of the Marriott. Maybe she denied Joran sex and he strangled or drowned her in a fit of rage. Maybe it was alcohol poisoning. Maybe, as some have speculated, she was slipped a tablet of Ecstasy or some other drug, and she died from a lethal cocktail.

If her body had been buried on Aruba, it probably would have been found by now. If it had been dumped into the surf, it would have ended up back on the beach the following morning. But 200 yards offshore is a sandbar. It's a romantic rendezvous. Couples sometimes go there to make love, and the fishermen watch from their boats. On the other side of that sandbar the current shifts, running west. Anything placed in the water on the far side of the sandbar will drift away from the island, toward Panama. If Natalee was deposited there, her body is gone forever.

O'Reilly's Sheepish Response to Hertzberg

2005-12-21T10:41:00.000-08:00

The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day

New Yorker Magazine joins our hall of shame. We are recommending readers and sponsors avoid the publication. The reason: that magazine allows writer Hendrick Hertzberg to print dishonest propaganda fed to him by left-wing smear sites.

As I previously stated, any publication or news operation that does that will be listed on BillOReilly.com as not worthy of your attention or advertising dollars. The spin and the propaganda stop here.

The New Yorker Magazine should be ashamed and is absolutely ridiculous. And one note to Mr. Hertzberg, you might want to rethink your process of character assassination, sir. Just looking out for you.

War on Xmas--Hendrik Hertzberg Filets O'Reilly

2005-12-21T10:39:00.000-08:00

BAH HUMBUG
by Hendrik Hertzberg
Issue of 2005-12-26 and 2006-01-02
Posted 2005-12-19

Chestnuts are roasting on an open fire, with Jack Frost nipping at your nose and folks dressed up like Eskimos—or, to update the line for political correctness, with tots in boots just like Aleuts. It’s that magical season when lights twinkle and good will abounds. It’s time again for the thrill that comes but once a year: the War on Christmas.

The War on Christmas is a little like Santa Claus, in that it (a) comes to us from the sky, beamed down by the satellites of cable news, and (b) does not, in the boringly empirical sense, exist. What does exist is the idea of the War on Christmas, which, though forever new, is a venerable tradition, older even than strip malls and plastic mistletoe. Christmas itself, in something like its recognizably modern form, with gifts and cards and elves, dates from the early nineteenth century. The War on Christmas seems to have come along around a hundred years later, with the publication of “The International Jew,” by Henry Ford, the automobile magnate, whom fate later punished by arranging to have his fortune diverted to the sappy, do-gooder Ford Foundation. “It is not religious tolerance in the midst of religious difference, but religious attack that they”—the Jews—“preach and practice,” he wrote. “The whole record of the Jewish opposition to Christmas, Easter and certain patriotic songs shows that.” Ford’s anti-Semitism has not aged well, thanks to the later excesses of its European adherents, but by drawing a connection between Christmasbashing and patriotism-scorning he pointed the way for future Christmas warriors.

Over the next few decades, when the country was preoccupied with the Depression, the Second World War, and going to movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the W. on C. went into remission. But at the end of the placid nineteen-fifties the John Birch Society, a pioneering organization of the bug-eyed right, took up the Yuletide cudgels. As Michelle Goldberg recalled recently in Salon, a 1959 Birch pamphlet warned that “the Reds” and “the U.N. fanatics” had launched an “assault on Christmas” as “part of a much broader plan, not only to promote the U.N., but to destroy all religious beliefs and customs.” The enemy’s strategy, the Birchers warned, was to aim at the soft underbelly and shake it like a bowlful of jelly. “What they now want to put over on the American people is simply this: Department stores throughout the country are to utilize U.N. symbols and emblems as Christmas decorations.” The focus on department stores was a prophetic insight, but its full potential as a weapon in Christmas war-fighting was not realized until the next century.

Today’s Christmas Pentagon is the Fox News Channel, which during a recent five-day period carried no fewer than fifty-eight different segments about the ongoing struggle, some of them labelled “Christmas under attack.” One of Fox’s on-air warriors is John Gibson, whose new book, “The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought,” presents itself as the definitive word. So one opens it eagerly with hopes of learning what this war actually consists of. These hopes are soon dashed—or, rather, fulfilled, since it turns out to consist of very little. Gibson provides a half-dozen or so anecdotes, padded out to stupefying length, in which a school board or a city hall renames its Christmas break a winter break or declines to rename its winter break a Christmas break, or removes Christmas trees from the lobbies of government buildings and then restores them after people complain. “The war on Christmas,” the author concludes triumphantly, “is joined.”

Gibson is a mere grunt in Fox’s army. Bill O’Reilly, the network’s most prominent religio-political commentator, is its Patton. The shortage of anti-Christmas atrocities (plus the fact that the U.N. fanatics long ago switched to subverting Halloween) may explain why he has concentrated on department stores, many of which, in their ads or via their salespeople, wish people “Happy Holidays” instead of—or in addition to, or more frequently than—“Merry Christmas.” (In 1921, Henry Ford attacked from the opposite flank, sneering that “the strange inconsistency of it all is to see the great department stores of the Levys and the Isaacs and the Goldsteins and the Silvermans filled with brilliant Christmas cheer.”)

O’Reilly sat out Vietnam. In the war on the War on Christmas, however, he not only has been in the trenches but has gone over the top. “I am not going to let oppressive, totalitarian, anti-Christian forces in this country diminish and denigrate the holiday!” he said the other day. And, “I’m going to use all the power that I have on radio and television to bring horror into the world of people who are trying to do that!” And, “There is no reason on this earth that all of us cannot celebrate a public holiday devoted to generosity, peace, and love together!” And, “And anyone who tries to stop us from doing it is gonna face me!”

O’Reilly sees the War on Christmas as part of the “secular progressive agenda,” because “if you can get religion out, then you can pass secular progressive programs like legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, gay marriage.” Just as Christmas itself evolved as a way to synthesize a variety of winter festivals, so the War on Christmas fantasy is a way of grouping together a variety of enemies, where they can all be rhetorically machine-gunned at once. But the suspicion remains that a truer explanation for Fox’s militancy may be, like so much else at Yuletide, business. Christmas is the big retail season. What Fox retails is resentment.

In this war, no weapons of Christmas destruction have been found—just a few caches of linguistic oversensitivity and commercial caution. Christmas remains robust: even Gibson says in his book that in America Christmas celebrators (ninety-six per cent) outnumber Christians (eighty-four per cent). But the “Happy Holidays” contagion has probably spread too far to be wiped out. “President Bush and I wish everyone a very happy holiday,” Laura Bush says sweetly on a video posted on the White House Web site. And even the Fox News online store advertised, until a couple of weeks ago, “The O’Reilly Factor Holiday Ornament.” (“Put your holiday tree in ‘The No Spin Zone.’ ”)

John Lennon, who died in this city, at this season, twenty-five years ago, didn’t bother with “Happy Holidays” and the like. In 1971, he and his wife, Yoko Ono, wrote and recorded a song that has become a classic. Here’s its final verse:

A very Merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let’s hope it’s a good one
Without any fear
War is over, if you want it
War is over now.

That’s the spirit, John. You bet we want it. And Merry Christmas to all.

Junking Science

2005-12-16T17:35:00.000-08:00

Junking Science
By Richard Wolinsky, AlterNet
Posted on October 10, 2005, Printed on December 16, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/26559/

[This is an edited transcript of an interview with Chris Mooney from Cover to Cover, a radio show that airs on KPFA Radio in Berkeley. The full audio of the story is available here.]

Richard Wolinsky: Chris Mooney is the author of The Republican War on Science, which deals with the way Republicans, the Republican party in particular, but also individual Republicans, as well as the Republican government, have dealt with science, scientific issues, and controversies involved with science. And my take on this is that the reason it's a war on science is because these people are, they couldn't get economics as an argument, they couldn't get ideology as an argument, so they figured, why not just go after the science? Is that about it?

Chris Mooney: There is a lot of that to it. The "war on science" that I'm describing does have this opportunistic element in which you find that interest groups, whether industry or on the religious right, who want to achieve a particular political end, are using science as their means of doing so and abusing science in the process. And they're not up front, they don't say "We oppose embryonic stem cell research for moral reasons," they want to say, "No, adult cells are better, so we don't need to do embryonic stem cell research." And that's where science is abused and distorted. And I'm detecting that across a wide range of issues. And so is the scientific community.

RW: Well, the history of politicization of science goes way back. To some degree certainly we can go back to Galileo, but what we've got here over the past 20 years is something else again.

CM:That's what I would argue. I would say that to some extent every political interest politicizes science or uses science politically in the sense of selectively using information to back up your point of view. I think that with the Republican Party today, there's something very different. And the reason it's very different is because the party is committed to catering to two key constituencies, big business and the religious right, who are often coming into conflict with the mainstream scientific view on issues like evolution for the religious right or global climate change for the fossil fuel industry. So you have a systematic attempt by Republican political leaders to appease these interests on the scientific issues that matter to them. And so you get in combination a kind of perfect storm of catering to special interests on science, again and again and again, systematically, throughout the Bush government.

RW: Well, it actually started before then, and as I was reading your book, I saw that there's something called the OTA, the Office of Technology Assessment, a congressional committee, a congressional office, I'm not sure how you want to call it. The OTA came out of Congress, it's been around since when?

CM:It was founded in 1972, I believe, and it lasted until 1995, when the Gingrich Congress came in, Republicans had not controlled Congress for decades, and they pretty promptly did away with it.

RW: Ok, prior to 1972, how did Congress learn about science?

CM: Well, they would have to call hearings, and they would have to bring in experts to testify. But in the 70s, there were a growing number of scientific controversies about things like nuclear energy or the super-sonic transport, and Congress felt that they couldn't always trust the executive branch to provide them unbiased information, cause the executive branch is serving the president. So they thought that they would have their own source of information. And they founded OTA, '72, and it struggled at first, but it ultimately became a world-renowned scientific advisory body. The Europeans built their own scientific advisory bodies based on OTA.

RW: And who selected OTA, the people in it?

CM: The staff? Well, it served at the pleasure of Congress, so it actually had an executive board of six Democrats and six Republicans, but then the staff was of course scientists.

RW: One thing, before we go further, is that you make a clear point in your book that science is not a he-said she-said affair. It's something called scientific consensus. What is scientific consensus?

CM: Scientific consensus is something that's achieved when an issue or question has been studied quite extensively, and studies have been published repeatedly in scientific journals that are coming to or bolstering the same central conclusion. So, evolution happened, would be a very good one. You have mounds of evidence, and at some point the scientific community is able to say, well, we think we've got a pretty good take on this one, we think that it stood the test of time. And that doesn't mean that it will never, ever be challenged by new data, but it does mean that a lot of evidence has built up to support a particular conclusion. And when that happens, it doesn't happen all the time, but when it does it's something very powerful. Because it's the best scientific knowledge that the scientific community can give us.

RW: So the OTA basically dealt with scientific consensus?

CM: They would be asked by Congress to investigate a question. They would study it carefully based on the work that had already been done, sometimes they would do new research, and then they would pull it all together in an expert report.

RW: And over time, what happened apparently was that they came out with reports that the Republicans just didn't like.

CM: Especially on the Reagan administration's Star Wars program. That was a key politics and science fight during the Reagan years. And OTA was on the side of many, many physicists who said, not only are there many security issues with this, because we think it's going to make the Soviets ramp up their own stocks of missiles, but we don't see it as technologically feasible. We think if you do build this thing it's not going to work. Or it'll suffer a catastrophic failure the first time you try to make it work. These studies undermined the Reagan administration's position pretty seriously. So this was extremely controversial.

RW: Also the area of the environment as well, right?

CM: Yeah. I think that in retrospect though, OTA's main sin from the Republican political point of view was those Star Wars studies.

RW: Well, the reason I mention that is because Gingrich disbanded it in '95, which meant that there was no longer an impartial body able to advise Congress. Now we're looking at what occurred in New Orleans with the break of the levees. And I would like to know if there's a connection between the disbanding of the OTA and the destruction of the wetlands, and in particular the rebuilding of the levees, the strengthening of the levees in New Orleans.

CM: There's something of a connection there, I wouldn't want to overplay it. OTA did do studies, and actually when the New Orleans catastrophe happened I looked back in the OTA archives, and there were studies about flood plains, wetlands, hurricane protection for the Gulf Coast. OTA had looked into these issues, it had informed Congress on these issues. Congress was no longer informed after 1995. That could have made a difference. I mean, I think a lot of other things needed to happen. But clearly, one of the things that wasn't happening was Congress getting studies from OTA on this subject.

RW:Gingrich disbanded it in 1995, so for the past decade, there's been nothing done in terms of all this, because there was no official body to consult with at all.

CM: Right, and my argument is that this facilitated the political abuse of science, it made it more likely to happen, because once you get rid of your definitive expert scientific assessment body that's world renowned and respected, then members of Congress can conveniently call up lobbyists, interest groups, special interests, and they can listen to their take on the science. So you get the situation where it's my science vs. your science, Democrat science vs. Republican science, instead of a careful expert assessment that has Congress's official name on it. So things get much more politicized.

RW: At some point something comes in, called the Data Quality Act. What was the Data Quality Act?

CM: Calling it an Act is a bit of actually an over-glorification, although that's what they call it. It's two sentences slipped into an appropriations bill by a lobbyist. And they've been used, these two sentences, by the Bush administration, to pretty radically change the way that the government uses scientific information in order to protect the public health and the environment.

What the Data Quality Act sets up is a process by which special interests get to petition agencies to attack scientific information they don't like, and potentially drag that scientific information into the courtroom. The legal issues are not yet resolved over whether they can sue or not. But it allows, especially industry, which is most inclined to use the act so far, it allows industry to say, we don't like this study you're using.

Very early, before the EPA or another government agency has even tried to do anything to regulate industry, industry can attack the information, and it can bog down the regulatory process by doing so. It's another device that facilitates the political abuse of science.

RW: In addition, by slowing everything down, they may or may not be able to stop it, but they could put it off for several years.

CM: Sure. And the process of government regulation is already slow enough.

RW: So it's pretty much the idea, ok we'll send it out for study yet again, and you can put something off indefinitely.

CM: They call it paralysis by analysis.

RW: Ok, that happened when?

CM: The Data Quality Act? 2000, 2001. It was slipped through late in the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration seized upon it, and rearranged the government essentially based upon it, based upon these two sentences.

RW: You had these two separate events, one of which to stop the flow of science, the other to fight any science that slipped through, and the result in a sense has been scientific paralysis in Congress for the past five years.

CM: And on issue after issue, these sort of raging science fights, where a special interest says, "We don't like this information," and you have no definitive body to come in and be the arbiter of what's good and what's not good, so you just have my science vs. your science, and everything gets politicized, and science itself ends up being undermined through this process.

RW: I'm gonna skip ahead for a second, because I want to take this in a different direction, which is that if at that end there is no longer any kind of check going on, what about journalism? What has journalism done?

CM: This is one of the arguments that I make. I actually find a lot of fault with journalists who I think are guilty often of aiding and abetting the strategies of those who want to create phony scientific controversies for political reasons.

I think a great example is evolution, where you have an extraordinarily firmly established scientific point of view, that evolution happened, evolution by natural selection. And you have a special interest group, essentially Christian conservatives arguing they have a scientific alternative. But the claim that intelligent design is scientific is extremely dubious and not accepted by the scientific community.

However, journalists will pair the two viewpoints against one another in a he-said she-said we're clueless format, And it's giving the intelligent design people exactly what they want. Which is, they're trying to create a controversy, and the media is playing right into their strategy.

RW: Well, this of course works across the board. What it does is create legitimacy for extreme positions.

CM: Exactly. And it also creates the phony notion that there's two sides when in fact, on something like evolution there's one side, the scientific position, and then there is intelligent design and creation science, which are these quasi-scientific hybrids that religious conservatives have come up with. And then there's every creation myth that any society has come up with. And only evolution is the one that's scientifically supported and accepted by scientific consensus. So it creates this phony duality as well.

RW: That also happens in the area of global warming.

CM: Oh sure, sure. It happens in a lot of areas. And I argue that political interests are aware of how the media works, and they know that these strategies will work. And so it falls to journalists to bring themselves up to speed on how they're being used.

RW: That also brings up the name of Frank Luntz. [chuckles] Some people know who he is, some people don't. He invented the term sound science?

CM: I wouldn't say he invented it. He is a Republican pollster, and by all counts a good and influential one, and he taught members of the party to use the phrase "sound science" to describe their positions on the environment. And there's a famous Luntz memo telling members of the Republican party how to talk about the environment. It says, "Use the phrase sound science," and it also says on global warming, "continue to question the science." So what sound science apparently means to him is, attack the mainstream consensus position and find your own selected scientists who still disagree with it.

RW: And another word they use is "junk science."

CM: For them, that's the opposite of sound science. But I think both of these are Orwellian terms. You know, junk science often means science that industry doesn't like, and sound science often means study it over and over and over again without taking any particular action, until you have an unreasonable degree of scientific certainty.

RW: Before we go into some of the specific issues that take place in your book, I'd like to talk about two things that are a little more current, that are post-book. One is the Terry Schiavo affair. How does the Terry Schiavo affair slip into this Republican war?

CM: It fits in, interestingly, in the following way. Senator Frist made himself quite notorious by standing up on the Senate floor and questioning the medical diagnosis of Terry Schiavo that had been done by Florida doctors. And what this represented for me was yet another case in which religious conservatives and the politician who's taking their side, Senator Frist, were unwilling to argue an issue solely on moral grounds, saying "We don't believe that someone should be put to death no matter what condition they're in." But rather, they had to find a scientific argument, they had to try to argue it through science, questionable science. They had to dispute a well-founded conclusion. In this case it was a medical diagnosis. Apparently they don't feel that their moral argument is strong enough, and so they blur the issue by also trying to make a questionable scientific argument, and then science gets abused and distorted.

And we see this again and again. Again, embryonic stem cells, saying that adult stem cells are good enough, and no one researching in this field really thinks that. And there are many, many other case studies of that kind of thing happening.

RW: Well, what I find interesting is that I begin to lose sense at a certain point, of what is coming out of the Republican propaganda machine, and what articles are real. For instance, there were two articles recently about stem-cell research. One was a small article, which I'm sure they picked up on, or maybe they started, about how there are certain other cells in the body, adult body, that can be used instead of stem cells, that are better. That didn't make a splash, and then disappeared. A few days later, I saw something which said that the problem with the Bush stem cell line is that it seems to have gotten cancerous, and is completely useless. So I'm just curious, do you know about both of those stories.

CM: I know a little about what you're referring to. There's been, from the beginning of the stem cell issue rising to prominence, Christian conservatives have always sought not only to say that we think it's immoral to conduct this research because embryos are destroyed in the process, but they've also said it's medically unnecessary. And sympathetic politicians have echoed that claim, medically unnecessary. And that claim is just outlandish if you talk to anyone who's researching in the stem cell field.

You talk to these scientists, and a lot of them study both embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. A lot of the biggest cheerleaders for embryonic work are people who've made their whole careers studying adult stem cells. They think that both are interesting scientifically, both have potential. It may be that adult stem cells are good for one thing, embryonic are good for another. Why would you shut off one avenue of research before we know? That's how scientists think about these things. And when they hear this claim that we'll just do adult stem cells, it's just, it's mind boggling to them.

But that is just a classic case study of how science is politically used in order to achieve a moral end by Christian conservatives.

RW: I look at the whole thing and I see a bigger picture. I mean, you're focused in on the war on science, but it's a war on truth, a war on honesty, it's a war on the American people in many ways, and it leads me towards trying to get some kind of broader --

CM: I think there's a bigger picture here too, I'm sorry to be so narrow. There's an analogy that I would draw between the war on science that I'm discussing and what happened with the hurricane. And I would make the analogy as follows: FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, they flopped, they failed to react to a massive crisis quickly enough. And Americans now question, these are taxpayer-funded agencies, right? We pay for these government bodies. We now question whether our government is competent to do what we expect of it.

Well, it's not just in emergency response that we're having that reaction to our government. It's in a lot of areas where the government's supposed to be using government to protect us, where the Bush administration is actually undermining the credibility and the professionalism of the government by having the EPA or the FDA put out what's pretty clearly misinformation. A great example is the White House trying to edit the text of an EPA global warming report.

These are agencies paid for by taxpayer money, that are supposed to be staffed by experts, they're supposed to assess the science, and they're supposed to react to protect us. And there's been a widespread erosion of faith in their ability to do this. And the war on science, maybe it's a broader war on professionalism. Maybe it's a war on the federal government's ability to serve us. Maybe it's a war on public servants.

RW: Well, you know, you bring in the philosophies of Grover Norquist and you're right there.

CM: Thomas Friedman had a New York Times commentary making this very point, that the conservative movement has never liked the federal government. And I think Grover Norquist's comment was "I just want to get it down small enough so that I can strangle it in the bathtub." And that's a view that's very incompatible with responding to a disaster promptly and effectively.

RW: In your research and your book, you do single out a couple of people in Congress who are particularly odious. One of them is a guy named Tom Coburn and the other, Jim Inhofe.

CM: Actually, it turns out that they're both Senators from Oklahoma. Inhofe is the Oklahoma senator who attacks global warming, he attacks the science, repeatedly. And he actually had the temerity to suggest that global warming was a hoax. Coburn works more in the medical health arena, and he has actually led a campaign to question the effectiveness of the condom. So he's sort of backing the Christian right's abstinence-only education approach. And I think both are guilty of seriously distorting the science in the process.

It's interesting, from the state of Oklahoma you have the two different sides of what I would call the Republican war on science, that we're going to attack science to help industry, and we're going to attack science to help the Christian conservative moral agenda. And again, when your roll them into a ball, that's when you get this systematic problem that I'm talking about.

RW: What do you think the role of the right-wing think tanks is in all this?

CM: I'm glad you asked me about that. I think that one of the factors that has made the politicization of science worse is that nowadays, when a member of Congress wants to undermine the mainstream scientific position on a question like global warming, the information is there for him to take up and cite on the floor of Congress. Because nowadays, there are a wide range of political think tanks in D.C. and elsewhere whose job it is to provide contrary "expertise" and arguments that's also in contradiction to the mainstream scientific view that's coming out of university research. And I point out in the book that you can trace the trend towards the creation of these think tanks. A prominent conservative thinker named Irving Kristol actually advised industry to create sympathetic voices in the 70s.

And it's not just industry, right? It actually also happens on the Christian right. The great example there is the Seattle-based Discovery Institute has almost single-handedly led an attack on the theory of evolution that it's built up over almost 15 years. And now you actually have the evolution fight on the front page of Time Magazine. They deserve a lot of credit for that, they have been very effective. But they are a think tank, and they are making points in contradiction to evolutionary science as established at all the nation's leading universities. But the right has its own shadow scientific community now.

RW: And that means not just politicians but places like Time Magazine suddenly elevate intelligent design to a "science." When I was in college, I got a Masters in philosophy, we studied intelligent design -- it was one of the arguments for the existence of God from the Middle Ages.

CM: And then you'll know that David Hume took it apart in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. And on an intellectual level I'm not sure it ever recovered. But it's a recycled philosophical argument that is actually from a pre-Enlightenment time. And nowadays, we don't use just philosophical arguments to prove the existence of God. We actually study, and do research, and that's what bolsters the theory of evolution. And you cannot do research to study the designer, because the designer is a supernatural force and scientists cannot design a test to determine how the designer acts.

When you're in a debate or argument with the ID proponents, you really have to say to them, ok, if you've got a scientific approach, then who's the designer, who made the designer, how did the designer do any of this, when did it happen, what chromosomes were changed in the organism to make it designed more carefully, how does the designer operate? With hands? With some sort of appendage, with a tool, is it just force from the brain, something we don't understand? And they can't answer any of these questions, and science can't answer any of these at all. They're inherently unscientific questions because they're untestable.

RW: Final question, what can we do, if anything, other than publicize it a little bit or argue about intelligent design.

CM: Well, publicizing it is important, and I encourage the scientific community to speak out. The reason I encourage them to do so, I know I would rather have them doing research, but if there is a problem, if there's a crisis, as I argue, over the political misuse or abuse of science today, the only people who can diagnose that crisis are the scientists, they're the ones who can detect the misinformation for us. They're the experts, they're the ones whose outrage really counts. That's not enough, outrage is not enough.

There are a number of other things we can do. We talked about OTA. I would argue strongly that we need to reestablish a congressional advisory body with scientific expertise to help depoliticize some of these issues. I would strengthen the scientific advisory body in the White House as well, the Office of Science and Technology Policy. There are a number of other legislative steps that we could think about, that some members of Congress on the Democrat side have thought about, steps to protect whistleblowers in government agencies who want to speak out when the science is being abused. And there's bad legislation that we need to either fight or get rid of, like the Data Quality Act, which we discussed. So these measures are helping contribute to the politicization of science.

We also talked about the media, I'm trying to make journalists more aware of how covering these things in a "debate" format he-said she-said we're clueless, actually aids and abets the strategies of the science abusers. And journalist education would help, journalist education in specifically scientific areas so that they know when these strategies are being brought to bear on them. I think that that's a start. But ultimately it may be that we need political solutions in the sense of actually voting, so it may be that we need to judge candidates based on their records on science. And that doesn't necessarily mean vote Democrat, but it may mean you vote Democrat if the Democrats have good scientific records or Republican if the Republicans have good scientific records. And very few, at this point, do. So there are some good examples on the Republican side, but unfortunately not that many.

Richard Wolinsky is the host of Cover To Cover, which airs on KPFA Pacifica Radio.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/26559/

In the Kingdom of the Half-Blind

2005-12-16T16:43:00.000-08:00

In the Kingdom of the Half-Blind
By Bill Moyers, AlterNet. Posted December 16, 2005.

Moyers addresses the Bush administration's obsession with secrecy and its bullying and manipulation of PBS.

Note: This is the prepared text of the address delivered on December 9, 2005, by Bill Moyers for the 20th anniversary of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, in Washington D.C. Collaborating with him on this speech was Michael Winship, a long-time colleague and journalistic collaborator.

Thank you for inviting me to take part in this anniversary celebration of The National Security Archive. Your organization has become indispensable to journalists, scholars, and any other citizen who believes the USA belongs to the people and not to the government.

It's always a fight to find out what the government doesn't want us to know. And no one in this town has done more to fight for open democracy or done more to see that the Freedom of Information Act fulfills its promise than the Archive. The fight goes back a long way. You'll find a fine account of it in Herbert Foerstel's book, "Freedom of Information and the Right to Know: The Origins and Application of the Freedom of Information Act" (Greenwood Press, 1999). Foerstel tells us that although every other 18th century democratic constitution includes the public's right to information, there were two exceptions: Sweden and the United States.

But in 1955 the American Society of Newspaper Editors decided to battle government secrecy. The Washington Post's James Russell Wiggins and Representative John Moss of California teamed up to spearhead that fight. President Kennedy subsequently resisted their efforts. When he asked reporters to censor themselves on the grounds that these were times of "clear and present danger," journalists were outraged and agreed that his administration represented a low point in their battle. But Congressman Moss refused to give up, and in 1966 he managed to pass the Freedom of Information Act, although in a crippled and compromised form.

I was there, as the White House press secretary, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the act on July 4, 1966; signed it with language that was almost lyrical -- "With a deep sense of pride that the United States is an open society in which the people's right to know is cherished and guarded."

Well, yes, but I knew that LBJ had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the signing ceremony. He hated the very idea of the Freedom of Information Act; hated the thought of journalists rummaging in government closets and opening government files; hated them challenging the official view of reality. He dug in his heels and even threatened to pocket veto the bill after it reached the White House. And he might have followed through if Moss and Wiggins and other editors hadn't barraged him with pleas and petitions. He relented and signed "the damned thing," as he called it. He signed it, and then went out to claim credit for it.

Because of the Freedom of Information Act and the relentless fight by the Archive to defend and exercise it, some of us have learned more since leaving the White House about what happened on our watch than we knew when we were there. Funny, isn't it, how the farther one gets from power, the closer one often gets to the truth?

Consider the recent disclosures about what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964. These documents, now four decades old, seem to confirm that there was no second attack on U.S. ships on the 4th of August and that President Johnson ordered retaliatory air strikes against North Vietnam on the basis of intelligence that either had been "mishandled" or "misinterpreted" or had been deliberately skewed by subordinates to provide him the excuse he was looking for to attack North Vietnam.

I was not then a player in foreign policy and had not yet become the President's press secretary -- my portfolio was politics and domestic policy. But I was there beside him during those frenetic hours. I heard the conversations from the President's side, although I could not hear what was being told to him by the Situation Room or the Pentagon.

I accept now that it was never nailed down for certain that there was a second attack, but I believe that LBJ thought there had been. It is true that for months he had wanted to send a message to Ho Chi Minh that he meant business about standing behind America's commitment to South Vietnam. It is true that he was not about to allow the hawkish Barry Goldwater to outflank him on national security in the fall campaign. It is also true that he often wrestled with the real or imaginary fear that liberal Democrats, whose hearts still belonged to their late fallen leader, would be watching and sizing him up according to their speculation of how Kennedy would have decided the moment.

So yes, I think the President's mind was prepared to act if the North Vietnamese presented him a tit-for-tat opportunity. But he wasn't looking for a wider war at that time, only a show of resolve, a flexing of muscles, the chance to swat the fly when it landed.

Nonetheless, this state of mind plus cloudy intelligence proved a combustible and tragic mix. In the belief that a second attack suggested an intent on the part of an adversary that one attack alone left open, the President did order strikes against North Vietnam, thus widening the war. He asked Congress for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that was passed three days later and opened the way for future large-scale commitments of American forces. Haste is so often the enemy of good judgment. Rarely does it produce such costly consequences as it did this time.

But did the President order-up fabricated evidence to suit his wish? No. Did subordinates rig the evidence to support what they thought he wanted to do? It's possible, but I swear I cannot imagine who they might have been -- certainly it was no one in the inner-circle, as far as I could tell. I don't believe this is what happened. Did the President act prematurely? Yes. Was the response disproportionate to the events? Yes. Did he later agonize over so precipitous a decision? Yes. "For all I know," he said the next year, "our Navy was shooting at whales out there." By then, however, he thought he had other reasons to escalate the war, and did. All these years later, I find it painful to wonder what could have been if we had waited until the fog lifted, or had made public what we did and didn't know, trusting the debate in the press, Congress, and the country to help us shape policies more aligned with events and with the opinion of an informed public.

I had hoped we would learn from experience. Two years ago, prior to the invasion of Iraq, I said on the air that Vietnam didn't make me a dove; it made me read the Constitution. Government's first obligation is to defend its citizens. There is nothing in the Constitution that says it is permissible for our government to launch a preemptive attack on another nation. Common sense carries one to the same conclusion: it's hard to get the leash back on once you let the wild dogs of war out of the kennel. Our present Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has a plaque on his desk that reads, "Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords." Perhaps, but while war is sometimes necessary, to treat it as sport is obscene. At best, war is a crude alternative to shrewd, disciplined diplomacy and the forging of a true alliance acting in the name of international law. Unprovoked, "the noblest sport of war" becomes the slaughter of the innocent.

I left the White House in early 1967 to practice journalism. Because our beat is the present and not the past -- we are journalists after all, not historians -- I put those years and events behind me, except occasionally to reflect on how they might inform my reporting and analysis of what's happening today. I was chastened by our mistakes back then, and chagrined now when others fail to learn from them.

The country suffers not only when presidents act hastily in secret, but when the press goes along. I keep an article in my files by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon ("30 Year Anniversary: Tonkin Gulf Lie Launched Vietnam War") written a decade ago and long before the recent disclosures. They might have written it over again during the buildup for the recent invasion of Iraq. On August 5, 1964, the headline in The Washington Post read: "American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers: Move Taken to Halt Aggression." That, of course, was the official line, spelled out verbatim and succinctly on the nation's front pages. The New York Times proclaimed in an editorial that the President "went to the people last night with the somber facts." The Los Angeles Times urged Americans "to face the fact that the communists, by their attack on American vessels in international waters, have escalated the hostilities." It was not only Lyndon Johnson whose mind was predisposed to judge on the spot, with half a loaf. It was also those reporters and editors who were willing to accept the official view of reality as the truth of the matter. In his book, "Censored War," Daniel Hallin found that journalists at the time had a great deal of information available which contradicted the official account of what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, but "it simply wasn't used."

Tim Wells, who wrote a compelling book on "The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam," told Cohen and Solomon it was yet another case of "the media's almost exclusive reliance on the U.S. government officials as sources of information," as well as "their reluctance to question official pronouncements on national security issues." There are many branches on the family tree of journalism where Judith Miller blossomed. I can imagine that one day the National Security Archive will turn up a document explaining how reporters waited outside the Garden of Eden to snap up Adam and Eve's account of what had happened inside, but never bothered to interview the snake.

I am taking your time with all this hoping you will understand why I have become something of a fundamentalist on the First Amendment protection of an independent press, a press that will resist the seductions, persuasions, and intimidations of people who hold great power -- over life and death, war and peace, taxes, the fate of the environment -- and would exercise it undisturbed, in great secrecy, if they are allowed.

In a telling moment, the Bush Administration opposed the declassification of 40 year old Gulf of Tonkin documents. Why? Because they fear uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq. And well they might. Just as absurd is their opposition to the release of two intelligence briefings given to President Johnson in 1965 and 1968. The CIA claims they should be kept secret on the grounds that their release could impair its mission by revealing its sources and methods of forty years ago. That's bull. The actual methods used by the CIA back then have largely been declassified, which is why I signed a statement in your support when the National Security Archive went to court over this matter. I was as disappointed as you were when the federal judge, who ruled this past summer, preferred the government's penchant for secrecy to the people's right to know what goes on in their name and with their money.

It has to be said: there has been nothing in our time like the Bush Administration's obsession with secrecy. This may seem self-serving coming from someone who worked for two previous presidents who were no paragons of openness. But I am only one of legions who have reached this conclusion. See the recent pair of articles by the independent journalist, Michael Massing, in The New York Review of Books. He concludes, "The Bush Administration has restricted access to public documents as no other before it." And he backs this up with evidence. For example, a recent report on government secrecy by the watchdog group, OpenTheGovernment.org, says the Feds classified a record 15.6 million new documents in fiscal year 2004, an increase of 81% over the year before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. What's more, 64% of Federal Advisory Committee meetings in 2004 were completely closed to the public. No wonder the public knows so little about how this administration has deliberately ignored or distorted reputable scientific research to advance its political agenda and the wishes of its corporate patrons. I'm talking about the suppression of that EPA report questioning aspects of the White House Clear Skies Act; research censorship at the departments of health and human services, interior and agriculture; the elimination of qualified scientists from advisory committees on kids and lead poisoning, reproductive health, and drug abuse; the distortion of scientific knowledge on emergency contraception; the manipulation of the scientific process involving the Endangered Species Act; and the internal sabotage of government scientific reports on global warming

It's an old story: the greater the secrecy, the deeper the corruption.

This is the administration that has illegally produced phony television news stories with fake reporters about Medicare and government anti-drug programs, then distributed them to local TV stations around the country. In several markets, they aired on the six o'clock news with nary a mention that they were propaganda bought and paid for with your tax dollars.

This is the administration that paid almost a quarter of a million dollars for rightwing commentator Armstrong Williams to talk up its No-Child-Left-Behind education program and bankrolled two other conservative columnists to shill for programs promoting the President's marriage initiative.

This is the administration that tacitly allowed inside the White House a phony journalist under the nom de plume of Jeff Gannon to file Republican press releases as legitimate news stories and to ask President Bush planted questions to which he could respond with preconceived answers.

And this is the administration that has paid over one hundred million dollars to plant stories in Iraqi newspapers and disguise the source, while banning TV cameras at the return of caskets from Iraq as well as prohibiting the publication of photographs of those caskets -- a restriction that was lifted only following a request through the Freedom of Information Act.

Ah, FOIA. Obsessed with secrecy, Bush and Cheney have made the Freedom of Information Act their number one target, more fervently pursued for elimination than Osama Bin Laden. No sooner had he come to office than George W. Bush set out to eviscerate both FOIA and the Presidential Records Act. He has been determined to protect his father's secrets when the first Bush was Vice President and then President -- as well as his own. Call it Bush Omerta.

This enmity toward FOIA springs from deep roots in their extended official family. Just read your own National Security Archive briefing book #142, edited by Dan Lopez, Tom Blanton, Meredith Fuchs, and Barbara Elias. It is a compelling story of how in 1974 President Gerald Ford's chief of staff -- one Donald Rumsfeld -- and his deputy chief of staff -- one Dick Cheney -- talked the President out of signing amendments that would have put stronger teeth in the Freedom of Information Act. As members of the House of Representatives, Congressman Rumsfeld actually co-sponsored the Act and as a Congressman, Ford voted for it. But then Richard Nixon was sent scuttling from the White House in disgrace after the secrets of Watergate came spilling out. Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted no more embarrassing revelations of their party's abuse of power; and they were assisted in their arguments by yet another rising Republican star, Antonin Scalia, then a top lawyer at the Justice Department. Fast forward to 2001, when in the early months of George W. Bush's Administration, Vice President Cheney invited the tycoons of oil, gas, and coal to the White House to divide up the spoils of victory. They had, after all, contributed millions of dollars to the cause, and as Cheney would later say of tax cuts for the fraternity of elites who had financed the campaign, they deserved their payoff. But to keep the plunder from disgusting the public, the identities of the participants in the meetings were kept secret. The liberal Sierra Club and the conservative Judicial Watch filed suit to open this insider trading to public scrutiny.

But after losing in the lower court, the White House asked the Supreme Court to intervene. Lo and behold, hardly had Justice Scalia returned from a duck hunting trip with the Vice President -- the blind leading the blind to the blind -- than the Supreme Court upheld the White House privilege to keep secret the names of those corporate predators who came to slice the pie. You have to wonder if sitting there in the marsh, shotguns in hand, Scalia and Cheney reminisced about their collaboration many years earlier when as young men in government they had tried to shoot down the dreaded Freedom of Information Act that kept them looking over their shoulders (Congress, by the way, overrode President Ford's veto.)

They have much to fear from the Freedom of Information Act. Just a few days ago, FOIA was used to force the Department of Justice to make available legal documents related to Supreme Court nominee Judge Alito's record. The department reluctantly complied but under very restricted circumstances. The records were made available on one day, for three hours, from 3 to 6pm, for reporters only. No citizen or advocacy groups were permitted access. There were 470 pages to review. The blogspot Mpetrelis reckons this meant a reporter had about 34 seconds to quickly read each page and figure out if the information was newsworthy or worth pursuing further. "Not a lot of time to carefully examine documents from our next Supreme Court justice."

It's no surprise that the White House doesn't want reporters roaming the halls of justice. The Washington Post reports that two years ago six Justice Department attorneys and two analysts wrote a memo stating unequivocally that the Texas Congressional redistricting plan concocted by Tom DeLay violated the Voting Rights Act. Those career professional civil servants were overruled by senior officials, Bush's political appointees, who went ahead and approved the plan anyway.

We're only finding this out now because someone leaked the memo. According to the Post, the document was kept under tight wraps and "lawyers who worked on the case were subjected to an unusual gag rule." Why? Because it is a devastating account of how DeLay allegedly helped launder corporate money to elect a Texas Legislature that then shuffled Congressional districts to add five new Republican members of the House, nailing down control of Congress for the radical right and their corporate pals.

They couldn't get away with all of this if the press was at the top of their game. Never has the need for an independent media been greater. People are frightened, their skepticism of power -- their respect for checks and balances -- eclipsed by their desire for security. Writing in The New York Times, Michael Ignatieff has reminded us that democracy's dark secret is that the fight against terror has to be waged in secret, by men and women who defend us with a bodyguard of lies and armory of deadly weapons. Because this is democracy's dark secret, Ignatieff continues, it can also be democracy's dark nemesis. We need to know more about what's being done in our name; even if what we learn is hard, the painful truth is better than lies and illusions. The news photographer in Tom Stoppard's play "Night and Day," sums its up: "People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark."

Yet the press is hobbled today -- hobbled by the vicissitudes of Wall Street investors who demand greater and greater profit margins at the expense of more investment in reporting (look at what's going on with Knight-Ridder.) Layoffs are hitting papers all across the country. Just last week, the Long Island daily Newsday, of which I was once publisher, cut 72 jobs and eliminated 40 vacancies -- that's in addition to 59 newsroom jobs eliminated the previous month. There are fewer editors and reporters with less time, resources and freedom to burn shoe leather and midnight oil, make endless phone calls, and knock on doors in pursuit of the unreported story.

The press is also hobbled by the intimidation from ideological bullies in the propaganda wing of the Republican Party who hector, demonize, and lie about journalists who ask hard questions of this regime.

Hobbled, too, by what Ken Silverstein, The Los Angeles Times investigative reporter, calls "spurious balance," kowtowing to those with the loudest voice or the most august title who demand that when it comes to reporting, lies must be treated as the equivalent of truth; that covering the news, including the official press release, has greater priority than uncovering the news.

Consider a parable from the past, from the early seventh century, when an Irish warrior named Congal went nearly blind after he was attacked by a swarm of bees. When he became king he changed Irish law to make bee attacks criminal. Thereafter he was known as Congal Caech which means "Congal the Squinting" or "Congal the Half-Blind." If this administration has its way, that description will apply to the press.

Which brings me to a parable for our day.

Once upon a time -- four years ago to be exact -- PBS asked me to create a new weekly broadcast of news, analysis, and interviews. They wanted it based outside the beltway and to be like nothing else on the air: report stories no one else was covering, conduct a conversation you couldn't hear anywhere else. That we did. We offered our viewers a choice, not an echo. In our mandate, we reached back to the words of Lord Byron that once graced the masthead of many small town newspapers: "Without, or with, offence to friends or foes," he said, "I sketch your world exactly as it goes."

We did it with a team of professional journalists recruited from the best in the business: our own NOW staff; public radio's Daniel Zwerdling, Rick Karr and Deborah Amos; Network veterans Brian Ross, Michele Martin, and Sylvia Chase; Washington's Sherry Jones; The Center for Investigative Reporting's Mark Shapiro; Frontline's Lowell Bergman; Newsweek's Joe Contreras. We collaborated on major investigations with U.S. News and World Report, NPR, and The New York Times.

We reported real stories and talked with real people about real problems. We told how faraway decision-making affected their lives. We reported on political influence that led to mountaintop removal mining and how the government was colluding with industry to cover up the effect of mercury in fish on pregnant women.

We described what life was like for homeless veterans and child migrants working in the fields. We exposed Wall Street shenanigans and tracked the Washington revolving door. We reported how Congress had defeated efforts to enact safeguards that would mitigate a scandal like Enron, and how those efforts were shot down by some of the same politicians who were then charged with investigating the scandal. We investigated the Deputy Secretary of the Interior, Steven Griles, a full 18 months before he resigned over conflicts of interest involving the oil and mining industries for which he had been a lobbyist on the other side of that revolving door. We reported on those secret meetings held by Cheney with his industry pals and attempted to find out who was in the room and what was discussed. We reported how ExxonMobil had influenced the White House to replace a scientist who believes global warming is real.

We won an Emmy for the hour-long profile of Chuck Spinney, the Pentagon whistleblower who worked from within to expose graft and waste in defense spending. And the blog, Dailykos.com, speculated that it was our interview with Ambassador Joe Wilson, two weeks before the invasion of Iraq and months before Robert Novak outed Wilson's wife Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, that first outraged the administration. "An honor I dreamed not of…"

None of this escaped the attention of the Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, a buddy of Karl Rove and the designated driver for the administration's partisan agenda for public broadcasting. Tomlinson set out, secretly, to discredit our broadcast. He accused us of being unfair and unbalanced, but that wouldn't wash. We did talk with liberal voices like Howard Zinn, Susan Sontag, Sister Joan Chittester, Isabel Allende, Thomas Frank and Arundhati Roy. But we also spoke with right-wingers like Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, Cal Thomas, Frank Luntz, Richard Viguerie, Robert Bartley of The Wall Street Journal editorial page and then his successor, Paul Gigot.

What got Tomlinson's goat was our reporting. After all, we kept after his political pals for keeping secrets, and over and again we reported on how the big media conglomerates were in cahoots with official Washington, scheming for permission to get bigger and bigger. The mainstream media wouldn't touch this topic. Murdoch, Time Warner, Viacom, GE/NBC, Disney/ABC, Clear Channel, Sinclair -- all stood to gain if their lobbying succeeded. Barry Diller appeared on our broadcast and described the relationship between the big news media and Washington as an "oligarchy." Sure enough, except for NOW with Bill Moyers, the broadcast media were silent about how they were lobbying for more and more power over what Americans see, read, and hear. It was left to one little broadcast, relegated to the black hole of Friday night, to shine the light on one of the most important stories of the decade.

What finally sent Tomlinson over the edge and off to the ramparts, however, was a documentary we did about the people of Tamaqua, a small town in Pennsylvania. The Morgan Knitting Mill there had just laid off more than a third of its workforce -- the last of 25 textile mills that sustained the townspeople after the demise of the coal industry. The jobs were going to Honduras and China. Our report told how free trade agreements like NAFTA had encouraged companies to lay off American workers, produce goods more cheaply abroad and then import the goods back here. We showed how the global economy contributes to the growing inequality in America, with the gap between the rich and poor doubling in the last three decades until it is now wider than in the days of the Great Depression.

Those are the facts -- "reality-based" reporting -- that caused Tomlinson to tell The Washington Post that what he saw was "liberal advocacy journalism." Well, if reporting what happens to ordinary people because of events beyond their control, and the indifference of government to their fate, is liberalism, I plead guilty.

Tomlinson was now on the warpath. In secret (his preferred modus operandi) he hired an acquaintance out in Indianapolis named Fred Mann to monitor the content of our show. What qualified Fred Mann for the job has been hard to learn. His most recent position was as director of the Job Bank and alumni services at the National Journalism Center in Herndon, Virginia, an organization that is administered by the Young America's Foundation, which is, in turn, affiliated with the rightwing Young Americans for Freedom. The foundation describes itself as "the principle outreach organization for the conservative movement" and has received funding from ExxonMobil and Phillip Morris, among others. But the trail to Mann went cold there. Several journalists have tried telephoning or emailing him. I tried four times just this week to reach him. One enterprising young reporter even left notes for him at an Indianapolis Hallmark Store where Mann frequently faxed data to Tomlinson. No luck. I guess we'll have to wait for Robert Novak to out him.

Fred Mann never got around to writing his full report, but when members of Congress pressed Tomlinson to show them the notes from Mann, it turns out that he had divided NOW's guests into categories, with headings like, "Anti-Bush," "Anti-business," and "Anti-Tom DeLay." He characterized Republicans Senator Chuck Hagel, who departed from Republican orthodoxy to question the Iraq war, as "liberal," which must have come as a quite a shock to the senator.

During all this I sought several times to meet with Tomlinson and the Board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I wanted to ask them first-hand what was going on and to discuss the importance of public broadcasting's independence. They refused. I invited Tomlinson more than once to go on the air with me, with a moderator and format of his choosing, to discuss our views on the role of public broadcasting. He refused.

But all the while he was crudely pressuring the President of PBS, Pat Mitchell, to counter NOW. And he himself was in direct contact with Paul Gigot, the rightwing editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial pages, to bring to PBS a show that Gigot had hosted on the cable business network CNBC until it was cancelled for lack of an audience. So the Journal Editorial Report came to PBS, with The Wall Street Journal, that fierce defender of the free market, accepting over $4 million of taxpayer dollars courtesy of Ken Tomlinson.

The emails between Tomlinson and Gigot during this time reveal two ideological soul mates scheming to make sure "our side," as they described themselves, gets "an absolute duplication of what Moyers is doing." But as the record will show, Gigot's show was nowhere near what NOW with Bill Moyers was doing. We were digging, investigating, and reporting; they were opining. We were offering a wide range of opinions and views; they were talking to each other. The participants on Gigot's broadcast were his own staff members at the newspaper whose editorial pages are the Pravda of American journalism, where the Right speaks only to the Right. To be blunt about it, we had more diversity of opinion on a single broadcast than Gigot had all year or than he has ever tolerated on his own editorial pages. Reporting? You have to be kidding. In their private exchange of emails Tomlinson informs Gigot that he doesn't really need to do field reporting. Gigot agrees, and goes on to say that he finds such reporting not only a waste of time and money, but "boring" [I'm not making this up: the editor of the editorial page of a great American newspaper finds field reporting "boring."] So it is that ideologues like Gigot can hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality.

I had always thought Gigot an honorable, if ideological fellow. The emails confirm that he is for certain an ideologue -- and a partisan. The saddest part of this story, personally, is that on my own initiative -- with no prompting from anyone -- I had Gigot on my broadcast three times and had asked him to become a regular presence through the elections. I even solicited Pat Mitchell, the PBS President, to urge him to accept my invitation. I had no idea that at this very same time he was secretly negotiating with Tomlinson for his own show. He never bothered to tell me. After reading the emails, I realized this was deceitful on his part. Even as I was asking him in good faith to join me on the broadcast, Gigot was back-channeling with Tomlinson on how they could complete their deal and was advising Tomlinson on "the line" that the CPB chairman should follow.

Of the many disclosures in the email exchange between the two, this is the most intriguing. On August 13, 2004, Tomlinson wrote Gigot: "Protect me on this. I am breaking my word by forwarding this Mintz/Moyers stuff -- but it's too rich for you not to see. Please, please don't show it to anyone. But keep in mind as we have fun with this. Cheers-KT."

What's he talking about? Mintz is Morton Mintz, the octogenarian (now retired) and much honored investigative reporter for The Washington Post. I know nothing about his politics; during his long career he broke exposes of both Democrats and Republicans. That August he and I were emailing about the possibility of an appearance by him on my broadcast, and two months later, just prior to the first Bush-Kerry debate, I did interview him about the questions he would put to both candidates if he were an interlocutor who wanted to break through the polite protocol of the staged event in the hope of getting the politicians to touch reality. Neither Mintz nor I can recall the exact subject of our email exchanges that August, long before the debate. Tomlinson somehow gained access to our correspondence -- Mintz speculates that he found someone who hacked into our emails -- and promised his source that he wouldn't share it with anyone else. Nonetheless, "breaking my word" and begging Gigot to "protect me on this," he forwarded it to his co-conspirator. In a sane world, both men would be drummed out of town for such behavior.

Gigot has now taken his show to FOX News, where such tactics will find a compatible home among like-minded partisans. "Our side" turns out to be the great Republican noise machine. A couple of days after that announcement, The Wall Street Journal published a thoroughly disingenuous editorial, obviously written by Gigot, defending Kenneth Tomlinson and their own involvement with him, while taking potshots at the Inspector General of CPB who had investigated the whole mess at the request of members of Congress. The editorial compared him to Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau.

But in a final triumph of reporting and evidence over ideology and spin, the Inspector found that Tomlinson had committed multiple transgressions: he broke the law, violated the corporation's guidelines for contracting, meddled in program decisions, injected politics into hiring procedures, and admonished CPB executive staff "not to interfere with his deal" with Gigot. The emails show Tomlinson bragging to Karl Rove, who played an important role in his appointment as chairman, about his success in "shaking things up" at CPB. They also confirm that he had consulted the White House about recruiting loyalist Republicans to serve as his confederates in an organization that had been created in 1967 to prevent just such partisan meddling in public broadcasting. (Thanks to Tomlinson and his White House allies, the new President of CPB is the former co-chair of the Republican National Committee. She arrives under a cloud that only her actions can dispel. We shall see.)

Curiously, Gigot's Wall Street Journal editorial conveniently failed to mention that the emails between himself and Tomlinson indicate Tomlinson perjured himself under oath, before Congress, when he said he had nothing to do with the agreement that landed Gigot at PBS. Fact is, they worked hand-in-glove. As I just mentioned, Tomlinson told his own staff not to interfere with "his deal" with Gigot. There's even an email in which Tomlinson says to Gigot, after they have been plotting on how to bring the proposed Gigot show to fruition, "Let's stay in close touch." Obviously, lying by an ally doesn't offend Gigot, who is otherwise known as a scourge of moral transgressions by Democrats, liberals, and other pagans.

As all this was becoming public, Tomlinson was forced to resign from the CPB board. He is now under investigation by the State Department for irregularities in his other job as Chair of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the agency that oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other international broadcasting sponsored by the United States. As I say, great secrecy breeds great corruption.

I have shared this sordid little story with you because it is a cautionary tale about the regime in power. If they were so determined to go with all guns blazing at a single broadcast of public television that is simply doing the job journalism is supposed to do -- setting the record straight -- you can imagine the pressure that has been applied to mainstream media. And you can understand what's at stake when journalism gets the message and pulls its punches. We saw it once again when Ahmed Chalabi was in town. This is the man who played a key and sinister role in fostering both media and intelligence reports that misled the American people about weapons of mass destruction. Although still under investigation by the FBI, Chalabi has maneuvered himself into the position of Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq. He came to Washington recently to schmooze with the President and to meet with the armchair warriors of the neoconservative crowd who had helped him spin the case for going to war. The old Houdini was back, rolling the beltway press who treated him with deference that might have been accorded George Washington. Watching him knock one soft pitch after another over the wall, I was reminded that the greatest moments in the history of the press have come not when journalists made common cause with power but when they stood fearlessly independent of it. This was not one of them.

In his recent book, "The Gospel According to America," David Dark reminds us again of a lesson we seem always to be forgetting, that "as learners of freedom, we might come to understand that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance." He might well have been directly addressing the press when he wrote, "Keeping one's head safe for democracy (or avoiding the worship of false gods) will require a diligent questioning of any and all tribal storytellers. In an age of information technology, we will have to look especially hard at the forces that shape discourse and the various high-powered attempts, new every morning, to invent public reality."

So be it.

Bill Moyers is a broadcast journalist and former host of the PBS program, "NOW With Bill Moyers."

No Jokes, Please, We're Liberal

2005-12-14T21:25:00.000-08:00

No Jokes, Please, We're Liberal
By MICHAEL WOLFF
If Fox News were truly fair and balanced, would it be as much fun to watch? While the right enjoys a laugh, media liberals have become the new conservatives: a stodgy, humorless Ivy League elite

Why aren't liberals funny? And how come conservative columnist David Brooks, formerly a stylish, witty, sharp-eyed writer, got to be such a plodding, stuffed-shirt prig when he went to work for a liberal publication?

Brooks's book Bobos in Paradise is an example of an old-fashioned, way-we-live-now sociology—drawing the great social caricature—that is hardly practiced anymore (sociology, which used to be aligned with journalism, is now a quantitative discipline). His subject was middle-class identity and particularly, even though he's a conservative, liberal-middle-class identity. As an observer of manners, Brooks was a little hyperbolic, a little reductive, and clever to a fault.

But then he went to the New York Times op-ed page. The Times, temperamentally resistant to the hyperbolic, the reductive, the too clever, took Brooks's style away. Sociology without style is pomposity.

The complicated condition for liberals, or, anyway, for liberal wits and stylists, is that so much of the liberal media—the constricting liberal media—has defaulted to a kind of consensus Times-ness. Hence, in defensive mode, and in a careful estimation of our market opportunities, we are all—we well-employed, Ivy League–ish, culturally engaged, upper-middle-class chattering types in the mainstream news media—self-serious, earnest, striving, humorless, correct people, seeking to become ever more earnest, faultless, evenhanded. We're Hillary (or we're her base, and she's courting us by becoming as worthy and flat as we are).

Not to put too fine a point on it, but liberals, in their desperate quest to be taken seriously, are the new conservatives.

Conservative opinionists in the burgeoning right-wing media—from Fox to talk radio to Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard to the Wall Street Journal editorial page—are, on the other hand, often facile, funny, irreverent, eccentric, jaunty, pithy, as well as aggressive and wrongheaded (that improbable creature Ann Coulter is all those things), as well as operatic (Terri Schiavo was an opera). As well as, on occasion, inebriated. (The character note of a liberal these days is sobriety—no drinks, no carbs, no jokes. The conservatives run amok while the liberals are corporatized.)

Obviously, conservatives have reason to enjoy themselves, while liberals do not. But then, too, it may reasonably be the conservatives' sense of verbal sport, of going too far, of showing off, that's helped get them into their catbird seat. And, conversely, the liberals' dullness and depressiveness—"little constipated souls," in the recent description by Ben Bradlee, who is from the liberal media's jaunty age—that's contributed to their fate.

So why no oomph? No joy? No jokes?

In the exception-that-proves department, every liberal jumps up at this point demanding, "What about Jon Stewart?"

"And Maureen Dowd."

"And," add a few liberals in rarefied radio markets, "Air America and Al Franken."

"Andy Borowitz!"

"Wonkette."

"Michael Moore" (but with lessening enthusiasm—more and more embarrassingly he mistakes himself for a serious fellow).

These are the humor anomalies (pretty much the sum total of the humor anomalies). The genre-ists. It's liberal comedy.

This is part of the liberal-journalism ethos. Editors and libel lawyers insist: if you mean it to be funny, you have to make it clear that it's humor. Literalism—that pre-Asperger's condition of wonks everywhere—is part of liberalism.

The conservatives have no appointed clowns. Rather, exaggeration is built into their argument. Is it shtick or isn't it? Peggy Noonan is as exaggerated as Maureen Dowd, but she isn't regarded as the in-house "crazy lady." The talk-radio screed is as amusing as it is incendiary—it's equal parts knee slap and outrage. Seriousness, the conservatives recognize, is, or ought to be, a fluid substance. Here's the answer to the elemental question: Why can't liberals do talk radio? Because they don't know how to tease.

The most enjoyable conversations I have had about modern media—not often an enjoyable subject—have been with Roger Ailes, the Fox mastermind. He's having fun. He's bad. He's a tease. He's out to provoke. To create conflict rather than avoid it.

Does that mean he's not serious? Well … Ailes is sly, charming, sometimes far-fetched, and irresistibly cynical about everybody's motives and everybody's virtue. Whereas we liberals are achingly serious—always. We're good boys.

Good-boyism is partly about market conditions. It's about getting a job. The fewer the jobs, the better the boy you have to be. Conservative media is a growing market; liberal media is a dwindling one. In the last decade or so, the conservatives have created all sorts of new and moneymaking opinion media. Whereas liberals have created only—I've really racked my brains here—Slate.

Slate?

Slate—the Microsoft-supported online magazine developed by liberal-media doyen Michael Kinsley, which has just been sold, at a great premium, to the Washington Post Company—is liberal media targeted at other people in the liberal media. Or, even more finely, targeted at other people in the liberal media who are concerned about issues such as the liberal media. (Various blogs, including Mickey Kaus's O.C.D.-like reading and rereading of the liberal media, are connected to Slate, and many other liberal blogs are clearly being written to gain the attention of Slate.)

With revenues of about $6 million a year, Slate is, in size and reach, insignificant. But in terms of sensibility, it's made it big—its self-importance can't be denied. It's faithfully Ivy League (the liberal media in its heart of hearts is made up of people who went to Harvard or who wish they'd gone to Harvard). Its cloying tone and manner strictly high-S.A.T. We're smart people communing with like-minded smart people, marveling together at the quaint habits of the regular people. We're here, the Slate people insist, because we have a contribution to make to the intellectual wealth of the world. It's our duty. (The last time I saw Slate's current editor, Jacob Weisberg, an ambitious climber up the liberal-media ladder, was at a crowded bar at the Democratic convention in Boston. I'd gotten into the bar because I'd cut out early on John Edwards's vacuous acceptance speech. Weisberg, because he'd uselessly and diligently weathered the speech, was trapped, craning his neck, on the other side of the velvet rope. Said Weisberg, with apparent incredulity, "You walked out on the vice-presidential acceptance speech?")

I have never actually met anyone who has read Slate who hasn't at one time worked at Slate or considered hiring someone who might have worked at Slate.

That is sort of the point. Slate, which came into being as an experiment in new media, has become best known for the fact that many people who have worked at Slate have graduated into jobs in the old liberal media. If you are in the old liberal print media, and you need to hire somebody, the first place you look is Slate (this is not hyperbole; this is how it works, really). In other words, the primary purpose of the only new form of liberal media is to train people to work in the old liberal media.

The real problem with Slate is that nobody who works at Slate actually wants to be working at Slate. The people who work at Slate are not people who get pleasure out of telling their parents they work for an online magazine. Rather, the kind of people who work at Slate want to be working at the Times. They may not really even want to be in the media or news or writing business: they just want to be at The New York Times. (The reason The Washington Post bought Slate has not a little to do with the competition between the Times and the Post and this sense of Slate as the New York Times farm team.)

The hegemony of the Times in liberal journalism is a remarkable development. A generation ago you had a national liberal media (called the media, rather than the liberal media) that consisted of powerful network news operations with dizzying resources, a catchall of independent Zeitgeist-tracking magazines with lots of buzz and glamour, two newsweeklies concentrating on news and opinion rather than, as they do now, family and lifestyle stuff, a more or less independent public television, a (more) vigorous author-driven book business, as well as the Times. But now you have only the Times and its sonorous echo, NPR (the Post, outside of its impulsive purchase of Slate, has become a strictly regional publication).

The Times defines nearly the sum total of liberal respectability—and opportunity. It's the employer of first choice and last resort. The Times is the market. Your paramount job as a provider of liberal opinion and commentary is to home in on the Times sensibility—get on that page.

But back to making jokes. Part of the issue here is that the Times, having sucked everything into its wake, can't admit to having done this. The Times, because it is liberal, has to be on the side of multiple voices. It can't acknowledge its domination, its hegemony—it can't even acknowledge that it is liberal (because liberals believe that being liberal puts them at a higher station of fairness and probity). Indeed, by having more or less successfully extended its franchise across the nation, the Times has to insist even more firmly on its neutrality and transparency. It can't wink the way Fox winks. It can't enjoy itself (the fact that so many people at the Times are depressed people might have something to do with this).

Conservatives talk about being conservative all of the time. Conservatives are obsessed with their own identity—and eccentricities. It's like talking about being Jewish—or like the way Jews once talked about being Jewish. It's not just defining. It's … funny.

Liberals never talk about being liberals—about the oddness that might make them unique and interesting. Mindful of their constant bad press, liberals—self-conscious press hounds one and all—don't like to admit to being liberals (and as for the people who do admit to being liberals, you understand why others wouldn't want to admit to being that).

It's a pretty severe humor limitation when you can't be funny about yourself.

My friend James Atlas, who has spent a long career in the liberal media, has just written a book called My Life in the Middle Ages, which is about, among other things, the pitiable and embarrassing angsts of a career in the liberal media. It's an old-style (read "Jewish"), self-lacerating humor—no matter how much crummy success I've achieved, I'm a hideous failure—which has made, I detect, lots of people in the liberal media, who believe they are actually big successes, uncomfortable.

Jim's real subject is status—that essential, and perhaps most difficult, liberal issue. It is the liberals' shameful place (our Santa Barbara Neverland). I once got Jim into trouble by recounting a conversation that he and I have often had about how much money it takes to be a Manhattan liberal. Some time back Jim had estimated that it required a minimum annual income of $350,000 to maintain a family of four in middle-class-liberal style. I quoted him as having revised that upward to $500,000 (this was three or four years ago—what with real-estate increases, I'd push it up to $650,000 now), which seemed hilarious to me, Jim and I doing such desperate and slapdash accounting.

Now, killing the joke, I can explain why this ought to be funny: Talking about money when you're not supposed to talk about money is funny. Trying to quantify status when you're not supposed to quantify it (it's just supposed to descend on you; you're supposed to just deserve it, apparently) is funny. Saying in public anything that is supposed to be merely whispered in private is funny. And talking about this at all indicates nothing so much as how hopelessly small-time we are. But this comment caused Jim piles of grief. For many people in the greater liberal media this comment meant that Jim was … "status-conscious." And a double vulgarian for discussing it openly. (In part for making such stabs at status-breaching humor, Jim details, wittily, in his book how he came to be fired from The New Yorker, that even higher liberal apogee than the Times.)

Indeed, in what might be interpreted as a not unimportant reading of the tea leaves of journalistic standards and practices, the Times Book Review recently gave prominent notice to a book (the kind of book—just a compendium of interviews, and a "paperback original" at that—that the Times usually deals with perfunctorily) which explicitly rejects the meaning and humor that Jim Atlas and, in the past, David Brooks—and, in some sense, every writer who has ever made a joke—have found in the issue of status.

The book, The New New Journalism, edited by Robert Boynton, who teaches N.Y.U. undergraduates how to write journalism for magazines (one hopes that he is not telling his students that there are actually journalism jobs at magazines these days), and reviewed by Slate's media critic, Jack Shafer (an ever vigilant, indefatigable school-monitor type), means to formally revise the long-faded movement of Zeitgeist-defining journalists of the 60s and 70s (Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Hunter Thompson, et al.), once called the "New Journalism."

The New New Journalism (exemplified by Eric Schlosser's deadly earnest Fast Food Nation, and Newjack, Ted Conover's less-than-Dostoyevskian tour of a New York State prison as a pretend prison guard) rejects, according to Boynton, the New Journalism's sociological concern with status. Rather, the primary subject of these new middle-class liberal journalists is … "the disenfranchised." These New New Journalists, says Boynton, "consider class and race, not status, the primary indices of social hierarchy."

Where practitioners of the old New were stylists, practitioners of the New New, according to the book, are focused on facts, eschewing what the Times dismisses as mere "fancy prose style." The book discusses at great and reverential length the cult of John McPhee, a writer of fabled factuality and unstylishness, who, I would wager, has seldom been read to the end by anybody other than his acolytes, called McPhinos, many of whom took his class at Princeton and are now the New Newists.

Indeed, nonfiction writing, as it disappears from the commercial world, has made it big on campus. It's called literary nonfiction. No jokes please, we're serious.

Meanwhile, it's been a year since the very correct and humorless Adam Moss, a former editor of The New York Times Magazine, took over New York magazine (I used to work at New York and left shortly before Moss arrived), a longtime venue for acute status journalism.

Now, New York has always been, in a sense, the un-Times place for liberal journalists, even the anti-Times (New York was spun off of the Times's great lost competitor the New York Herald Tribune). I once tried to interview Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. for New York. But he refused, explaining, with his signature subtlety, "I hate New York magazine."

New York serves liberal journalism in tabloid form. Its seminal interests have been position, hierarchy, power (both how to get more and how to make fun of people who were getting more). About which subjects it sought—often by way of exaggeration, metaphor, embellishment, gossip, and self-evident rapaciousness—to be entertaining, amusing, provocative, informative (in that order). If often pleasurable, New York was never quite respectable.

The change in the weekly since Moss—in addition to editing the Times Magazine for many years, he is also one of Sulzberger's close friends—took over has been the most radical in New York's near-40-year history: It's become estimable. Praiseworthy (praising and reading are different, often inimical functions). Respectable—if no longer pleasurable. (It's now owned by banker Bruce Wasserstein, to whom respectability may be worth more than money. Note: I was part of another group, one with more commercial intentions, which tried to buy New York.) With more words and smaller type, it's hard work too—but good for you.

It's repositioned itself as a worthy satellite of The New York Times. Like Slate, it will undoubtedly graduate lots of people to the Times. It's quality. Self-conscious quality (perhaps all quality is). Ivy League quality.

But it isn't funny. Not in the least. It's completely in earnest. It's serious about its job, grim in its efforts to elevate the metropolitan-area upper middle class.

Now I am getting older, moving deeper, with my friend Atlas, into the middle ages. So it may be that I am missing the new trend. THE NEW EARNESTNEST the old New York magazine might have headlined it. MEET THE NEW OLD FOGIES. I'd have enjoyed a light essay on the subject by David Brooks.

Except that, judging by the commercial health of the liberal media—not least of all its systemic inability to get anybody under middle age interested in it—it may be that all the earnest, respectability-seeking old fogies are on the inside working for the liberal media while the wisecracking vulgarians are on the outside ignoring it.

The problem may be that we liberals are by temperament job seekers rather than entrepreneurs. We're just not outsiders. So if the Times is the great and encompassing and growing liberal info-and-opinion corporation—the only one left—then we've got to make ourselves attractive to it.

Pistols needn't apply.

Michael Wolff, a Vanity Fair contributing editor, is the author of Autumn of the Moguls (HarperBusiness) and Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet (Simon & Schuster).

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

2005-12-06T17:33:00.000-08:00

The Paranoid Style in American Politics
By Richard Hofstadter†
Harper’s Magazine, November 1964, pp. 77-86.

It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it—and its targets have ranged from “the international bankers” to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers.

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes.

I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics., In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the parlous situation of the United States:

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.…What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence.…The laws of probability would dictate that part of…[the] decisions would serve the country’s interest.

Now turn back fifty years to a manifesto signed in 1895 by a number of leaders of the Populist party:

As early as 1865-66 a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America.…For nearly thirty years these conspirators have kept the people quarreling over less important matters while they have pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central purpose.…Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being used to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people and the financial and commercial independence of the country.

Next, a Texas newspaper article of 1855:

…It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism.…The Pope has recently sent his ambassador of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect of which is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic church throughout the United States.…These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our Senators; reprimanding our Statesmen; propagating the adulterous union of Church and State; abusing with foul calumny all governments but Catholic, and spewing out the bitterest execrations on all Protestantism. The Catholics in the United States receive from abroad more than $200,000 annually for the propagation of their creed. Add to this the vast revenues collected here.…

These quotations give the keynote of the style. In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims. I do not propose to try to trace the variations of the paranoid style that can be found in all these movements, but will confine myself to a few leading episodes in our past history in which the style emerged in full and archetypal splendor.
Illuminism and Masonry

I begin with a particularly revealing episode—the panic that broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general reaction to the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened by the response of certain men, mostly in New England and among the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy. Illuminism had been started in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt. Its teachings today seem to be no more than another version of Enlightenment rationalism, spiced with the anticlerical atmosphere of eighteenth-century Bavaria. It was a somewhat naïve and utopian movement which aspired ultimately to bring the human race under the rules of reason. Its humanitarian rationalism appears to have acquired a fairly wide influence in Masonic lodges.

Americans first learned of Illumism in 1797, from a volume published in Edinburgh (later reprinted in New York) under the title, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. Its author was a well-known Scottish scientist, John Robison, who had himself been a somewhat casual adherent of Masonry in Britain, but whose imagination had been inflamed by what he considered to be the far less innocent Masonic movement on the Continent. Robison seems to have made his work as factual as he could, but when he came to estimating the moral character and the political influence of Illuminism, he made the characteristic paranoid leap into fantasy. The association, he thought, was formed “for the express purpose of rooting out all religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of europe.” It had become “one great and wicked project fermenting and working all over Europe.” And to it he attributed a central role in bringing about the French Revolution. He saw it as a libertine, anti-Christian movement, given to the corruption of women, the cultivation of sensual pleasures, and the violation of property rights. Its members had plans for making a tea that caused abortion—a secret substance that “blinds or kills when spurted in the face,” and a device that sounds like a stench bomb—a “method for filling a bedchamber with pestilential vapours.”

These notions were quick to make themselves felt in America. In May 1798, a minister of the Massachusetts Congregational establishment in Boston, Jedidiah Morse, delivered a timely sermon to the young country, which was then sharply divided between Jeffersonians and Federalists, Francophiles and Anglomen. Having read Robison, Morse was convinced of a Jacobinical plot touched off by Illuminism, and that the country should be rallied to defend itself. His warnings were heeded throughout New England wherever Federalists brooded about the rising tide of religious infidelity or Jeffersonian democracy. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, followed Morse’s sermon with a Fourth-of-July discourse on The Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis, in which he held forth against the Antichrist in his own glowing rhetoric. Soon the pulpits of New England were ringing with denunciations of the Illuminati, as though the country were swarming with them.

The anti-Masonic movement of the late 1820s and the 1830s took up and extended the obsession with conspiracy. At first, this movement may seem to be no more than an extension or repetition of the anti-Masonic theme sounded in the outcry against the Bavarian Illuminati. But whereas the panic of the 1790s was confined mainly to New England and linked to an ultraconservative point of view, the later anti-Masonic movement affected many parts of the northern United States, and was intimately linked with popular democracy and rural egalitarianism. Although anti-Masonry happened to be anti-Jacksonian (Jackson was a Mason), it manifested the same animus against the closure of opportunity for the common man and against aristocratic institutions that one finds in the Jacksonian crusade against the Bank of the United States.

The anti-Masonic movement was a product not merely of natural enthusiasm but also of the vicissitudes of party politics. It was joined and used by a great many men who did not fully share its original anti-Masonic feelings. It attracted the support of several reputable statement who had only mild sympathy with its fundamental bias, but who as politicians could not afford to ignore it. Still, it was a folk movement of considerable power, and the rural enthusiasts who provided its real impetus believed in it wholeheartedly.
As a secret society, Masonry was considered to be a standing conspiracy against republican government. It was held to be particularly liable to treason—for example, Aaron Burr’s famous conspiracy was alleged to have been conducted by Masons. Masonry was accused of constituting a separate system of loyalty, a separate imperium within the framework of federal and state governments, which was inconsistent with loyalty to them. Quite plausibly it was argued that the Masons had set up a jurisdiction of their own, with their own obligations and punishments, liable to enforcement even by the penalty of death. So basic was the conflict felt to be between secrecy and democracy that other, more innocent societies such as Phi Beta Kappa came under attack.

Since Masons were pledged to come to each other’s aid under circumstances of distress, and to extend fraternal indulgence at all times, is was held that the order nullified the enforcement of regular law. Masonic constables, sheriffs, juries, and judges must all be in league with Masonic criminals and fugitives. The press was believed to have been so “muzzled” by Masonic editors and proprietors that news of Masonic malfeasance could be suppressed. At a moment when almost every alleged citadel of privilege in America was under democratic assault, Masonry was attacked as a fraternity of the privileged, closing business opportunities and nearly monopolizing political offices.

Certain elements of truth and reality there may have been in these views of Masonry. What must be emphasized here, however, is the apocalyptic and absolutistic framework in which this hostility was commonly expressed. Anti-Masons were not content simply to say that secret societies were rather a bad idea. The author of the standard exposition of anti-Masonry declared that Freemasonry was “not only the most abominable but also the most dangerous institution that ever was imposed on man.…It may truly be said to be hell’s master piece.”
The Jesuit Threat

Fear of a Masonic plot had hardly been quieted when the rumors arose of a Catholic plot against American values. One meets here again the same frame of mind, but a different villain. The anti-Catholic movement converged with a growing nativism, and while they were not identical, together they cut such a wide swath in American life that they were bound to embrace many moderates to whom the paranoid style, in its full glory, did not appeal. Moreover, we need not dismiss out of hand as totally parochial or mean-spirited the desire of Yankee Americans to maintain an ethnically and religiously homogeneous society nor the particular Protestant commitments to individualism and freedom that were brought into play. But the movement had a large paranoid infusion, and the most influential anti-Catholic militants certainly had a strong affinity for the paranoid style.

Two books which appeared in 1835 described the new danger to the ?American way of life and may be taken as expressions of the anti-Catholic mentality. One, Foreign Conspiracies against the Liberties of the United States, was from the hand of the celebrated painter and inventor of the telegraph, S.F.B. Morse. “A conspiracy exists,” Morse proclaimed , and “its plans are already in operation…we are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our ships, our forts, or our armies.” The main source of the conspiracy Morse found in Metternich’s government: “Austria is now acting in this country. She has devised a grand scheme. She has organized a great plan for doing something here.…She has her Jesuit missionaries traveling through the land; she has supplied them with money, and has furnished a fountain for a regular supply.” Were the plot successful, Morse said, some scion of the House of Hapsburg would soon be installed as Emperor of the United States.

“It is an ascertained fact,” wrote another Protestant militant,

that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery. A minister of the Gospel from Ohio has informed us that he discovered one carrying on his devices in his congregation; and he says that the western country swarms with them under the name of puppet show men, dancing masters, music teachers, peddlers of images and ornaments, barrel organ players, and similar practitioners.

Lyman Beecher, the elder of a famous family and the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote in the same year his Plea for the West, in which he considered the possibility that the Christian millennium might come in the American states. Everything depended, in his judgment, upon what influences dominated the great West, where the future of the country lay. There Protestantism was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with Catholicism. “Whatever we do, it must be done quickly.…” A great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by “the potentates of Europe,” multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation, and sending increasing thousands of voters to “lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power.”

****************
The Paranoid Style in Action

The John Birch Society is attempting to suppress a television series about the United Nations by means of a mass letter-writing campaign to the sponsor,…The Xerox Corporation. The corporation, however, intends to go ahead with the programs.…

The July issue of the John Birch Society Bulletin…said an “avalanche of mail ought to convince them of the unwisdom of their proposed action—just as United Air Lines was persuaded to back down and take the U.N. insignia off their planes.” (A United Air Lines spokesman confirmed that the U.N. emblem was removed from its planes, following “considerable public reaction against it.”)

Birch official John Rousselot said, ”We hate to see a corporation of this country promote the U.N. when we know that it is an instrument of the Soviet Communist conspiracy.”

—San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 1964

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Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan. Whereas the anti-Masons had envisaged drinking bouts and had entertained themselves with sado-masochistic fantasies about the actual enforcement of grisly Masonic oaths,* the anti-Catholics invented an immense lore about libertine priests, the confessional as an opportunity for seduction, licentious convents and monasteries. Probably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a work supposedly written by one Maria Monk, entitled Awful Disclosures, which appeared in 1836. The author, who purported to have escaped from the Hotel Dieu nunnery in Montreal after five years there as novice and nun, reported her convent life in elaborate and circumstantial detail. She reported having been told by the Mother Superior that she must “obey the priests in all things”; to her “utter astonishment and horror,” she soon found what the nature of such obedience was. Infants born of convent liaisons were baptized and then killed, she said, so that they might ascend at once to heaven. Her book, hotly attacked and defended , continued to be read and believed even after her mother gave testimony that Maria had been somewhat addled ever since childhood after she had rammed a pencil into her head. Maria died in prison in 1849, after having been arrested in a brothel as a pickpocket.

Anti-Catholicism, like anti-Masonry, mixed its fortunes with American party politics, and it became an enduring factor in American politics. The American Protective Association of the 1890s revived it with ideological variations more suitable to the times—the depression of 1893, for example, was alleged to be an international creation of the Catholics who began it by starting a run on the banks. Some spokesmen of the movement circulated a bogus encyclical attributed to Leo XIII instructing American Catholics on a certain date in 1893 to exterminate all heretics, and a great many anti-Catholics daily expected a nationwide uprising. The myth of an impending Catholic war of mutilation and extermination of heretics persisted into the twentieth century.
Why They Feel Dispossessed

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Important changes may also be traced to the effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective. For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower., secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, Justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid alleged conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.

Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions. The theatre of action is now the entire world, and he can draw not only on the events of World War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold War. Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination. In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.

The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism. A great many right-wingers would agree with Frank Chodorov, the author of The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil, that this campaign began with the passage of the income-tax amendment to the Constitution in 1913.
The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.
Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.

Perhaps the most representative document of the McCarthyist phase was a long indictment of Secretary of State George C. Marshall, delivered in 1951 in the Senate by senator McCarthy, and later published in a somewhat different form. McCarthy pictured Marshall was the focal figure in a betrayal of American interests stretching in time from the strategic plans for World War II to the formulation of the Marshall Plan. Marshal was associated with practically every American failure or defeat, McCarthy insisted, and none of this was either accident or incompetence. There was a “baffling pattern” of Marshall’s interventions in the war, which always conduced to the well-being of the Kremlin. The sharp decline in America’s relative strength from 1945 to 1951 did not “just happen”; it was “brought about, step by step, by will and intention,” the consequence not of mistakes but of a treasonous conspiracy, “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

Today, the mantle of McCarthy has fallen on a retired candy manufacturer, Robert H. Welch, Jr., who is less strategically placed and has a much smaller but better organized following than the Senator. A few years ago Welch proclaimed that “Communist influences are now in almost complete control of our government”—note the care and scrupulousness of that “almost.” He has offered a full scale interpretation of our recent history n which Communists figure at every turn: They started a run on American banks in 1933 that forced their closure; they contrived the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in the same year, just in time to save the Soviets from economic collapse; they have stirred up the fuss over segregation in the South; they have taken over the Supreme Court and made it “one of the most important agencies of Communism.”

Close attention to history wins for Mr. Welch an insight into affairs that is given to few of us. “For many reasons and after a lot of study,” he wrote some years ago, “I personally believe [John Foster] Dulles to be a Communist agent.” The job of Professor Arthur F. Burns as head of Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors was “merely a cover-up for Burns’s liaison work between Eisenhower and some of his Communist bosses.” Eisenhower’s brother Milton was “actually [his] superior and boss within the Communist party.” As for Eisenhower himself, Welch characterized him, in words that have made the candy manufacturer famous, as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”—a conclusion, he added, “based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt.”
Emulating the Enemy

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy.* Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

On the other hand, the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns. Catholics and Mormons—later, Negroes and Jews—have lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.
Renegades and Pedants

A special significance attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. The anti-Masonic movement seemed at times to be the creation of ex-Masons; certainly the highest significance was attributed to their revelations, and every word they said was believed. Anti-Catholicism used the runaway nun and the apostate priest; the place of ex-Communists in the avant-garde anti-Communist movements of our time is well known. In some part, the special authority accorded the renegade derives from the obsession with secrecy so characteristics of such movements: the renegade is the man or woman who has been in the Arcanum, and brings forth with him or her the final verification of suspicions which might otherwise have been doubted by a skeptical world. But I think there is a deeper eschatological significance that attaches to the person of the renegade: in the spiritual wrestling match between good and evil which is the paranoid’s archetypal model of the world, the renegade is living proof that all the conversions are not made by the wrong side. He brings with him the promise of redemption and victory.

A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates :evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.

Paranoid writing begins with certain broad defensible judgments. There was something to be said for the anti-Masons. After all, a secret society composed of influential men bound by special obligations could conceivable pose some kind of threat to the civil order in which they were suspended. There was also something to be said for the Protestant principles of individuality and freedom, as well as for the nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization. Again, in our time an actual laxity in security allowed some Communists to find a place in governmental circles, and innumerable decisions of World War II and the Cold War could be faulted.

The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes the right-wing striving for scholarly depth and an inclusive world view has startling consequences: Mr. Welch, for example, has charged that the popularity of Arnold Toynbee’s historical work is the consequence of a plot on the part of Fabians, “Labour party bosses in England,” and various members of the Anglo-American “liberal establishment” to overshadow the much more truthful and illuminating work of Oswald Spengler.
The Double Sufferer

The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies…systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”

This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture—it is no more than that—that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties. In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

† Richard Hofstadter is DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. His latest book, “Anti-intellectualism in American Life,” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction earlier this year. This essay is adapted from the Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at Oxford University in November 1963.

* Many anti-Masons had been fascinated by the penalties involved if Masons failed to live up to their obligations. My own favorite is the oath attributed to a royal archmason who invited “having my skull smote off and my brains exposed to the scorching rays of the sun.”

* In his recent book, How to Win an Election, Stephen C. Shadegg cites a statement attributed to Mao Tse-tung: “Give me just two or three men in a village and I will take the village.” Shadegg comments: “ In the Goldwater campaigns of 1952 and 1958 and in all other campaigns where I have served as consultant I have followed the advice of Mao Tse-tung.” “I would suggest,” writes senator Goldwater in Why Not Victory? “that we analyze and copy the strategy of the enemy; theirs has worked and ours has not.

The Medium is the Message

2005-11-26T16:29:00.000-08:00

Marshall McLuhan:
"The Medium is the Message"

Todd Kappelman

The High Priest of Pop-Culture

In this article we will begin an examination of someone who most people do not know, but who is considered by many to be the first father and leading prophet of the electronic age, Marshall McLuhan. A Canadian born in 1911, McLuhan became a Christian through the influence of G.K. Chesterton in 1937. He wrote his monumental work, one of twelve books and hundreds of articles, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in 1964. The subject that would occupy most of McLuhan's career was the task of understanding the effects of technology as it related to popular culture, and how this in turn affected human beings and their relations with one another in communities. Because he was one of the first to sound the alarm, McLuhan has gained the status of a cult hero and "high priest of pop-culture".{1} This status is not undeserved, and McLuhan said many things that are still pertinent today.

His thought, though voluminous, is frequently reduced to one-liners, and small sound bites, which sum up the more complicated content of his probing and rigorous examination of the media, a word that he coined. Concerning the new status of man in technological, and media-dominated society, he said:

If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?{2}

In statements like this, McLuhan both announces the existence of a global village, another word he is credited for coining, and predicts the intensification of the world community to its present expression. All of this was done in the early 1960s at a time when television was still in its infancy, and the personal computer was almost twenty years into the future.

McLuhan is announcing what Lewis H. Lapham says is a world of people who worship the objects of their own invention in the form of fax machines and high speed computers, and accept the blessings of Coca-Cola and dresses by Donna Karan as the mark of divinity.{3} The fact that more people watch television than go to church is nothing new to us, but it was one of the tell-tale signs of a cultural shift in history for McLuhan; a shift which has been imperceptible to most, and devastating to all. If anyone doubts McLuhan's warning that "we become what we behold," he should reflect on the consuming desire of many average teenagers to be like Michael Jordan, Madonna, or Britney Spears: a desire that has resulted in a culture of plastic surgery and drive-by shootings to obtain tennis shoes.

Objects of Desire

In our continuing examination of Marshall McLuhan, the patriarch of media criticism, we will explore the totalitarian techniques of American advertising and market research on the unsuspecting consumer.{4} How this is accomplished, and the effects it has, were outlined in The Mechanical Bride, first published in 1951. The book dealt with the influence of print media on the male and female psyche. The objective of advertising men, said McLuhan, is the manipulation, exploitation, and control of the individual.{5} If this is true, then who, one might ask, was doing the controlling, and what was the desired effect?

The advertising companies were doing the controlling, and the desired effect was nothing loftier than selling products to unsuspecting customers. Making women into objects of desire by men, and then in turn selling the women the products to help them achieve the effect of desirability, accomplished the entire enterprise. The advertising men succeeded in creating a market where one did not previously exist. The purpose here, and earlier for McLuhan, is not to vilify the advertising industry, rather it is to provide insight into how media functions. One such insight is McLuhan's description of the contemporary mindset of a woman under the influence of advertising geniuses. He said:

To the mind of the modern girl, legs, like busts, are power points, which she has been taught to tailor, but as parts of the success kit rather than erotically or sensuously. She swings her legs from the hip . . . she knows that a "long-legged girl can go places." As such, her legs are not intimately associated with her taste or with her unique self but are merely display objects like the grille on a car. They are date-bated power levers for the management of the male audience.{6}

What McLuhan correctly ascertains is not the fact that women try to look attractive for men (presumably women have been doing this for a long time), but the idea of "polishing" each and every part for a kind of optimal performance. The modern woman has been taught through advertising bombardments that every feature of her physical makeup can be enhanced for the specific purposes of gaining a husband, a promotion, or just getting a door opened.

As one might suspect, there is a male counterpart to this advertising bombardment. The overwhelming superwoman, the possessor of beauty and grace in degrees hitherto unimaginable, demands an impossibly high standard of virility from her male counterpart. The result says McLuhan, are men who are readily captured by the gentleness and guile of women, but who are also surrounded by a barrage of body parts. The man is not won over, but slugged, and beaten down in defeat.{7}

Technology as Extensions of the Human Body

In our continuing look at Marshal McLuhan, the man who coined the term "global village" and the phrase "the medium is the message," we will reflect on what he had to say about the various ways human beings extend themselves, and how these extensions affect our relationships with one another. First, we must understand what McLuhan meant by the term "extension(s)."

An extension occurs when an individual or society makes or uses something in a way that extends the range of the human body and mind in a fashion that is new. The shovel we use for digging holes is a kind of extension of the hands and feet. The spade is similar to the cupped hand, only it is stronger, less likely to break, and capable of removing more dirt per scoop than the hand. A microscope, or telescope is a way of seeing that is an extension of the eye.

Considering more complicated extensions, one might think of the automobile as an extension of the feet. It allows man to travel places in the same manner as the feet, only faster and with less effort. In addition, this extension enables one to travel in relative comfort in extreme weather conditions. Most individuals already understand the concept of extension, but many are unreflective when it comes to what McLuhan calls "amputations;" the counterpart to extensions.

Every extension of mankind, especially technological extensions, have the effect of amputating or modifying some other extension. An example of an amputation would be the loss of archery skills with the development of gunpowder and firearms. The need to be accurate with the new technology of guns made the continued practice of archery obsolete. The extension of a technology like the automobile "amputates" the need for a highly developed walking culture, which in turn causes cities and countries to develop in different ways. The telephone extends the voice, but also amputates the art of penmanship gained through regular correspondence. These are a few examples, and almost everything we can think of is subject to similar observations.

McLuhan believed that mankind has always been fascinated and obsessed with these extensions, but too frequently we choose to ignore or minimize the amputations. For example, we praise the advantages of high speed personal travel made available by the automobile, but do not really want to be reminded of the pollution it causes. Additionally, we do not want to be made to think about the time we spend alone in our cars isolated from other humans, or the fact that the resulting amputations from automobiles have made us more obese and generally less healthy. We have become people who regularly praise all extensions, and minimize all amputations. McLuhan believed that we do so at our own peril.

The Dangers of Over-extended Technology

We have discussed the idea of extensions and amputations caused by new technology, which is introduced into society. The automobile was previously mentioned as an extension of the foot. The car allows one to travel, just as the foot does, only faster and with less effort. The amputations which result would include loss of muscle strength in the under-utilized legs, and the reduction in the quality of air we breathe.

Something occurs when a medium like the automobile, used for transportation, becomes over-extended. The resulting amputations such as muscle atrophy, smog, and high-speed fatalities increase at a rate that challenges the benefits initially gained. Automobile fatalities, lung disease, and obesity caused by modern transportation begin to outweigh the benefits of getting to our destinations quicker and with less effort. The final movement is the reversal of the benefits. McLuhan said:

Although it may be true to say that an American is a creature of four wheels, and to point out that American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's-license age than at voting age, it is also true that the car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.{8}

To this observation might be added the fact that we train children from a very young age to stand within a few feet of high-speed vehicles without being afraid. Less than two hundred years ago a screaming locomotive or a high speed automobile would have caused a person to flee in terror for their lives. We have slowly conditioned ourselves to not be afraid of something that is in fact extremely dangerous. Similarly, we know that speed limits of twenty miles an hour would almost certainly eliminate most car fatalities, but we also consider the advantages of getting to our destinations quicker to be worth the resulting death rate. Proof of this casual acceptance of the disadvantages of the car could be imagined if one were to consider the fate of a political candidate who ran on a platform of reducing the national speed limit to twenty miles per hour. We know the advantages, even before implementation, but we choose to accept the disadvantages because there is a privileging of all types of technological extension, even deadly and horrific forms.

We are now prepared to consider the specific types of extensions realized by the television, mobile phone, and computer. If we take McLuhan's lead then all of these must be simultaneously considered as extensions with both positive and negative amputations of previous technologies.

Four Questions Applied to Media

We are concluding our considerations of Marshall McLuhan's pertinence with an examination of ideas found in his last work, The Global Village, published in 1989, twenty-five years after his monumental Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In his early works McLuhan focused on the rapid change in the five centuries since the development of the printing press and movable type, and the especially rapid developments of the twentieth-century. McLuhan died in 1980 and was beginning to see the first fruits of the television generations as well as the fulfillment of some of his predictions. He was deeply concerned about man's willful blindness to the downside of technology, yet McLuhan was not an irrational alarmist.

In his later years, and partially as a response to his critics, McLuhan developed a scientific basis for his thought around what he termed the tetrad. The tetrad allowed McLuhan to apply four laws, framed as questions, to a wide spectrum of mankind's endeavors, and thereby give us a new tool for looking at our culture.

The first of these questions or laws is "What does it (the medium or technology) extend?" In the case of a car it would be the foot, in the case a phone it would be the voice. The second question is "What does it make obsolete?" Again, one might answer that the car makes walking obsolete, and the phone makes smoke signals and carrier pigeons unnecessary. The third question asks, "What is retrieved?" The sense of adventure or quest is retrieved with the car, and the sense of community returns with the spread of telephone service. One might consider the rise of the cross-country vacation that accompanied the spread of automobile ownership. The fourth question asks, "What does the technology reverse into if it is over-extended?" An over-extended automobile culture longs for the pedestrian lifestyle, and the over-extension of phone culture engenders a need for solitude.

With the radio and television we have simultaneous access to events on the entire planet. However, television culture diminishes, or amputates, many of the close ties of family life based on oral communication. The simple act of turning on a television can reduce a room of people to silence. What is retrieved is the tribal or interrelated view of man. What it becomes or returns to is the global theater, where people are actors on a stage. One need only witness the event status of an airplane crash or weather disaster.

On McLuhan's gravestone are the words "The Truth Shall Make You Free." We do not have to like or even agree with everything that McLuhan said, but we should nevertheless remember that his life was dedicated to showing men the truth about the world they live in, and the hidden consequences of the technologies he develops.

Notes

1969 interview in Playboy magazine originally titled "A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media," pp. 53-74, in The Essential McLuhan, Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (ed.), (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp.233-69.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), p.61

Lewis H. Lapham in the introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Understanding Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), pp.xx-xi.

See McLuhan's work The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951). This is an intensive examination of the effects of advertising and comics in producing new perceptions about what we should and do desire, as well as why we believe these things will bring us happiness.

"The Mechanical Bride," in The Essential McLuhan, Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (ed.), (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p.21.

"The Mechanical Bride," in The Essential McLuhan, p.24.

Ibid. p.25.

The Essential McLuhan, p.217.

Europe vs. US Labor Practices

2005-11-16T17:17:00.000-08:00

NO WORK AND NO PLAY
New Yorker
Issue of 2005-11-28

In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, it was a commonplace that Americans would soon devote their lives to leisure, not work. The number of hours the average American worked had fallen by almost twenty-five per cent between 1900 and 1950, and pundits saw no reason for the trend to stop. By the end of the twentieth century, the futurist Herman Kahn prophesied in 1967, Americans would enjoy thirteen weeks of vacation and a four-day work week. The challenge, it seemed, would be figuring out what to do with all our free time.

Kahn was wrong. Today, Americans work about as many hours each year as they did in 1970, and, instead of thirteen weeks of vacation, the average American now gets four (and that includes holidays). But there is a place that has got considerably closer to the leisure society of the futurists’ dreams—Western Europe. The French work twenty-eight per cent fewer hours per person than Americans, and the Germans put in twenty-five per cent fewer hours. Compared with Europeans, a higher percentage of American adults work, they work more hours per week, and they work more weeks per year.

One obvious result of this is that America is richer than Europe. In terms of productivity—that is, how much a worker produces in an hour—there’s little difference between the U.S., France, and Germany. But since more people work in America, and since they work so many more hours, Americans create more wealth. In effect, Americans trade their productivity for more money, while Europeans trade it for more leisure. Folk wisdom suggests that the reason for this difference is cultural, which, depending on your perspective, means either that Europeans are ambitionless café-dwellers or that Americans are Puritan grinds with no taste for the finer things in life. But, while culture undoubtedly matters, not that long ago it was the Europeans who worked harder; in 1970, for instance, the French worked ten per cent more hours than Americans.

So what changed? The Nobel Prize-winning economist Edward C. Prescott has pointed to sharp increases in Europe’s tax rates since 1970—higher taxes give workers less of an incentive to work extra hours. But taxes aren’t high enough to explain Europeans’ new taste for free time. A more plausible explanation was put forward recently by the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote: European labor unions are far more powerful and European labor markets are far more tightly regulated than their American counterparts. In the seventies, Europe, like the U.S., was hit by high oil prices, high inflation, and slowing productivity. In response, labor unions fought for a reduced work week with no reduction in wages, and greater job protection. When it was hard to get wage increases, the unions pushed for more vacation time instead. Governments responded to political pressure by plumping for leisure, too; in France in the eighties, for instance, a succession of laws increased mandatory vacation time and limited employers’ ability to use overtime.

The difference in work habits between Europeans and Americans, in other words, isn’t a matter of European workers’ individually deciding they’d rather spend a few extra hours every week at the movies; it’s a case of collectively determined contracts and regulations. There is a good deal to be said for this approach—most Americans, after all, are happy that the forty-hour week is written into law—but it has its costs. Even if you want to work more, it’s hard to do so: try getting anything done in Paris during August. And reducing the amount of work employees do makes it more expensive to employ people, which contributes to Europe’s high unemployment rate.

The embrace of leisure affects the job situation in Europe in other ways, too. Because Americans spend more hours at the office than Europeans, they spend fewer hours on tasks in the home: things like cooking, cleaning, and child care. This is especially true of American women, who, according to a study by the economists Richard Freeman and Ronald Schettkat, spend ten fewer hours a week on household jobs than European women do. Instead of doing these jobs themselves, Americans pay other people to do them. For instance, Americans spend about the same percentage of their income stocking up on food at home as the French and the Germans do, but they spend roughly twice as much in restaurants as the French, and almost three times as much as the Germans. Not surprisingly, many more Americans than Europeans work in the restaurant business. The same is true of child care.

In the American model, then, you work more hours and use the money you make to pay for the things you can’t do because you’re working, and this creates a demand for service jobs that wouldn’t otherwise exist. In Europe, those jobs don’t exist in anything like the same numbers; employment in services in Europe is fifteen per cent below what it is in the U.S. Service jobs are precisely the jobs that young people and women (two categories of Europeans who are severely underemployed) find it easiest to get, the jobs that immigrants here thrive on but that are often not available to immigrants in France. There are many explanations for the estimated forty-per-cent unemployment rate in the banlieues that have been the site of recent riots, but part of the problem is that voluntary leisure for some Europeans has helped lead to involuntary leisure for others. The less work that gets done, the less work there is to do. Helping some people get off the labor treadmill can keep many people from ever getting on the treadmill at all.

— James Surowiecki

The Devil Proposes a Toast

2005-11-15T18:40:00.000-08:00

November 15, 2005
Screwtape Proposes a Toast
C.S. Lewis

The scene is in Hell at the annual dinner of the Tempters' Training College for young devils. The principal, Dr. Slubgob, has just proposed the health of the guests. Screwtape, a very experienced devil, who is the guest of honour, rises to reply:

Mr. Principal, your Imminence, your Disgraces, my Thorns, Shadies, and Gentledevils:

It is customary on these occasions for the speaker to address himself chiefly to those among you who have just graduated and who will very soon be posted to official Tempterships on Earth. It is a custom I willingly obey. I well remember with what trepidation I awaited my own first appointment. I hope, and believe, that each one of you has the same uneasiness tonight. Your career is before you. Hell expects and demands that it should be -- as mine was -- one of unbroken success. If it is not, you know what awaits you.

I have no wish to reduce the wholesome and realistic element of terror, the unremitting anxiety, which must act as the lash and spur to your endeavours. How often you will envy the humans their faculty of sleep! Yet at the same time I would wish to put before you a moderately encouraging view of the strategical situation as a whole.

Your dreaded Principal has included in a speech full of points something like an apology for the banquet which he has set before us. Well, gentledevils, no one blames him. But it would be in vain to deny that the human souls on whose anguish we have been feasting tonight were of pretty poor quality. Not all the most skillful cookery of our tormentors could make them better than insipid.

Oh, to get one's teeth again into a Farinata, a Henry VIII, or even a Hitler! There was real crackling there; something to crunch; a rage, an egotism, a cruelty only just less robust than our own. It put up a delicious resistance to being devoured. It warmed your inwards when you'd got it down.

Instead of this, what have we had tonight? There was a municipal authority with Graft sauce. But personally I could not detect in him the flavour of a really passionate and brutal avarice such as delighted one in the great tycoons of the last century. Was he not unmistakably a Little Man -- a creature of the petty rake-off pocketed with a petty joke in private and denied with the stalest platitudes in his public utterances -- a grubby little nonentity who had drifted into corruption, only just realizing that he was corrupt, and chiefly because everyone else did it? Then there was the lukewarm Casserole of Adulterers. Could you find in it any trace of a fully inflamed, defiant, rebellious, insatiable lust? I couldn't. They all tasted to me like undersexed morons who had blundered or trickled into the wrong beds in automatic response to sexy advertisements, or to make themselves feel modern and emancipated, or to reassure themselves about their virility or their "normalcy," or even because they had nothing else to do. Frankly, to me who have tasted Messalina and Cassanova, they were nauseating. The Trade Unionist stuffed with sedition was perhaps a shade better. He had done some real harm. He had, not quite unknowingly, worked for bloodshed, famine, and the extinction of liberty. Yes, in a way. But what a way! He thought of those ultimate objectives so little. Toeing the party line, self-importance, and above all mere routine, were what really dominated his life.

But now comes the point. Gastronomically, all this is deplorable. But I hope none of us puts gastronomy first. Is it not, in another and far more serious way, full of hope and promise?

Consider, first, the mere quantity. The quality may be wretched; but we never had souls (of a sort) in more abundance.

And then the triumph. We are tempted to say that such souls -- or such residual puddles of what once was soul -- are hardly worth damning. Yes, but the Enemy (for whatever inscrutable and perverse reason) thought them worth trying to save. Believe me, He did. You youngsters who have not yet been on active duty have no idea with what labour, with what delicate skill, each of these miserable creatures was finally captured.

The difficulty lay in their very smallness and flabbiness. Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible. To raise them just enough; but not that fatal millimetre of "too much." For then, of course, all would possibly have been lost. They might have seen; they might have repented. On the other hand, if they had been raised too little, they would very possibly have qualified for Limbo, as creatures suitable neither for Heaven nor for Hell; things that, having failed to make the grade, are allowed to sink into a more or less contented subhumanity forever.

In each individual choice of what the Enemy would call the "wrong" turning, such creatures are at first hardly, if at all, in a state of full spiritual responsibility. They do not understand either the source or the real character of the prohibitions they are breaking. Their consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them. And of course we have contrived that their very language should be all smudge and blur; what would be a bribe in someone else's profession is a tip or a present in theirs. The job of their Tempters was first, or course, to harden these choices of the Hellward roads into a habit by steady repetition. But then (and this was all-important) to turn the habit into a principle -- a principle the creature is prepared to defend. After that, all will go well. Conformity to the social environment, at first merely instinctive or even mechanical -- how should a jelly not conform? -- now becomes an unacknowledged creed or ideal of Togetherness or Being Like Folks. Mere ignorance of the law they break now turns into a vague theory about it -- remember, they know no history -- a theory expressed by calling it conventional or Puritan or bourgeois "morality." Thus gradually there comes to exist at the center of the creature a hard, tight, settled core of resolution to go on being what it is, and even to resist moods that might tend to alter it. It is a very small core; not at all reflective (they are too ignorant) nor defiant (their emotional and imaginative poverty excludes that); almost, in its own way, prim and demure; like a pebble, or a very young cancer. But it will serve our turn. Here at last is a real and deliberate, though not fully articulate, rejection of what the Enemy calls Grace.

These, then, are two welcome phenomena. First, the abundance of our captures: however tasteless our fare, we are in no danger of famine. And secondly, the triumph: the skill of our Tempters has never stood higher. But the third moral, which I have not yet drawn, is the most important of all.

The sort of souls on whose despair and ruin we have -- well, I won't say feasted, but at any rate subsisted -- tonight are increasing in numbers and will continue to increase. Our advices from Lower Command assure us that this is so; our directives warn us to orient all our tactics in view of this situation. The "great" sinners, those in whom vivid and genial passions have been pushed beyond the bounds and in whom an immense concentration of will has been devoted to objects which the Enemy abhors, will not disappear. But they will grow rarer. Our catches will be ever more numerous; but they will consist increasingly of trash -- trash which we should once have thrown to Cerberus and the hellhounds as unfit for diabolical consumption. And there are two things I want you to understand about this: First, that however depressing it might seem, it is really a change for the better. And secondly, I would draw your attention to the means by which it has been brought about.

It is a change for the better. The great (and toothsome) sinners are made out of the very same material as those horrible phenomena the great Saints. The virtual disappearance of such material may mean insipid meals for us. But is it not utter frustration and famine for the Enemy? He did not create the humans -- He did not become one of them and die among them by torture -- in order to produce candidates for Limbo, "failed" humans. He wanted to make them Saints; gods; things like Himself. Is the dullness of your present fare not a very small price to pay for the delicious knowledge that His whole great experiment is petering out? But not only that. As the great sinners grow fewer, and the majority lose all individuality, the great sinners become far more effective agents for us. Every dictator or even demagogue -- almost every film star or [rock star] -- can now draw tens of thousands of the human sheep with him. They give themselves (what there is of them) to him; in him, to us. There may come a time when we shall have no need to bother about individual temptation at all, except for the few. Catch the bellwether, and his whole flock comes after him.

But do you realize how we have succeeded in reducing so many of the human race to the level of ciphers? This has not come about by accident. It has been our answer -- and a magnificent answer it is -- to one of the most serious challenges we ever had to face.

Let me recall to your minds what the human situation was in the latter half of the nineteenth century -- the period at which I ceased to be a practising Tempter and was rewarded with an administrative post. The great movement toward liberty and equality among men had by then borne solid fruits and grown mature. Slavery had been abolished. The American War of Independence had been won. The French Revolution had succeeded. In that movement there had originally been many elements which were in our favour. Much Atheism, much Anticlericalism, much envy and thirst for revenge, even some (rather absurd) attempts to revive Paganism, were mixed in it. It was not easy to determine what our own attitude should be. On the one hand it was a bitter blow to us -- it still is -- that any sort of men who had been hungry should be fed or any who had long worn chains should have them struck off. But on the other hand, there was in the movement so much rejection of faith, so much materialism, secularism, and hatred, that we felt we were bound to encourage it.

But by the latter part of the century the situation was much simpler, and also much more ominous. In the English sector (where I saw most of my front-line service) a horrible thing had happened. The Enemy, with His usual sleight of hand, had largely appropriated this progressive or liberalizing movement and perverted it to His own ends. Very little of its old anti-Christianity remained. The dangerous phenomenon called Christian Socialism was rampant. Factory owners of the good old type who grew rich on sweated labor, instead of being assassinated by their workpeople -- we could have used that -- were being frowned upon by their own class. The rich were increasingly giving up their powers, not in the face of revolution and compulsion, but in obedience to their own consciences. As for the poor who benefited by this, they were behaving in a most disappointing fashion. Instead of using their new liberties -- as we reasonably hoped and expected -- for massacre, rape, and looting, or even for perpetual intoxication, they were perversely engaged in becoming cleaner, more orderly, more thrifty, better educated, and even more virtuous. Believe me, gentledevils, the threat of something like a really healthy state of society seemed then perfectly serious.

Thanks to Our Father Below, the threat was averted. Our counterattack was on two levels. On the deepest level our leaders contrived to call into full life an element which had been implicit in the movement from its earliest days. Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn't know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side), we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state. Even in England we were pretty successful. I heard the other day that in that country a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a toolshed in his own garden.

Such was our counterattack on one level. You, who are mere beginners, will not be entrusted with work of that kind. You will be attached as Tempters to private persons. Against them, or through them, our counterattack takes a different form.

Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won't. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's question: whether "democratic behaviour" means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.

You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.

The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I'm as good as you.

The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid, resounding lie. I don't mean merely that his statement is false in fact, that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waist measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself. No man who says I'm as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.

And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food: "Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I -- it must be a vile, upstage, la-di-da affectation. Here's a fellow who says he doesn't like hot dogs -- thinks himself too good for them, no doubt. Here's a man who hasn't turned on the jukebox -- he's one of those goddamn highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were honest-to-God all-right Joes they'd be like me. They've no business to be different. It's undemocratic."

Now, this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to humans for thousands of years. But hitherto they always regarded it as the most odious, and also the most comical, of vices. Those who were aware of feeling it felt it with shame; those who were not gave it no quarter in others. The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it -- make it respectable and even laudable -- by the incantatory use of the word democratic.

Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labour more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from fear of being undemocratic. I am credibly informed that young humans now sometimes suppress an incipient taste for classical music or good literature because it might prevent their Being Like Folks; that people who would really wish to be -- and are offered the Grace which would enable them to be -- honest, chaste, or temperate refuse it. To accept might make them Different, might offend against the Way of Life, take them out of Togetherness, impair their Integration with the Group. They might (horror of horrors!) become individuals.

All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: “O God, make me a normal twentieth century girl!” Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly: “Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.”

Meanwhile, as a delightful by-product, the few (fewer every day) who will not be made Normal or Regular and Like Folks and Integrated increasingly become in reality the prigs and cranks which the rabble would in any case have believed them to be. For suspicion often creates what it expects. (“Since, whatever I do, the neighbors are going to think me a witch, or a Communist agent, I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and become one in reality.”) As a result we now have an intelligentsia which, though very small, is very useful to the cause of Hell.

But that is a mere by-product. What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.

I have said that to secure the damnation of these little souls, these creatures that have almost ceased to be individual, is a laborious and tricky work. But if proper pains and skill are expended, you can be fairly confident of the result. The great sinners seem easier to catch. But then they are incalculable. After you have played them for seventy years, the Enemy may snatch them from your claws in the seventy-first. They are capable, you see, of real repentance. They are conscious of real guilt. They are, if things take the wrong turn, as ready to defy the social pressures around them for the Enemy’s sake as they were to defy them for ours. It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss.

My own experience, as I have said, was mainly on the English sector, and I still get more news from it than from any other. It may be said that what I am now going to say will not apply so fully to the sectors in which some of you may be operating. But you can make the necessary adjustments when you get there. Some application it will almost certainly have. If it has too little, you must labor to make the country you are dealing with more like what England already is.

In that promising land the spirit of I’m as good as you has already begun something more than a generally social influence. It begins to work itself into their educational system. How far its operations there have gone at the present moment, I should not like to say with certainty. Nor does it matter. Once you have grasped the tendency, you can easily predict its future developments; especially as we ourselves will play our part in the developing. The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be “undemocratic.” These differences between pupils – for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences – must be disguised. This can be done at various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that children used to do in their spare time. Let, them, for example, make mud pies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have – I believe the English already use the phrase – “parity of esteem.” An even more drastic scheme is not possible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma -- Beelzebub, what a useful word! – by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT.

In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I’m as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers – or should I say, nurses? – will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for us.

Of course, this would not follow unless all education became state education. But it will. That is part of the same movement. Penal taxes, designed for that purpose, are liquidating the Middle Class, the class who were prepared to save and spend and make sacrifices in order to have their children privately educated. The removal of this class, besides linking up with the abolition of education, is, fortunately, an inevitable effect of the spirit that says I’m as good as you. This was, after all, the social group which gave to the humans the overwhelming majority of their scientists, physicians, philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, composers, architects, jurists, and administrators. If ever there were a bunch of stalks that needed their tops knocked off, it was surely they. As an English politician remarked not long ago, “A democracy does not want great men.”

It would be idle to ask of such a creature whether by want it meant “need” or “like.” But you had better be clear. For here Aristotle’s question comes up again.

We, in Hell, would welcome the disappearance of democracy in the strict sense of that word, the political arrangement so called. Like all forms of government, it often works to our advantage, but on the whole less often than other forms. And what we must realize is that “democracy” in the diabolical sense (I’m as good as you, Being Like Folks, Togetherness) is the fittest instrument we could possibly have for extirpating political democracies from the face of the earth.

For “democracy” or the “democratic spirit” (diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or whimper at the first sign of criticism. And that is what Hell wishes every democratic people to be. For when such a nation meets in conflict a nation where children have been made to work at school, where talent is placed in high posts, and where the ignorant mass are allowed no say at all in public affairs, only one result is possible.

One Democracy was surprised lately when it found that Russia had got ahead of them in science. What a delicious specimen of human blindness! If the whole tendency of their society is opposed to every sort of excellence, why did they expect their scientists to excel?

It is our function to encourage the behaviour, the manners, the whole attitude of mind, which democracies naturally like and enjoy, because these are the very things which, if unchecked, will destroy democracy. You would almost wonder that even humans don’t see it themselves. Even if they don’t read Aristotle (that would be undemocratic) you would have thought the French Revolution would have taught them that the behaviour aristocrats naturally like is not the behaviour that preserves aristocracy. They might then have applied the same principle to all forms of government.

But I would not end on that note. I would not – Hell forbid! Encourage in your own minds that delusion which you must carefully foster in the minds of your human victims. I mean the delusion that the fate of nations is in itself more important than that of individual souls. The overthrow of free peoples and the multiplication of slave states are for us a means (besides, of course, being fun); but the real end is the destruction of individuals. For only individuals can be saved or damned, can become sons of the Enemy or food for us. The ultimate value, for us, of any revolution, war, or famine lies in the individual anguish, treachery, hatred, rage, and despair which it may produce. I’m as good as you is a useful means for the destruction of democratic societies. But it has a far deeper value as an end in itself, as a state of mind which, necessarily excluding humility, charity, contentment, and all the pleasures of gratitude or admiration, turns a human being away from almost every road which might finally lead him to Heaven.

But now for the pleasantest part of my duty. It falls to my lot to propose on behalf of the guests the health of Principal Slubgob and the Tempters’ Training College. Fill your glasses. What is this I see? What is this delicious bouquet I inhale? Can it be? Mr. Principal, I unsay all my hard words about the dinner. I see, and smell, that even under wartime conditions the College cellar still has a few dozen of sound old vintage PHARISEE. Well, well, well. This is like old times. Hold it beneath your noses for a moment, gentledevils. Hold it up to the light. Look at those fiery streaks that writhe and tangle in its dark heart, as if they were contending. And so they are. You know how this wine is blended? Different types of Pharisee have been harvested, trodden, and fermented together to produce its subtle flavour. Types that were most antagonistic to one another on Earth. Some were all rules and relics and rosaries; others were all drab clothes, long faces, and petty traditional abstinences from wine or cards or the theatre. Both had in common their self-righteousness and an almost infinite distance between their actual outlook and anything the Enemy really is or commands. The wickedness of other religions was the really live doctrine in the religion of each; slander was its gospel and denigration its litany. How they hated each other up where the sun shone! How much more they hate each other now that they are forever conjoined but not reconciled. Their astonishment, their resentment, at the combination, the festering of their eternally impenitent spite, passing into our spiritual digestion, will work like fire. Dark fire. All said and done, my friends, it will be an ill day for us if what most humans mean by “Religion” ever vanishes from the Earth. It can still send us the truly delicious sins. Nowhere do we tempt so successfully as on the very steps of the altar.

Your Imminence, your Disgraces, my Thorns, Shadies, and Gentledevils: I give you the toast of – Principal Slubgob and the College!

From The Screwtape Letters, New York: Touchstone, 1961. C.S. Lewis prefaces this work with two quotations:

--The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn. -- Luther
--The devil...the prowde spirit...cannot endure to be mocked. -- Thomas More

Four eyes aren't better than two

2005-11-09T18:29:00.000-08:00

Jeremy Clarkson

My eye was caught recently by a photograph in a magazine called The Spectator. It showed an old man in a 19th-century setting and underneath it read “Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homosexuality”.

This seemed odd, partly because the old man in the photograph, with his mutton chops and his frock coat, looked about as gay as Sean Connery, and partly because I thought homosexuality had been invented long before the 1800s.

I therefore plunged into the lengthy story that accompanied the photograph and pretty soon my curiosity turned to bewilderment. Because it just went on and on about alternative medicine.

Only when I reached the end and turned back for a better look at the old man did I realise my mistake. Samuel Hahnemann was not the founder of homosexuality. He was the founder of homeopathy.

For some time now I’ve suspected my eyes are beginning to fail and that some spectacles might be a good idea. But I’ve always been nervous about coming out because of a simple truism. Not all people who wear glasses need a poke in the eye. But all people who need a poke in the eye do wear glasses.

Sadly, contact lenses are not an option because if your eyesight is broken how are you supposed to find them when you drop them on a brightly coloured hotel carpet? Or at a football match? I’ve seen too many people on their hands and knees shouting “Nobody move”.

There’s something else, too. Regularly I appear on television with bloodshot eyes because I can’t use eye drops, and I feel physically sick at the thought of having a retinal scan. I can’t even watch a close-up of someone’s eyes on Casualty. So, given the choice of putting in a pair of contact lenses or having my scrotum eaten by a pack of wild dogs, I’d have my trousers off in a jiffy.

And therefore, with an hour to kill at London City airport last week, I sauntered into the shop and decided to buy some spectacles.

It wasn’t easy. A notice alongside the display asked me to stand 14 inches away and read various lines of print, each of which was in a different size. Right. So how do you know what 14 inches is in an airport shop? Eventually I figured a Berliner newspaper might be about right, so finally I had a very good reason for buying The Guardian.

Having used it to position my nose in the right place, I found I could read the entire eye chart, and who made it, and their address, with no difficulty at all. So on that basis my eyes are fine.

But they’re not. I cannot read The Spectator by the 40-watt glow of my bedside lamp. And nor can I read menus in candlelit restaurants. And so, because I didn’t want to go through the rest of my life eating the wrong food and muddling homeopaths up with homosexuals, I selected the weakest lenses and set about choosing some frames.

Now look. It’s a fair bet that most people who need spectacles are no longer in the first flush of youth, so could someone please explain why the choice was so universally cool and anti-fit hip. I wanted something from the Seventies, an Aviator perhaps, or maybe a Lennon, but all I was offered was the sort of stuff worn by fierce-looking television executives and Bonio.

None of them, I felt sure, would suit me at all, but for confirmation of this I put a pair on my face and stood in front of the mirror to see what they looked like.

It was hard to say for sure, because all the advertising paraphernalia and health and safety nonsense was hanging like bunting in front of the lenses, which to make things even worse were covered in stickers. How stupid is that? After I’d peeled and ripped it all off, I went back to the mirror to find that I was completely out of focus. For all I knew I wasn’t standing in front of a mirror at all. It could have been a huge poster of a space alien. Certainly the creature staring back at me had a face that was about three miles wide.

And it was covered in huge, pustulating spots. Jesus Christ. They hadn’t been there when I’d shaved that morning and yet now I looked like I’d been attacked with half a pint of VX nerve gas. And there was what looked like a whole tree growing out of my nose.

How come the girl at the check-in desk hadn’t thought to mention this? I always make a point of telling people when they have loo roll sticking out of their trousers, or their skirt tucked into their knickers, so why had no one taken me on one side and explained there was a giant redwood growing from a moon-sized puss-filled crater on my nose? Bastards.

Hurriedly I removed the spectacles and felt a wave of relief as everything returned to normal. The spots went away and the tree turned back into a small hair.

Small wonder people with glasses are so irritating. Like vampires they live in a permanent state of fear that they may accidentally catch sight of themselves in a mirror.

They also know that the disintegration has begun. Today it’s the eyes, but soon the ageing process will start to scythe its way through something more important.

Spectacles, then, make The Spectator and menus easier to read, but in the process they also bring into pin-sharp focus your own mortality.

Cracks in the Wall Between Advertising and News

2005-11-08T15:25:00.000-08:00

Cracks in the Wall Between Advertising and News

By BYRON CALAME

WEAK advertising demand and higher costs are squeezing most newspapers these days. The New York Times Company's sharp drop in third-quarter earnings and its plan to eliminate hundreds of jobs provide ample evidence of the revenue-cost pinch at this paper's corporate parent.

The search for revenue, not surprisingly, means the advertising staff of The Times is scrambling ever harder to come up with attractive new options for advertisers. Sometimes that can lead to pressures to let advertisers tie their pitches more closely to the credibility of the news columns. And that can blur the distinction between advertising and articles - risking erosion of the readers' right to assume that the news columns are pure journalism, both in print and online.

Why is the line between news and advertising so important? I hold to the traditional view, that readers trust a paper more when there's a clear separation. Advertisers are attracted to readers who trust what's in the news columns. And the resulting revenue enables the newspaper to keep providing high-quality journalism.

Advertising, of course, is the major source of revenue for newspapers. Although The Times doesn't break out the numbers, advertising appears to account for about twice as much revenue as circulation does.

The sky isn't falling at The Times. But I see a few worrisome indications that advertisers are being allowed to tap into the credibility of the news columns in ways that slip over the line.

It would be difficult to find a clearer example of the mingling of real news and advertising than the "watermark" ads The Times started offering in late September. Advertising images are printed faintly underneath a full page of stock-price quotations, with a conventional ad stripped across the bottom. There is little distinction left between news and advertising in the ads, which many editors refer to as "shadow" ads.

Prudential Financial's well-known rock logo showed up underneath a full page of stock and mutual fund quotations in one of the early watermark ads in The Times on Oct. 6. It was especially hard to miss for any reader seeking information on that page. And if you happened to be a Citigroup shareholder checking the price of your stock, you would have found it buried in the middle of a competitor's logo.

"Our new branded watermark unit reflects The Times's ongoing commitment to deliver high impact advertising opportunities and value to our customers," Jyll F. Holzman, the senior vice president of advertising, said in announcing the offering last month. Three of the ads - priced at $41,850 each on the paper's rate card - have appeared so far, and several are already scheduled to run each month through January. A comparable regular full-page ad in the Business Day section costs about $119,000.

The Times's limits on the use of the watermark ads ease my mind a bit. Among them: only one ad per day, and only on a page in the Business Day section devoted entirely to tabular information. But I worry about the proverbial camel's nose as I read in the American Society of Newspaper Editors magazine that The Philadelphia Inquirer has decided to accept shadow ads behind sports statistics and movie directories as well as financial tables. And The Times's move seems likely to embolden more newspapers to decide it must be O.K.

Before The Times takes watermark ad reservations beyond next year's first quarter, I hope senior editors and advertising executives review the effect on both readers and advertisers. If any signs emerge that reader perceptions of the independence of the news columns are being eroded, I hope alarms would go off in the newsroom at least. And I certainly intend to be watching.

In the online world, the relationship between journalism and advertising deserves special scrutiny because the foundation is being laid for the way news will be delivered far into the future. That's one reason I'm concerned by ads on nytimes.com that are built around or include "A Sponsored Archive" of articles from The Times. I fear readers accustomed to seeing lists of related articles on the news pages of nytimes.com will think these sponsored archives also reflect the newsroom's judgment.

One of the key features of nytimes.com is the editors' ability to offer readers easy links to earlier articles that can provide valuable perspective with just a couple of clicks. Typically, these have been carefully chosen to round out the current day's articles.

But the sponsored archives of Times articles in the online ads haven't been selected by anyone in the newsroom. Rather, the articles in sponsored archives are chosen by the advertiser or someone it hires to handle the task. And that is not always made clear enough.

One such ad for a pharmaceutical company earlier this year, for example, offered an archive of Times articles related to health and cholesterol. While I couldn't see that discontinued ad's archive, I think there's little chance that readers using it would have found any unfavorable articles about the advertiser or its products.

In at least one recent ad, I found the disclaimer about the selection of the sponsored archive so tiny as to be barely readable on the screen: "The editorial staff of The New York Times was not involved in the production of this feature." Responding to my query about the readability of the disclaimer, a spokeswoman for nytimes.com assured me in an e-mail message Wednesday that changes would be made. "We will highlight the disclosure further to avoid any confusion by users," she wrote.

Finally, there's the cat-and-mouse routine that has been going on between news and advertising staffs at newspapers as long as I can remember. There are almost always some advertisers interested in buying an ad designed to look like a news page, and their clout increases when demand is slow. The basic idea is to lure readers to an ad that seems at first glance to be just another news article.

The Times has detailed rules for such potentially confusing ads that are enforced by the two-person office of advertising acceptability, often in consultation with the paper's standards editor, Allan M. Siegal. To help alert readers to an ad that looks too much like a news presentation, for instance, the word "Advertisement" must run at the top.

But there was no such label on a full-page ad in a September issue of the Book Review section that was made to look like a review of a book of poetry. And when I looked back over 2005, I found other text-laden full-page ads from a different advertiser in the Book Review section that also lacked the label.

It turns out the poetry-book ad had slipped past the office of advertising acceptability. But Mr. Siegal had spotted the ad in the paper and reminded those involved of the rules by the time I queried him about it. The most recent text-laden Book Review ad I checked had the word "Advertisement" twice at the top.

That heartening development in the effort to maintain the bright line between news and ads is quickly overtaken, however, by a disheartening one: half of the advertising acceptability staff will likely disappear in the current round of job cuts.

The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section.

Too Close to the Source?

2005-11-07T06:30:00.000-08:00

washingtonpost.com
The Reporter's Last TakeIn an Era of Anonymous Sources, Judy Miller Is a Cautionary Tale of the Times
By Lynne DukeWashington Post Staff WriterThursday, November 10, 2005; C01
NEW YORK Judy Miller's fumbling with the tape recorder. It's not even her tape recorder.
"This is off the record," she's saying, her voice high and nasal. She's groping for a button to stop the tape, to take us behind that cozy curtain called "off the record" where you can dish, spin, vent, manipulate, and all in secret.
Miller's good at it. This is her world.
So here we are last week in a SoHo brasserie called Balthazar, where a parade of Judys appears. Outraged Judy. Saddened Judy. Charming Judy. Wise Judy. Conspiratorial Judy. Judy, the star New York Times reporter turned beleaguered victim of the gossipmongers and some journalists who have made her "sick to death of the regurgitation of lies and easily checkable falsehoods." That's why she's agreed to talk.
But her Treo's vibrating on her hip. It's a friend calling. "My fan club from Paris," she chirps into the phone, in English, before switching to a mix of French and Arabic.
It goes on like this for three hours. She answers questions -- or refuses. She turns the tables, asking about her interviewer's life. She takes calls. She grabs the tape recorder. She waxes eloquent, even in anger. At times, tears well up. There's something frantic about her -- not vulnerable, mind you, for that's the last thing she is.
"Oh. I've got to take this." She's reaching for the phone again. "It's my lawyer."
For weeks, she'd been in severance talks with the Times. And finally, yesterday, she and her employer of 28 years called it quits.
After all, how could she have remained at a newspaper where her boss, Executive Editor Bill Keller, seemed to have called her a liar and added the innuendo of the word "entanglement" to the lexicon of reporter-source relations? Where she's been vilified in print as a "Woman of Mass Destruction"? Where a lot of people think she used her journalism to help the Bush administration's case for war? Where colleagues were outraged to hear accusations that she abused her embedded status with an Army unit searching for those fabled weapons of mass destruction?
Well, Miller had -- before her resignation -- some pointed, mocking words for her many critics.
"I am so powerful and influential that I take over Army divisions? I run the New York Times newsroom single-handedly? And now I take the country to war? Wow! That must be one heck of a reporter. I've heard of pushy broads, but this brings the pushy broad to a new level."Looking for the Truth
She is celebrated and scorned, both famous and infamous. A dogged reporter, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author of four books, expert on terrorism, confidante of powerful government sources through several White House administrations -- and yet Miller's credibility came to rest on a single question: Does she tell the truth?
For a reporter, that question is devastating in the asking. But to her critics, it is a question long overdue.
Several of Miller's Times colleagues, interviewed before her resignation, expressed bitterness after years of watching her seem to slip-slide away from sanction for questionable behavior, like being too cozy with a particular point of view, being too close to her sources, all of which she denies.
And so Miller's emergence as a pivotal figure in a high government scandal seems, to her critics, a karmic comeuppance. As Miller's role in the CIA leak probe was revealed, a certain schadenfreude took hold in Times newsrooms both in New York and in Washington, which have been seething over the Miller saga.
In a special prosecutor's quest to find the culprit who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, Miller, 57, wound up spending 85 days in jail earlier this year rather than name the source who mentioned Plame's identity to her. She served time, she said, because she did not believe her source had sufficiently waived the confidentiality agreement between them.
It was all for the sake of the First Amendment rights of journalists, she says -- which prompted eyes to roll among some of her colleagues at the Times, who believe she really went to jail because she needed to resuscitate her professional image. Miller had been battered by earlier allegations of bias in support of the Bush administration's contention, since discredited, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. (She became so controversial, in fact, that in late 2003 the Times prohibited her from writing about WMD.)
"Anybody who thinks that I would have gone to jail as a career move doesn't know jail, doesn't know me." (But yes, she says, she did keep a jailhouse journal, just in case she decides to do a book.)
After her release from jail, she revealed to a federal grand jury what I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then the vice president's chief of staff, had said to her about Plame in three conversations.
Shortly thereafter, on Oct. 28, Libby resigned after the grand jury indicted him for allegedly lying about several Plame-related conversations he'd had with reporters, including Miller.
Miller says she was hurt by Keller's suggestion that there was an "entanglement" between her and Libby.
"I had no personal, social or other relationship with him except as a source," she told the Times.
Now, Miller could become a witness for the prosecution at Libby's trial, which in a way could put her in the dock, too: as the journalist who became a lightning rod for all manner of criticism of the Bush administration, the war, the conduct of journalism.Building a Reputation
"It's quite conceivable that some people really don't like me," Miller is saying. "That's okay. I don't like everybody. As Bill Safire said, I'm not Miss Congeniality. . . . I suppose people often feel slighted that I don't spend a lot of time schmoozing around the coffee cart, because if I'm talking to my colleagues, I'm not getting the story."
That had been Miller's main mission throughout her journalism career.
Her style is indeed "pushy," as she herself suggested. But would an aggressive, high-decibel male reporter be embroiled in all the controversy in which Miller finds herself? It is a question that some of her friends raise, for they believe that part of the invective swirling around Miller has to do with gender bias.
"A man is tough and hard-driving and a woman is a bitch," says Patricia Cohen, the Times theater editor (and former Washington Post staffer), who is a friend of Miller's.
Others say that Miller's troubles at the Times stemmed in part from poor management decisions about assignments.
For instance, Miller was promoted in the late 1980s to an editing job as deputy Washington bureau chief. And it was a disaster. She ran roughshod over staff so harshly that Max Frankel, then the paper's executive editor, said he "relieved her of that job."
"She was very anxiety-ridden and tough on a lot of people," he says.
(Miller concurs that the promotion was a mistake. "I was ill-suited for it. It's not me. I'm not good at managing other people.")
Frankel said Miller flourished, however, as the Times Cairo bureau chief and then a Paris correspondent.
"Judy made her early reputation as a reporter in the Middle East, where you don't work with many people," Frankel says. "You're out alone. You're running a bureau and you're traveling around and you're getting good interviews and lobbing good stories. And she was appreciated for those things."
Indeed, Miller had a large footprint throughout the Middle East in those years. She was on a first-name basis, for instance, with the late King Hussein of Jordan and once ended up in a tractor alone with Moammar Gaddafi of Libya at the wheel as she attempted to interview him.
Colleagues in the region recall her as hypercompetitive, sometimes disturbingly so.
Youssef M. Ibrahim, who was Middle East regional correspondent for the Times for 10 years beginning in 1986, says Miller tried to steal an interview he'd scheduled in the mid-1980s with Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Egyptian foreign ministry official who would later become United Nations secretary general.
As Ibrahim recalls it, Miller told him she was "intercepting" the Boutros-Ghali interview, that she had seniority, says Ibrahim, who left the Times in 1999.
They shouted at each other, he says. He is not even sure who hung up on whom. In the end, Ibrahim got his interview -- without Miller present.
"I'm glad he has such an exquisite memory," says Miller. "I don't even remember it. But reporters fight over stories. It is not shocking, at the New York Times or any other newspaper."
Adam Clymer, retired political correspondent for the Times, recalls an episode during the 1988 presidential campaign, when Miller was deputy Washington bureau chief.
Then the political editor based in New York, Clymer was awakened just after midnight one morning by a call from Miller, he says. She was demanding that a story about Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis be pulled from the paper.
The story was too soft, she complained -- and said Lee Atwater, the political strategist for Vice President George H.W. Bush, believed it was soft as well. Clymer said he was stunned to realize that Atwater apparently had either seen the story or been told about it before publication. He and Miller argued, he recalls, and he ultimately hung up on her, twice.
To Clymer, it was an indication of what he and others believe is Miller's main problem.
"She had gotten too close to her sources," he says.
But Miller denies the episode happened.
"I doubt I would have said that," she says sardonically, "because it wouldn't have been a winning argument."
Her former colleagues use all manner of adjectives to describe Miller, but there is consensus among some two dozen people interviewed that she is, indeed, a volatile person.
Volcanic might be the better word. She erupts. She is known to holler at newsroom clerks, to berate hotel staff while on the road, several colleagues said.
Even in her social life, she is known as a charming hostess at dinner parties with her husband, publishing icon Jason Epstein, a founder of the New York Review of Books -- except when there's an eruption and they start sniping at each other. The explosions pass quickly, and they return to their charming selves, says Leslie Gelb, an old friend of Miller's and a former Timesman who has dined at the Miller-Epstein home.
Miller attributes her explosiveness to her heritage -- a brew of Russian Jewish (her father's side) and Irish Catholic (her mother's).
"The thing they had in common was they were volatile," she says of Bill Miller and Mary Theresa Connolly.
And both were entertainers who wanted something different for their children.Getting Personal
Bill Miller, who died in 2002, once owned and operated a swank nightclub in the 1940s, called Bill Miller's Riviera, high on a cliff in Fort Lee, N.J., where Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and a young Sammy Davis Jr. played. Later, he was credited with invigorating the lounge acts at several Las Vegas hotels, bringing in Mae West, Louis Prima, Sonny and Cher and -- yes, even Elvis for a long run of sold-out shows.
Connolly had been a dancer in a club owned by Lou Walters (the father of Barbara Walters of ABC News), who introduced her to Bill Miller. The two married, and Judy Miller's childhood took her from Englewood, N.J., to Miami Beach to Vegas to Hollywood, where she studied drama at Hollywood High.
Judy Miller arrived in the nation's capital in 1972, at the age of 24, fresh from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, where she received a master's in economics, after her bachelor's degree from Barnard College. She had no prospects, just a hunger to be a journalist, she says, and quickly began reporting for National Public Radio and the Progressive.
That magazine hired her in 1973 as its Washington correspondent. Miller threw herself fully into the Washington milieu. She was ambitious. She was drawn to powerful people and powerful stories.
She developed a reputation as a strong reporter, and the Times, in the throes of a class action gender discrimination suit, hired Miller in 1977.
Gelb, then a national security writer at the Times, remembers Miller for her "frantic pursuit of stories," he says. "It was kind of endearingly frantic. She was just so driven to go get good stories, and she was working all the time."
She also was fully in the mix of the Washington social scene. Her relationships took on the aspect of legend, stirring controversy and gossip because of her romantic affairs with public officials.
Miller is outraged when asked about it.
"What male reporter would be asked about whom he went out with 25 years ago?" (Well, actually, lots, if the dates were public officials.)
First, she lived with Wisconsin Democrat Rep. Les Aspin. Their relationship was well known. They entertained friends together. (Aspin died of a stroke in 1995.)
Then, her relationship with Richard Burt, a Times colleague, turned controversial when he left the paper and joined the State Department. Burt declined to speak on the record for this article. News articles of that period say Burt's relationship with Miller was questioned during his Senate confirmation hearings as an assistant secretary of state in 1982 and, in 1989, as a chief U.S. arms control negotiator. Some senators wanted to know whether Burt had passed classified information to Miller during their relationship. Burt denied it.
Miller says neither Congress nor the State Department were her beats during those relationships. But they raised red flags nonetheless for Bill Kovach, who became the Times Washington bureau chief in 1979.
"There were regular stories about Judy Miller's tendency to get too close to sources and develop personal relationships," says Kovach, founding chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, a media ethics group. Any public official, to his thinking, is a potential source, which is why close relations with them should be shunned.
Kovach talked to Miller about respecting ethical boundaries, he says. He'd asked editors to watch her articles, to check for bias, and found them to be clear. Miller says she does not recall the conversation with Kovach.
In those days, as part of his training in a business he would one day run, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. also worked in the Times Washington bureau. In fact, he was part of the social set of young reporters that included Miller. Sulzberger and his wife shared a summer house on the Eastern Shore with Miller and a beau from the bureau, according to "The Trust," the 1999 book about the Sulzberger family.
Those days were long ago. But there is an abiding perception among some at the Times that Sulzberger, now the Times publisher, has been Miller's behind-the-scenes protector all these years.
Miller herself would not comment on that idea; Sulzberger's office did not respond to a reporter's inquiry.
"I never saw any evidence that he did protect her, but I am very much aware of editors believing they couldn't do much about her because they thought he was protecting her," Clymer says.'Do You Know Judy Miller?'
As a Times reporter, Miller's reputation both preceded and lingered after her -- as a colleague discovered one day in 2001 when he was reporting at the Afghan foreign ministry in Kabul.
Officials there didn't speak great English, and there was much back and forth, until the reporter uttered the words "New York Times," which the officials understood. They started shouting at the reporter, "Do you know Judy Miller? Do you know Judy Miller?"
Turns out, these officials had been on the receiving end of Miller's aggressive reporting when she traveled in Afghanistan in search of al Qaeda training camps.
"This Judy Miller! She was so pushy and she was demanding and pressing us to take her to those al Qaeda camps but we couldn't go and she told us we were covering up" and on and on, the Afghanis yelled at Miller's amused colleague that day. And he was duly impressed. (He requested anonymity to avoid being drawn into the controversy.)
Even before the 9/11 terror attacks, Miller had been searching for terrorist training camps, for the three-part January 2001 series on al Qaeda, reported with Craig Pyes and written with Stephen Engelberg, that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. And she has written books on the Holocaust, on Saddam Hussein, on the rise of radical Islam and on bioterror in her best-selling 2001 book "Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War," written with Engelberg and William Broad, another Times colleague.
People who have worked with her hold her work style in high regard, though they also are aware of her shortcomings in basic human relations.
Miller is a "24/7 operation," the kind of reporter who "would call at 10 in the evening wanting to tell you about an exciting interview she just had," says Engelberg, now managing editor at the Oregonian in Portland.
"She cultivates sources really assiduously," says Claudia Payne, a close Miller friend and also an editor on the al Qaeda series. "She has an incredible sense of decorum. Sources get greeting cards. They get little trinkets" like Times keychains and the like.
Miller says that after winning the Pulitzer, an editor (she won't say who) told her to "run amok," to bring in more great stories, more prize-winning stories.
That's what gave her the idea to call herself "Miss Run Amok." She says she meant it facetiously. She was quoted in the Times as telling a colleague the title meant "I can do whatever I want." She disputes that statement.
And she did it, this running amok, at the center of a major story of our time.
She was among the key journalists writing of the danger of Iraq's WMD in several articles that quoted Bush administration officials and made the case, now discredited, for the United States' war in Iraq. To be fair, Iraq's possession of WMD was the conventional wisdom of the pre-war period. The Washington Post was among the newspapers reporting that story.
But Miller's work stood out. She relied on a collection of Iraqi defectors whose information proved faulty and whose credibility in many cases was suspect. And during the war, when other newspeople and experts began realizing that the lack of evidence of Iraq's WMD was likely an indicator that there was no WMD, Miller held out longer and continued to write from the field as if they would be found any day.
In early 2003, as the war began, Miller was embedded with one of the U.S. Army teams whose sole task was to find a WMD. The unit was called Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, and Miller played a strangely involved role in it, according to Washington Post reports of that time.
She appeared to act as a liaison of sorts between the Army and Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, one of the exiles she had known for several years, and whose veracity on Iraq's weapons turned out to be suspect.
Several military personnel involved with the weapons hunt told The Washington Post two years ago that they felt Miller had virtually hijacked the team.
She was so invested in Alpha's progress that she wrote a threatening note to military public affairs officials to protest the team's redeployment orders.
"I intend to write about this decision in the NY Times to send a successful team back home just as progress on WMD is being made," she wrote. The team was not redeployed.A Sense of Mission
There is something about Miller -- something that seems like a crusade, a personal mission, against terror.
To her critics, she's an ideologue. She's often criticized as a neoconservative, because she seems to have bought a policy line from particular sources because of an ideological kinship.
Some point to Miller's relationship just after Sept. 11, 2001, with Benador Associates, a conservative speaker's bureau whose roster at that time included neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, a Reagan-era defense official. Miller says she was connected to Benador only briefly, and her one potential speaking engagement ultimately fell through.
As further evidence that Miller toes a particular line, some point to Laurie Mylroie, Miller's co-author in the 1990 book "Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf." Mylroie, a policy pundit, has argued that Iraq was connected to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and to the attacks of 2001.
Miller, when asked about this, says she does not agree with those theories.
"I am not a neoconservative," Miller says adamantly. She calls herself a centrist.
If she relied on any sources too strongly while covering WMD and the war, she says, it was because she had no reason to distrust them, because they had never lied to her or been wrong. She is talking, she says, about people in the Clinton administration as well as the current Bush administration.
But in her reporting, there was something else on which Miller relied as much, if not more: her personal belief in the danger that Saddam Hussein posed to the world.
It was personal, for she had been detained for a day by Hussein's security forces back in the 1980s, she says. And it was personal because, as she writes in her 1996 book on Islam, "God Has Ninety-Nine Names," an Iraqi source once told her "that I was on a very short list of writers who are considered the regime's 'eternal enemies.' "
No, she says, she wasn't just being fed information by sources.
"I had my own independent knowledge of Saddam Hussein. I was on record in 'Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf,' talking about this horrible regime and its use of chemical weapons against its own people. . . . I feared there was nothing he wouldn't do if he had access to such weapons. I was genuinely fearful of what he might do to American forces, to American installations in the Middle East and, if there was an al Qaeda link -- and I didn't know that and I never wrote that -- what he might do in the United States. My own reporting on Iraq made me fearful of Saddam Hussein."
And so fighting him, fighting his terror, became a passion. Fighting chemical and biological threats became a passion. Fighting al Qaeda became a passion.
As she speaks of 9/11's galvanizing impact, her voice rises.
"I hope to God that I'm wrong. I hope to God that not another American ever dies in a terrorist attack. But I would take no comfort. I would be heartsick to have to say I told you so.
"But I will make no apologies for my continuous commitment, my desire to pursue stories about threats to our country," she says emphatically, almost frantically, her crusading eyes brimming with tears.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Woman of Mass Destruction

2005-11-06T14:26:00.000-08:00

Woman of Mass Destruction
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
Saturday 22 October 2005

I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp.

The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy - her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur - never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types.

Once when I was covering the first Bush White House, I was in The Times' seat in the crowded White House press room, listening to an administration official's background briefing. Judy had moved on from her tempestuous tenure as a Washington editor to be a reporter based in New York, but she showed up at this national security affairs briefing.

At first she leaned against the wall near where I was sitting, but I noticed that she seemed agitated about something. Midway through the briefing, she came over and whispered to me, "I think I should be sitting in the Times seat."

It was such an outrageous move, I could only laugh. I got up and stood in the back of the room, while Judy claimed what she felt was her rightful power perch.

She never knew when to quit. That was her talent and her flaw. Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, she was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers. She more than earned her sobriquet "Miss Run Amok."

Judy's stories about WMD fit too perfectly with the White House's case for war. She was close to Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who was conning the neocons to knock out Saddam so he could get his hands on Iraq, and I worried that she was playing a leading role in the dangerous echo chamber that former Senator Bob Graham dubbed "incestuous amplification." Using Iraqi defectors and exiles, Mr. Chalabi planted bogus stories with Judy and other credulous journalists.

Even last April, when I wrote a column critical of Mr. Chalabi, she fired off e-mail to me defending him.

When Bill Keller became executive editor in the summer of 2003, he barred Judy from covering Iraq and W.M.D issues. But he admitted in The Times' Sunday story about Judy's role in the Plame leak case that she had kept "drifting" back. Why did nobody stop this drift?

Judy admitted in the story that she "got it totally wrong" about WMD "If your sources are wrong," she said, "you are wrong." But investigative reporting is not stenography.

The Times' story and Judy's own first-person account had the unfortunate effect of raising more questions. As Bill said in an e-mail note to the staff on Friday, Judy seemed to have "misled" the Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, about the extent of her involvement in the Valerie Plame leak case.

She casually revealed that she had agreed to identify her source, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, as a "former Hill staffer" because he had once worked on Capitol Hill. The implication was that this bit of deception was a common practice for reporters. It isn't.

She said that she had wanted to write about the Wilson-Plame matter, but that her editor would not allow it. But Managing Editor Jill Abramson, then the Washington bureau chief, denied this, saying that Judy had never broached the subject with her.

It also doesn't seem credible that Judy wouldn't remember a Marvel comics name like "Valerie Flame." Nor does it seem credible that she doesn't know how the name got into her notebook and that, as she wrote, she "did not believe the name came from Mr. Libby."

An Associated Press story yesterday reported that Judy had coughed up the details of an earlier meeting with Mr. Libby only after prosecutors confronted her with a visitor log showing that she had met with him on June 23, 2003. This cagey confusion is what makes people wonder whether her stint in the Alexandria jail was in part a career rehabilitation project.

Judy is refusing to answer a lot of questions put to her by Times reporters, or show the notes that she shared with the grand jury. I admire Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Keller for aggressively backing reporters in the cross hairs of a prosecutor. But before turning Judy's case into a First Amendment battle, they should have nailed her to a chair and extracted the entire story of her escapade.

Judy told The Times that she plans to write a book and intends to return to the newsroom, hoping to cover "the same thing I've always covered - threats to our country." If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.

1943 Supreme Court Opinion on Jehovah's Witness Free Speech Case

2005-11-05T21:15:00.000-08:00

WEST VIRGINIA STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION ET AL. v. BARNETTE ET AL.

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
319 U.S. 624
June 14, 1943, Decided

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON delivered the opinion of the Court.

Following the decision by this Court on June 3, 1940, in Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586, the West Virginia legislature amended its statutes to require all schools therein to conduct courses of instruction in history, civics, and in the Constitutions of the United States and of the State "for the purpose of teaching, fostering and perpetuating the ideals, principles and spirit of Americanism, and increasing the knowledge of the organization and machinery of the government." Appellant Board of Education was directed, with advice of the State Superintendent of Schools, to "prescribe the courses of study covering these subjects" for public schools. The Act made it the duty of private, parochial and denominational schools to prescribe courses of study "similar to those required for the public schools."

The Board of Education on January 9, 1942, adopted a resolution containing recitals taken largely from the Court's Gobitis opinion and ordering that the salute to the flag become "a regular part of the program of activities in the public schools," that all teachers and pupils "shall be required to participate in the salute honoring the Nation represented by the Flag; provided, however, that refusal to salute the Flag be regarded as an act of insubordination, and shall be dealt with accordingly."

The resolution originally required the "commonly accepted salute to the Flag" which it defined. Objections to the salute as "being too much like Hitler's" were raised by the Parent and Teachers Association, the Boy and Girl Scouts, the Red Cross, and the Federation of Women's Clubs. [The National Headquarters of the United States Flag Association takes the position that the extension of the right arm in this salute to the flag is not the Nazi-Fascist salute, "although quite similar to it. In the Pledge to the Flag the right arm is extended and raised, palm UPWARD, whereas the Nazis extend the arm practically straight to the front (the finger tips being about even with the eyes), palm DOWNWARD, and the Fascists do the same except they raise the arm slightly higher."] Some modification appears to have been made in deference to these objections, but no concession was made to Jehovah's Witnesses. [They have offered in lieu of participating in the flag salute ceremony "periodically and publicly" to give the following pledge: "I have pledged my unqualified allegiance and devotion to Jehovah, the Almighty God, and to His Kingdom, for which Jesus commands all Christians to pray. I respect the flag of the United States and acknowledge it as a symbol of freedom and justice to all. I pledge allegiance and obedience to all the laws of the United States that are consistent with God's law, as set forth in the Bible.] What is now required is the "stiff-arm" salute, the saluter to keep the right hand raised with palm turned up while the following is repeated: "I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands; one Nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Failure to conform is "insubordination" dealt with by expulsion. Readmission is denied by statute until compliance. Meanwhile the expelled child is "unlawfully absent" and may be proceeded against as a delinquent. His parents or guardians are liable to prosecution, and if convicted are subject to fine not exceeding $ 50 and jail term not exceeding thirty days.

Appellees, citizens of the United States and of West Virginia, brought suit in the United States District Court for themselves and others similarly situated asking its injunction to restrain enforcement of these laws and regulations against Jehovah's Witnesses. The Witnesses are an unincorporated body teaching that the obligation imposed by law of God is superior to that of laws enacted by temporal government. Their religious beliefs include a literal version of Exodus, Chapter 20, verses 4 and 5, which says: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them." They consider that the flag is an "image" within this command. For this reason they refuse to salute it.

Children of this faith have been expelled from school and are threatened with exclusion for no other cause. Officials threaten to send them to reformatories maintained for criminally inclined juveniles. Parents of such children have been prosecuted and are threatened with prosecutions for causing delinquency.

The Board of Education moved to dismiss the complaint setting forth these facts and alleging that the law and regulations are an unconstitutional denial of religious freedom, and of freedom of speech, and are invalid under the "due process" and "equal protection" clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution. The cause was submitted on the pleadings to a District Court of three judges. It restrained enforcement as to the plaintiffs and those of that class. The Board of Education brought the case here by direct appeal.

This case calls upon us to reconsider a precedent decision, as the Court throughout its history often has been required to do. Before turning to the Gobitis case, however, it is desirable to notice certain characteristics by which this controversy is distinguished.

The freedom asserted by these appellees does not bring them into collision with rights asserted by any other individual. It is such conflicts which most frequently require intervention of the State to determine where the rights of one end and those of another begin. But the refusal of these persons to participate in the ceremony does not interfere with or deny rights of others to do so. Nor is there any question in this case that their behavior is peaceable and orderly. The sole conflict is between authority and rights of the individual. The State asserts power to condition access to public education on making a prescribed sign and profession and at the same time to coerce attendance by punishing both parent and child. The latter stand on a right of self-determination in matters that touch individual opinion and personal attitude.

As the present CHIEF JUSTICE said in dissent in the Gobitis case, the State may "require teaching by instruction and study of all in our history and in the structure and organization of our government, including the guaranties of civil liberty, which tend to inspire patriotism and love of country." Here, however, we are dealing with a compulsion of students to declare a belief. They are not merely made acquainted with the flag salute so that they may be informed as to what it is or even what it means. The issue here is whether this slow and easily neglected route to aroused loyalties constitutionally may be short-cut by substituting a compulsory salute and slogan.

There is no doubt that, in connection with the pledges, the flag salute is a form of utterance. Symbolism is a primitive but effective way of communicating ideas. The use of an emblem or flag to symbolize some system, idea, institution, or personality, is a short cut from mind to mind. Causes and nations, political parties, lodges and ecclesiastical groups seek to knit the loyalty of their followings to a flag or banner, a color or design. The State announces rank, function, and authority through crowns and maces, uniforms and black robes; the church speaks through the Cross, the Crucifix, the altar and shrine, and clerical raiment. Symbols of State often convey political ideas just as religious symbols come to convey theological ones. Associated with many of these symbols are appropriate gestures of acceptance or respect: a salute, a bowed or bared head, a bended knee. A person gets from a symbol the meaning he puts into it, and what is one man's comfort and inspiration is another's jest and scorn.

Over a decade ago Chief Justice Hughes led this Court in holding that the display of a red flag as a symbol of opposition by peaceful and legal means to organized government was protected by the free speech guaranties of the Constitution. Stromberg v. California, 283 U.S. 359. Here it is the State that employs a flag as a symbol of adherence to government as presently organized. It requires the individual to communicate by word and sign his acceptance of the political ideas it thus bespeaks. Objection to this form of communication when coerced is an old one, well known to the framers of the Bill of Rights.

It is also to be noted that the compulsory flag salute and pledge requires affirmation of a belief and an attitude of mind. It is not clear whether the regulation contemplates that pupils forego any contrary convictions of their own and become unwilling converts to the prescribed ceremony or whether it will be acceptable if they simulate assent by words without belief and by a gesture barren of meaning. It is now a commonplace that censorship or suppression of expression of opinion is tolerated by our Constitution only when the expression presents a clear and present danger of action of a kind the State is empowered to prevent and punish. It would seem that involuntary affirmation could be commanded only on even more immediate and urgent grounds than silence. But here the power of compulsion is invoked without any allegation that remaining passive during a flag salute ritual creates a clear and present danger that would justify an effort even to muffle expression. To sustain the compulsory flag salute we are required to say that a Bill of Rights which guards the individual's right to speak his own mind, left it open to public authorities to compel him to utter what is not in his mind.

Whether the First Amendment to the Constitution will permit officials to order observance of ritual of this nature does not depend upon whether as a voluntary exercise we would think it to be good, bad or merely innocuous. Any credo of nationalism is likely to include what some disapprove or to omit what others think essential, and to give off different overtones as it takes on different accents or interpretations. If official power exists to coerce acceptance of any patriotic creed, what it shall contain cannot be decided by courts, but must be largely discretionary with the ordaining authority, whose power to prescribe would no doubt include power to amend. Hence validity of the asserted power to force an American citizen publicly to profess any statement of belief or to engage in any ceremony of assent to one, presents questions of power that must be considered independently of any idea we may have as to the utility of the ceremony in question.

Nor does the issue as we see it turn on one's possession of particular religious views or the sincerity with which they are held. While religion supplies appellees' motive for enduring the discomforts of making the issue in this case, many citizens who do not share these religious views hold such a compulsory rite to infringe constitutional liberty of the individual. It is not necessary to inquire whether non-conformist beliefs will exempt from the duty to salute unless we first find power to make the salute a legal duty.

The Gobitis decision, however, assumed, as did the argument in that case and in this, that power exists in the State to impose the flag salute discipline upon school children in general. The Court only examined and rejected a claim based on religious beliefs of immunity from an unquestioned general rule. The question which underlies the flag salute controversy is whether such a ceremony so touching matters of opinion and political attitude may be imposed upon the individual by official authority under powers committed to any political organization under our Constitution. We examine rather than assume existence of this power and, against this broader definition of issues in this case, reexamine specific grounds assigned for the Gobitis decision.

1. It was said that the flag-salute controversy confronted the Court with "the problem which Lincoln cast in memorable dilemma: 'Must a government of necessity be too strong for the liberties of its people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?'" and that the answer must be in favor of strength. It may be doubted whether Mr. Lincoln would have thought that the strength of government to maintain itself would be impressively vindicated by our confirming power of the State to expel a handful of children from school.

Government of limited power need not be anemic government. Assurance that rights are secure tends to diminish fear and jealousy of strong government, and by making us feel safe to live under it makes for its better support. Without promise of a limiting Bill of Rights it is doubtful if our Constitution could have mustered enough strength to enable its ratification. To enforce those rights today is not to choose weak government over strong government. It is only to adhere as a means of strength to individual freedom of mind in preference to officially disciplined uniformity for which history indicates a disappointing and disastrous end.

The subject now before us exemplifies this principle. Free public education, if faithful to the ideal of secular instruction and political neutrality, will not be partisan or enemy of any class, creed, party, or faction. If it is to impose any ideological discipline, however, each party or denomination must seek to control, or failing that, to weaken the influence of the educational system. Observance of the limitations of the Constitution will not weaken government in the field appropriate for its exercise.

2. It was also considered in the Gobitis case that functions of educational officers in States, counties and school districts were such that to interfere with their authority "would in effect make us the school board for the country."

The Fourteenth Amendment, as now applied to the States, protects the citizen against the State itself and all of its creatures -- Boards of Education not excepted. These have, of course, important, delicate, and highly discretionary functions, but none that they may not perform within the limits of the Bill of Rights. That they are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.

3. The Gobitis opinion reasoned that this is a field "where courts possess no marked and certainly no controlling competence," that it is committed to the legislatures as well as the courts to guard cherished liberties and that it is constitutionally appropriate to "fight out the wise use of legislative authority in the forum of public opinion and before legislative assemblies rather than to transfer such a contest to the judicial arena," since all the "effective means of inducing political changes are left free."

The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.

The freedoms of speech and of press, of assembly, and of worship may not be infringed on slender grounds. They are susceptible of restriction only to prevent grave and immediate danger to interests which the State may lawfully protect. I

Nor does our duty to apply the Bill of Rights to assertions of official authority depend upon our possession of marked competence in the field where the invasion of rights occurs....

4. Lastly, and this is the very heart of the Gobitis opinion, it reasons that "National unity is the basis of national security," that the authorities have "the right to select appropriate means for its attainment," and hence reaches the conclusion that such compulsory measures toward "national unity" are constitutional. Upon the verity of this assumption depends our answer in this case.

National unity as an end which officials may foster by persuasion and example is not in question. The problem is whether under our Constitution compulsion as here employed is a permissible means for its achievement.

Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good as well as by evil men. Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon but at other times and places the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls. As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity. As governmental pressure toward unity becomes greater, so strife becomes more bitter as to whose unity it shall be. Probably no deeper division of our people could proceed from any provocation than from finding it necessary to choose what doctrine and whose program public educational officials shall compel youth to unite in embracing. Ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies. Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.

To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.

We think the action of the local authorities in compelling the flag salute and pledge transcends constitutional limitations on their power and invades the sphere of intellect and spirit which it is the purpose of the First Amendment to our Constitution to reserve from all official control.

The decision of this Court in Minersville School District v. Gobitis and the holdings of those few per curiam decisions which preceded and foreshadowed it are overruled, and the judgment enjoining enforcement of the West Virginia Regulation is affirmed.

MR. JUSTICE ROBERTS and MR. JUSTICE REED adhere to the views expressed by the Court in Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586, and are of the opinion that the judgment below should be reversed.

MR. JUSTICE BLACK and MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS, concurring:

We are substantially in agreement with the opinion just read, but since we originally joined with the Court in the Gobitis case, it is appropriate that we make a brief statement of reasons for our change of view.

Reluctance to make the Federal Constitution a rigid bar against state regulation of conduct thought inimical to the public welfare was the controlling influence which moved us to consent to the Gobitis decision. Long reflection convinced us that although the principle is sound, its application in the particular case was wrong. We believe that the statute before us fails to accord full scope to the freedom of religion secured to the appellees by the First and Fourteenth Amendments....

Neither our domestic tranquillity in peace nor our martial effort in war depend on compelling little children to participate in a ceremony which ends in nothing for them but a fear of spiritual condemnation. If, as we think, their fears are groundless, time and reason are the proper antidotes for their errors. The ceremonial, when enforced against conscientious objectors, more likely to defeat than to serve its high purpose, is a handy implement for disguised religious persecution. As such, it is inconsistent with our Constitution's plan and purpose.

MR. JUSTICE MURPHY, concurring:

I agree with the opinion of the Court and join in it....

I am unable to agree that the benefits that may accrue to society from the compulsory flag salute are sufficiently definite and tangible to justify the invasion of freedom and privacy that is entailed or to compensate for a restraint on the freedom of the individual to be vocal or silent according to his conscience or personal inclination. The trenchant words in the preamble to the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom remain unanswerable: ". . . all attempts to influence [the mind] by temporal punishments, or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, . . ." Any spark of love for country which may be generated in a child or his associates by forcing him to make what is to him an empty gesture and recite words wrung from him contrary to his religious beliefs is overshadowed by the desirability of preserving freedom of conscience to the full. It is in that freedom and the example of persuasion, not in force and compulsion, that the real unity of America lies.

MR. JUSTICE FRANKFURTER, dissenting:

One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution. Were my purely personal attitude relevant I should wholeheartedly associate myself with the general libertarian views in the Court's opinion, representing as they do the thought and action of a lifetime. But as judges we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic. We owe equal attachment to the Constitution and are equally bound by our judicial obligations whether we derive our citizenship from the earliest or the latest immigrants to these shores. As a member of this Court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard. The duty of a judge who must decide which of two claims before the Court shall prevail, that of a State to enact and enforce laws within its general competence or that of an individual to refuse obedience because of the demands of his conscience, is not that of the ordinary person. It can never be emphasized too much that one's own opinion about the wisdom or evil of a law should be excluded altogether when one is doing one's duty on the bench. The only opinion of our own even looking in that direction that is material is our opinion whether legislators could in reason have enacted such a law. In the light of all the circumstances, including the history of this question in this Court, it would require more daring than I possess to deny that reasonable legislators could have taken the action which is before us for review. Most unwillingly, therefore, I must differ from my brethren with regard to legislation like this. I cannot bring my mind to believe that the "liberty" secured by the Due Process Clause gives this Court authority to deny to the State of West Virginia the attainment of that which we all recognize as a legitimate legislative end, namely, the promotion of good citizenship, by employment of the means here chosen.

When Mr. Justice Holmes, speaking for this Court, wrote that "it must be remembered that legislatures are ultimate guardians of the liberties and welfare of the people in quite as great a degree as the courts," he went to the very essence of our constitutional system and the democratic conception of our society. He did not mean that for only some phases of civil government this Court was not to supplant legislatures and sit in judgment upon the right or wrong of a challenged measure. He was stating the comprehensive judicial duty and role of this Court in our constitutional scheme whenever legislation is sought to be nullified on any ground, namely, that responsibility for legislation lies with legislatures, answerable as they are directly to the people, and this Court's only and very narrow function is to determine whether within the broad grant of authority vested in legislatures they have exercised a judgment for which reasonable justification can be offered.

The precise scope of the question before us defines the limits of the constitutional power that is in issue. The State of West Virginia requires all pupils to share in the salute to the flag as part of school training in citizenship. The present action is one to enjoin the enforcement of this requirement by those in school attendance. We have not before us any attempt by the State to punish disobedient children or visit penal consequences on their parents. All that is in question is the right of the State to compel participation in this exercise by those who choose to attend the public schools.

Under our constitutional system the legislature is charged solely with civil concerns of society. If the avowed or intrinsic legislative purpose is either to promote or to discourage some religious community or creed, it is clearly within the constitutional restrictions imposed on legislatures and cannot stand. But it by no means follows that legislative power is wanting whenever a general non-discriminatory civil regulation in fact touches conscientious scruples or religious beliefs of an individual or a group....

Parents have the privilege of choosing which schools they wish their children to attend. And the question here is whether the state may make certain requirements that seem to it desirable or important for the proper education of those future citizens who go to schools maintained by the states, or whether the pupils in those schools may be relieved from those requirements if they run counter to the consciences of their parents.....

We are told that a flag salute is a doubtful substitute for adequate understanding of our institutions. The states that require such a school exercise do not have to justify it as the only means for promoting good citizenship in children, but merely as one of diverse means for accomplishing a worthy end. We may deem it a foolish measure, but the point is that this Court is not the organ of government to resolve doubts as to whether it will fulfill its purpose. Only if there be no doubt that any reasonable mind could entertain can we deny to the states the right to resolve doubts their way and not ours....

Exploring Constitutional Conflicts

Thank Jehovah's Witnesses for speech freedoms

2005-11-04T21:00:00.000-08:00

Thank Jehovah's Witnesses for speech freedoms
By: Tony Mauro
Date: 30 May 2000
Source: USA Today
URL: http://cgi.usatoday.com/usatonline/20000530/2310079s.htm

If you have a front door, a Jehovah's Witness probably has knocked on it.

With well-dressed politeness and practiced persistence, they offer literature, biblical advice and a path to God's kingdom as they see it.

As often as not, they knock at the wrong time, when we're too busy to listen or not particularly interested in shopping for another faith.

But before you shut the door on a Jehovah's Witness the next time, pause to consider the shameful persecution they suffered not too long ago, as well as the rich contribution they have made to the First Amendment freedoms we all enjoy.

The legal clashes Jehovah's Witnesses had with government authorities over their proselytizing and practices led to an astonishing total of 23 separate Supreme Court rulings between 1938 and 1946 -- surely more than any other single religious organization engendered before or since. So frequently did Witnesses raise core First Amendment issues that Justice Harlan Fiske Stone wrote, "The Jehovah's Witnesses ought to have an endowment in view of the aid which they give in solving the legal problems of civil liberties."

Next month will mark the 60th anniversary of the most infamous Jehovah's Witness decision, one the Supreme Court got completely wrong: Minersville School District vs. Gobitis. The court, smitten by pre-World War II patriotic fervor, ruled it was constitutional to require Jehovah's Witness students to violate their faith and pledge allegiance to the flag in public school.

A Pennsylvania school district had expelled Lillian and William Gobitas (their last name was misspelled in court papers) because they kept their arms down during the daily flag salute. The Witnesses' interpretation of the Bible is that saluting the flag would amount to placing another deity before God.

As recounted in Shawn Francis Peters' powerful new book, Judging Jehovah's Witnesses, the Supreme Court's decision unleashed a wave of virulent anti-Jehovah's Witness persecution across the nation that is little remembered today.

Witness missionaries were chased and beaten by vigilantes in Texas. Their literature was confiscated and even burned. Less than a week after the court decision, a Kingdom Hall was stormed and torched in Kennebunk, Maine. American Legion posts harassed Witnesses nationwide. The American Civil Liberties Union reported to the Justice Department that nearly 1,500 Witnesses were physically attacked in more than 300 communities nationwide. One Southern sheriff told a reporter why Witnesses were being run out of town: "They're traitors; the Supreme Court says so. Ain't you heard?"

Partly because of this violent reaction to its decision, the Supreme Court reversed itself with remarkable speed. On Flag Day of 1943, the court handed down West Virginia State Board of Education vs. Barnette, using some of the most eloquent language ever written to describe the First Amendment freedoms Americans enjoy. "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion," Justice Robert Jackson wrote.

The active persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses abated somewhat, although thousands were arrested during World War II for seeking religious exemption from military service. They were accused, baselessly, of being Nazi sympathizers. And Witnesses continued to have run-ins with the law over leafleting, in part because of their sometimes-confrontational style. Peters tells of a Jehovah's Witness caravan riding through Arkansas waving banners that read, "Religion is a Racket" and "Preachers are Crooks."

Today those messages probably would not cause a stir, and even then they should not have triggered violence. But in the America of the 1940s, they were pretty close to fighting words.

Speaking of "fighting words," that concept was embodied in First Amendment law by another Jehovah's Witness case, Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire. A Witness named Walter Chaplinsky was arrested in Rochester, N.H., for his fiery street-corner evangelizing, which included attacks on the "harlot" Catholic Church and on saluting the flag. The crowd that gathered became so angry that a man tried to impale Chaplinsky on a pole bearing the U.S. flag.

The Supreme Court's 1942 decision placed "fighting words" such as those used by Chaplinsky outside the First Amendment's protection if they "by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." That standard remains relevant today and helped defeat politically correct speech codes that would have censored far-less harmful speech.

Perhaps the longest-lasting contribution the Witnesses made to First Amendment freedoms came in a 1940 case, Cantwell vs. Connecticut. The Supreme Court said Jehovah's Witnesses Newton Cantwell and his two sons, Jesse and Russell, should not have been arrested for soliciting without a license on the streets of New Haven, Conn. Before the Cantwell decision, it was not legally clear that the First Amendment protected religious practitioners against restrictions at the state and local levels as well as federal. But the Supreme Court in Cantwell said it did, thereby ushering in an era of greatly strengthened religious freedom.

All religions have the Jehovah's Witnesses to thank for the expansion of that freedom. But in their publications and on their Web site (www.watchtower.org) Witnesses make scant mention of their persecution and their legal battles.

Unlike other groups, the Witnesses have not resorted to televangelism and don't claim a high-profile presence in society. Witnesses -- all 1 million of them in this country, 3.5 million of them worldwide -- spread their message door-to-door and through the publications Watchtower and Awake!

"Their simple but eloquent voices tell a remarkable story," Peters says, "one that lays bare the extremes of cowardice and courage so often found in nations engrossed in war."

Tony Mauro, the Supreme Court correspondent for American Lawyer Media and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors, is the author of a new book, Illustrated Great Decisions of the Supreme Court.

Coffee Tawk With Maureen Dowd

2005-11-03T16:03:00.000-08:00

Coffe Talk w/ Maureen Dowd
Austin Chronicle
by Wells Dunbar

In case you haven't heard, Maureen Dowd is upset, and she's coming to Austin. The New York Times columnist brings her supple, snarky wit to the LBJ auditorium this Wednesday at 6pm to discuss the current state of journalism, but her tight schedule doesn't permit any nacho time. "I lived on nachos for 20 years," said the Pulitzer Prize winner, "before a nutritionist explained to me that they weren't a major food group." The Chronicle was lucky enough to wax with Ms. Dowd earlier this week about the incestuous nature of insider reporting, Judy "Miss Run Amok" Miller, and the nanny presidency.

Austin Chronicle: What's the bigger issue in journalism today – blogs, and their sometimes amateurish quality, or the cozy relationships some mainstream media reporters cultivate with their sources, as seen in the Judith Miller fiasco?

Maureen Dowd: Journalism is an imperfect art. I always think of it as liquid history; we're trying to write for history, but it's like that quiz show where you try to put as many things in your supermarket basket as you can in 30 seconds. Blogs have made my life difficult, because with everyone trying to have an opinion, it's hard to think of anything original to say when you have to wait three days for your column to be published. It's like now we're in a whole nation of opinion writers, so what makes yours special? You have to work even harder. It used to be in the old days, (The New Republic editor) Walter Lippman and (longtime Times writer) James Reston would write from some Olympian height, and everyone would wait to have the word handed down, but not anymore. I always tease my assistants, I say, "You know, when James Reston would give his assistants the column after it was finished, they'd say [fawning voice] 'Thank you Mr. Reston!'" I don't know. There can be problems in every aspect of journalism. The bloggers have done some great investigative work, and some hilarious work – I love Gawker, they do some hilarious things and some very original columns. It's hard sometimes, because blogs also have a lot of misinformation. I'm never quite sure when you're using it as research, you never quite know how verified it is. It's like the Wild West. But that's what makes it exciting. My general opinion of all this is that the form may change, but we shouldn't be threatened because the function doesn't change. And the function is to – I can never think of a less corny way to say this – to serve as part of the checks and balances. The Bush administration has does everything they can to kill any checks and balances, but, thank goodness, we've managed to survive. So it really doesn't matter what the technology is.

AC: After 9/11 and after Katrina, the media went into shortlived soul searching – do you think Scooter Libby's indictment will make some in the media question their chatty relationship with their sources?

MD: I always tend to think of it as antagonistic, like it's our job to watch them, not to socialize with them. I don't want to socialize with politicians, or be friends with them. I feel like it's my job to say, "Are they having a good day, or a bad day?," doing a good job, or a bad job, and why. I'm the reader's advocate, I'm not there to hang with them. The White House and the government have so many people paid by the taxpayers to put their spin on stories. If they're good press secretaries, they just add the spin; in the case of this White House, there's been a lot more heinous activity that the taxpayers have paid for in terms of actual deceit. They don't need newspaper people to help them spin. They've got plenty of people who are already doing that.

AC: Do you think what we're seeing right now is the cumulative effect of all this deceit?

MD: I think things that start with a lie don't work out well. I think that's a general truism in life. Things that start with a big lie don't tend to work out well. And the Iraq war started out with a big lie, that it was necessary for our security, that al Qaeda was connected to Saddam, that Saddam was connected to 9/11, and that Saddam had the potential for nuclear weapons. And that's not why they wanted to go into Iraq. I think whenever you don't trust the American people to make life-and-death decisions, if you have to fool them into something, that's not going to lead to anything good. My objection to the war wasn't even the war itself, it was the case for war. They had to make the case; they never did that. Inside the White House they didn't make the case; there was no debate, they suppressed all the information that contradicted their ideological opinions, and [the case] wasn't made to the country.

AC: So I guess we are seeing that right now.

MD: Yeah, all the chickens are coming home to roost, or whatever cliché you want to use about it. Even Republicans admiringly say they constructed a remarkable alternative reality. It was an alternative reality; it wasn't based in facts, it was based in faith and ideology. And wishful thinking. Only in Disney can wishes make it so.

AC: I think back to the article in The New York Times Magazine where a White House source lambasted the "reality based community."

MD: I love that quote. I use it all the time. That may have been their pinnacle, if this is their nadir. It's like some kind of Potemkin village reality they had built. I think they could only do that after 9/11, because the public was bonded to the President in trust and fear, and so that's the loathsome thing about, that they took advantage of all of that American fear and insecurity and loyalty, to sell their old ideological plan.

AC: The White House was known for their spin and message control, but lately it's been leaking like a sinking ship. Why?

MD: It's funny – I was wondering if the ethics course Harriet Miers is teaching is really a way to clamp down, to get them not to talk about the Scooter thing. I don't know if she's teaching it, but she's arranging for people to get ethics training. It's just weird. OK, you take the country to war based on lies, you smear an FBI agent, you miss Katrina because you're just too busy bicycling, or worrying about your clothes if you're Brownie. And now they're going to get into ethics training? There just has to be some other agenda there. So it may be a way to close it down.

AC: It doesn't make sense. It's like paying Brownie to investigate FEMA's horrible response.

MD: How can he still be on the payroll? If this were a Judy Holliday movie, she'd go to a shareholder's meeting and have a revolt. How can this guy still be getting paid by the taxpayers?

AC: Well those Nordstrom shirts aren't cheap. But back to Miers, while she was certainly underqualified, did you sense any sexism in the attacks on her nomination?

MD: I really think Bush is the one that really hurt women there. Because he put up someone who was not qualified in anything, except apple polishing and fawning over him. He's so insulated and infantilized by all these yes men and yes women and nannies around him, like Karen Hughes and Condi Rice, that he didn't even realize that just sucking up to him does not make one qualified for the Supreme Court. And he seemed to be stunned by that, which was really a funny moment. But in the meantime it really hurt women, because she was not qualified – the Senate had to send back her questions, because they were so lamely answered, and she didn't have any expertise in constitutional law. She was not the kind of first-rate legal scholar you want on the Supreme Court. Then it was like, OK, she has to get out of the way, and another white guy has to come in. So I think the total effect was bad, but I blame Bush for that. It was kind of a setup for her. I feel sorry for her, but Bush set her up, and women up, to take the fall because he wanted to put one of his governesses in, without the proper qualifications. The same could be said of Karen Hughes. The most difficult problem we have in the world today is trying to understand the Muslims and getting them to understand us, and when you send someone who doesn't know anything about that part of the world, just because they're a loyalist to you, I don't think that is a wise decision. It doesn't make her look good, it doesn't improve our relations, and it doesn't make women look good. When she goes to Saudi Arabia, and she doesn't know what you could learn just from reading [Dowd's book] Bushworld [laughs], that Saudi Arabian women hate one thing more than not driving, and that's Americans criticizing their men for not letting them drive. I just think this doesn't make women look good when he puts nannies in jobs they're not suited for.

AC: There is a lot of nannying going on in the White House.

MD: I know, it's the British side of the Bushes! [laughs]

AC: He is surrounded by these powerful women, but they are in these sycophantic positions, like Rice or Hughes.

MD: It's funny, because the first part of the Bush administration was almost cartoonishly masculine, and now he just seems to be surrounded by nannies. I think that men, and probably women too, in any field, can get infantilized, and get bad advice if they only surround themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear. That was the story about this al Qaeda guy who told the CIA briefers what they wanted to hear, because that was what Cheney wanted to hear.

AC: In making the case for war ...

MD: I think that leads you down the wrong path if you surround yourself with people who are telling you what you want to hear rather than what you should hear. People who are insecure at some level are more prone to want those people around them ... It's weird, because the first term was all this swaggering, macho, militaristic bellicose. And now he just seems to be surrounded by women and wondering alone. It's a really weird change in tone.

AC: Yours was the first major piece critical of Judith Miller in the Times op-ed page. The paper was widely criticized for being scooped on their own story. Were you withholding judgment until the Times published their own investigation?

MD: The case was incredibly confusing, and since Fitzgerald was so tight-lipped, it was really hard to tell what was going on and it still is. I still don't understand Novak's role. And I still don't fully understand Judy's. There's been some debate about it, that the Times perhaps should have set up a separate mechanism to report on themselves at the very beginning. Because they had her legal defense and their journalistic side all tied up, all of a piece. But it was just a real hard, unique, and confusing case, and it still is. [Editor's note: At press time, it was announced that Miller was parting ways with the Times.]

AC: How do you think it's affected the Times? Is it a worse blow that the Jayson Blair scandal?

MD: No. I think everybody piles on the Times, and we pile on ourselves. That's because we have to be Caesar's wife, we have to be purer that pure. But I think the readers appreciate the fact that we agonize when something goes wrong, that we have this public trust, and we've worked through it. I think we're coming out on the other side of it. Again, you just have to try and put out the best paper you can every day, that's all you can do. It's the most fun you can have for a dollar, that's what I always say. [laughs] Or what is it, five on Sundays?

Who Will Control the Internet?

2005-11-02T16:35:00.000-08:00

Who Will Control the Internet?
By Kenneth Neil Cukier

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005

Summary: Foreign governments want control of the Internet transferred from an American NGO to an international institution. Washington has responded with a Monroe Doctrine for our times, setting the stage for further controversy.

KENNETH NEIL CUKIER covers technology and regulatory issues for The Economist.

WASHINGTON BATTLES THE WORLD

As historic documents go, the statement issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce on June 30 was low-key even by American standards of informality. No flowery language, no fountain-penned signatures, no Great Seal of the United States -- only 331 words on a single page. But the simplicity of the presentation belied the importance of the content, which was Washington's attempt to settle a crucial problem of twenty-first-century global governance: Who controls the Internet?

Any network requires some centralized control in order to function. The global phone system, for example, is administered by the world's oldest international treaty organization, the International Telecommunication Union, founded in 1865 and now a part of the UN family. The Internet is different. It is coordinated by a private-sector nonprofit organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which was set up by the United States in 1998 to take over the activities performed for 30 years, amazingly, by a single ponytailed professor in California.

The controversy over who controls the Internet has simmered in insular technology-policy circles for years and more recently has crept into formal diplomatic talks. Many governments feel that, like the phone network, the Internet should be administered under a multilateral treaty. ICANN, in their view, is an instrument of American hegemony over cyberspace: its private-sector approach favors the United States, Washington retains oversight authority, and its Governmental Advisory Committee, composed of delegates from other nations, has no real powers.

This discontent finally boiled over at the UN's World Summit on the Information Society, the first phase of which was held in Geneva in December 2003 (the second phase is set for November in Tunis). Brazil and South Africa have criticized the current arrangement, and China has called for the creation of a new international treaty organization. France wants an intergovernmental approach, but one fundamentally based on democratic values.{See Footnote 1} Cuba and Syria have taken advantage of the controversy to poke a finger in Washington's eye, and even Zimbabwe's tyrant, Robert Mugabe, has weighed in, calling the existing system of Internet governance a form of neocolonialism.

How did such a welcomed technology become the source of such discord? Everyone understands that the Internet is crucial for the functioning of modern economies, societies, and even governments, and everyone has an interest in seeing that it is secure and reliable. But at the same time, many governments are bothered that such a vital resource exists outside their control and, even worse, that it is under the thumb of an already dominant United States. Washington's answer to these concerns -- the Commerce Department's four terse paragraphs, released at the end of June, announcing that the United States plans to retain control of the Internet indefinitely -- was intended as a sort of Monroe Doctrine for our times. It was received abroad with just the anger one would expect, setting the stage for further controversy.

MASTERS OF THEIR DOMAIN NAMES

One of the most cherished myths of cyberspace is that the Internet is totally decentralized and inherently uncontrollable. Like all myths, this one is based on a bit of truth and a heavy dose of wishful thinking. It is true that compared with the century-old telephone system, the Internet is a paragon of deregulation and decentralization. In four critical areas, however, it requires oversight and coordination in order to operate smoothly. Together, these areas constitute the "domain name system" of addresses, with which users navigate the Internet and send e-mail.

First, there are domain names, such as www.foreignaffairs.org. Somebody must decide who will operate the database of generic names ending with suffixes such as ".com," ".net," ".info," and others (a privilege that promises handsome profits). Also, someone must appoint the operators of two-letter country-code suffixes (such as ".cn," for China).

Second, there are Internet Protocol numbers, the up-to-12-digit codes, invisible to users, that every machine on the network needs to have in order to be recognized by other machines. Due to a technical decision made when the network was developing in the late 1970s -- in a world speckled with mainframe computers -- the system was set up to accommodate only around four billion potential Internet Protocol numbers, far fewer than are now necessary. Until the Internet is upgraded, accordingly, Internet Protocol numbers must be allocated sparingly -- and carefully, since accidentally duplicating them creates mayhem for routing Internet traffic.

Third are what are called root servers. Some form of control is needed in the actual machines that make the domain name system work. When users visit Web sites or send e-mail, big computers known as root servers match the domain names with their corresponding Internet Protocol numbers in a matter of milliseconds. The database is the world's most important Rolodex. Yet due to a technical hiccup that occurred when the network was young, there can be only 13 root servers, some of which provide data to mirror sites around the world. As a result, somebody must decide who will operate the root servers and where those operators will be based. Because the system evolved informally, the root servers' administrators are diverse, including NASA, a Dutch nonprofit organization, universities, the U.S. military, and private companies. Today, all told, ten root servers are operated from the United States and one each from Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Tokyo.

Fourth and finally, there are technical standards that must be formally established and coordinated to ensure the Internet's interoperability. They entail more than just the addressing system and involve everything from how routers send traffic to parameters so that video flows smoothly. Ultimately, the standards let the Internet evolve.

If all this sounds outrageously technical, that is because it is. And it is the reason why, even after the Internet had become a mass-market medium, most diplomats and foreign policy experts remained largely unaware of these issues. But although the management of the names, numbers, root servers, and standards that constitute the Internet's infrastructure -- what techies call "Internet governance" -- seems nerdy, it can have an important impact on mainstream policy issues. For instance, countries that place restrictions on the types of domain names that can be used effectively hamper free speech. The personal information of registrants of addresses with generic suffixes such as ".com" and ".net" are made publicly available online, which jeopardizes people's privacy. Telecom operators need access to Internet Protocol numbers to deploy services, making them a major asset for companies and an economic interest of countries. Technical standards can be designed either to foster openness or to permit censorship and surveillance. In short, the Internet, before it is physically constructed from routers and cables, is made up of values. And the domain name system is the central chokepoint where control of the Internet can be exercised.

For most of its history, the Internet has been administered by Woodstock-era American engineers and academics. As a result, the network has embodied the philosophy of that community: a political and economic liberalism led to openness on a technical level. The open infrastructure (with nonproprietary standards that let any network connect to any other, hence the "inter-net") has fostered free expression, low-cost access, and innovation. Its private-sector origins (despite initial federal funding) have made the Internet nonbureaucratic, particularly compared with state-run monopoly telecom carriers. And the fact that the Internet's networks carry streams of data rather than mainly voice calls has kept it outside of the purview of traditional telecom regulators.

To be sure, the Internet's openness begets big headaches: it is difficult to track spammers, and the system is tremendously vulnerable to hacking. But the open network is like the open society -- crime thrives, but so does creativity. We take for granted that the Internet we enjoy today will continue to have these characteristics, but this is hardly certain. It all depends on who controls the domain name system and what priorities they choose to set.

THE TANGLED WEB THEY WOVE

Until 1998, the Internet was overseen almost exclusively by one man: Jon Postel, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California. As a graduate student in the 1960s, he was among the handful of engineers who built the Internet. For the next 30 years, he managed it on behalf of the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, which funded the Internet's initial development.

Postel made seemingly technical decisions such as who should get to operate a country-code domain. Although it may seem odd that national address suffixes (such as ".uk," for the United Kingdom) were allocated to private individuals rather than government bodies, such was the case. In its early days, the Internet was so new and strange that there was usually no appropriate national organization to hand a suffix to. Besides, governments, and particularly their monopoly telecom carriers, more often hindered communications development than helped it. By the mid-1990s, however, it became clear to the small coterie of officials in the United States and elsewhere who were aware of the matter that the Internet could no longer be administered by a single individual. But who or what would replace him?

After a bitter series of negotiations among the business community, governments, and nongovernmental organizations worldwide, the Clinton administration helped broker a compromise and established ICANN in 1998. Because the United States' hands-off approach had allowed the Internet to flourish, it seemed appropriate that the new organization be based in the private sector. This would make it more responsive, more flexible, and less prone to bureaucratic and political squabbling. The negotiations were so tense that Postel suffered a heart attack as they were ending and never lived to see the birth of the successor organization he was instrumental in creating.

ICANN was an experiment, a bottom-up, multi-stakeholder approach toward managing a global resource on a nongovernmental basis. Indeed, in its early days it was often touted as a model for other issues that require the unified action of numerous groups from government, industry, and civil society, such as treating communicable diseases or handling climate change. ICANN's private-sector status, moreover, has helped keep the Internet free from political interference. When in 2002 members of the Federal Communications Commission were asked by their counterparts at China's Ministry of Information Industry why Taiwan had been allocated its own two-letter domain (".tw"), the commissioners could pass the buck to ICANN and breathe a sigh of relief.

Yet from the start, ICANN was plagued by controversy. Critics charged that it lacked transparency, accountability, and legitimacy. Civil-society groups felt it was in the pocket of the domain name registration businesses it was designed to regulate. Businesses felt it was overly governmental. And foreign governments felt powerless before it. As many developing countries woke to the Internet's importance, it struck them as outrageous that the Internet was essentially run by a nonprofit corporation whose 15-person board of directors was accountable to the attorney general of the state of California and under the authority of the U.S. government. Even the U.S. Congress criticized it, hauling the group into tense hearings regularly. Half a decade after it was founded with such optimism, the organization was mockingly referred to in tech-policy circles as "ICANN'T."

All this came to a head in 2003, during the preparatory meetings for the World Summit on the Information Society. Washington had been able to deflect criticism of ICANN in bilateral discussions but proved unable to block the momentum for change at the multilateral level. Telecom-policy officials mildly supportive of ICANN were replaced by senior representatives from foreign ministries, officials less familiar with the details of Internet governance but more experienced in challenging U.S. power. Watching the United States go to war in Iraq despite global opposition, these diplomats saw ICANN as yet another example of American unilateralism. What would prevent Washington, they argued, from one day choosing, say, to knock Iran off the Internet by simply deleting its two-letter moniker, ".ir," from the domain name system? Surely the Internet ought to be managed by the international community rather than a single nation.

Governments worldwide sought to dilute the United States' control by calling for a new arrangement, and in November 2004 UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed a 40-person working group to address questions of Internet governance. Washington had planned to grant ICANN autonomy from its oversight in 2006. But the more other countries clamored for power, the more the United States reconsidered its policy of relinquishing control. Ultimately, it came down to national interest: Washington, with so much at stake in the Internet's continuing to function as it had, decided it was not prepared to risk any changes. So, as the UN working group was preparing to release its report (which, unsurprisingly, favored transferring authority over the Internet to the UN), the U.S. government made a preemptive strike. In the brief Commerce Department statement, Washington announced its decision: the United States would retain its authority over ICANN, period.

THE OPEN NETWORK AND ITS ENEMIES

Power, before it comes from arms or wealth, emanates from ideas. The Internet has emerged as a piece of critical information infrastructure for every nation. Developed countries increasingly rely on it for their economic livelihood and basic communications; developing nations recognize it as a way of linking people together, enabling commercial relationships, and generating the transparency and civic dialogue that undergird democratic governance. Information technology can also strengthen the hand of authoritarian regimes, but there seems little doubt that in its current form the Internet's general influence is progressive rather than regressive.

ICANN cannot take credit for any of this, but the group's work has ensured that the network operates smoothly so that these benefits can be realized. As the overseer of the domain name system, the United States has taken a liberal approach in keeping with its liberal values. There is no guarantee that an intergovernmental system would continue on such a course, and so even committed internationalists ought to be wary of changing how the system is run.

This is especially so since the very countries that most restrict the Internet within their borders are the ones calling loudest for greater control. As other countries sharpen their diplomatic knives for the final round of the summit in Tunis in November, the dispute is echoing an earlier battle at Unesco in the 1980s over the so-called New World Information and Communication Order, which led the United States and the United Kingdom to pull out of the organization. Then, it was the Soviet Union, its satellites, and the developing world that called for controlling media activities and funding the development of media resources in developing countries; today, some of those same nations seek power over the Internet, as well as financial aid to overcome the digital divide.

Washington's new position shrewdly mixes a few carrots in along with the big stick. It formally acknowledges that countries have "sovereignty concerns" about their national two-letter address domains -- a mealy-mouthed nod toward granting countries control over them, which is only appropriate. Although this will invite problems, such as with Taiwan's ".tw," these can be sidestepped -- just as the allocation of telephone "country codes" to territories does not confer diplomatic recognition, neither does the allocation of country domains need to. Washington also supports the continued discussion of broader Internet governance issues in multiple forums, which could restrain the creation of a cumbersome and monolithic Global Internet Policy Council (which was among the UN working group's proposals). It may also keep politicians from trespassing on ICANN's more purely technical areas, which could harm the network.

Nevertheless, although the new U.S. position may be the least bad alternative in the short term, it will almost certainly be unsustainable over the longer term. For the moment, there is little other governments can do to rebel. Unless they feel their concerns are being addressed, however, they are likely to try to set up a parallel naming and addressing system to compete with ICANN-sanctioned domains. Technology abhors homogeneity; differing technical standards are the norm rather than the exception. The ongoing scuffle over the creation of Galileo, Europe's challenge to Washington's Global Positioning System, is one example; the battle over third-generation mobile-phone standards is another. The danger, however, is that two different addressing systems on the Internet may not interoperate perfectly. If it wants to preserve and extend the benefits the Internet currently brings, Washington will have to come up with some way of sharing control with other countries without jeopardizing the network's stability or discouraging free speech and technical innovation.

Ultimately, what is playing out is a clash of perspectives. The U.S. government saw the creation of ICANN as the voluntary relinquishing of a critical source of power in the digital age; others saw it as a clever way for Washington to maintain its hegemony by placing Internet governance in the U.S. private sector. Foreign critics think a shift to multilateral intergovernmental control would mark a step toward enlightened global democracy; Washington thinks it would constitute a step back in time, toward state-regulated telecommunications. Whether and how these perspectives are bridged will determine the future of a global resource that nearly all of us have come to take for granted.

{Footnote 1} This sentence was edited after publication. Original sentence read: "France wants an intergovernmental approach, but one involving only an elite group of democratic nations."

What's a Modern Girl to Do?

2005-11-01T17:25:00.000-08:00

Can't wait to get your take on this one.

October 30, 2005

What's a Modern Girl to Do?

By MAUREEN DOWD

When I entered college in 1969, women were bursting out of their 50's chrysalis, shedding girdles, padded bras and conventions. The Jazz Age spirit flared in the Age of Aquarius. Women were once again imitating men and acting all independent: smoking, drinking, wanting to earn money and thinking they had the right to be sexual, this time protected by the pill. I didn't fit in with the brazen new world of hard-charging feminists. I was more of a fun-loving (if chaste) type who would decades later come to life in Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw. I hated the grubby, unisex jeans and no-makeup look and drugs that zoned you out, and I couldn't understand the appeal of dances that didn't involve touching your partner. In the universe of Eros, I longed for style and wit. I loved the Art Deco glamour of 30's movies. I wanted to dance the Continental like Fred and Ginger in white hotel suites; drink martinis like Myrna Loy and William Powell; live the life of a screwball heroine like Katharine Hepburn, wearing a gold lamé gown cut on the bias, cavorting with Cary Grant, strolling along Fifth Avenue with my pet leopard.

My mom would just shake her head and tell me that my idea of the 30's was wildly romanticized. "We were poor," she'd say. "We didn't dance around in white hotel suites." I took the idealism and passion of the 60's for granted, simply assuming we were sailing toward perfect equality with men, a utopian world at home and at work. I didn't listen to her when she cautioned me about the chimera of equality.

On my 31st birthday, she sent me a bankbook with a modest nest egg she had saved for me. "I always felt that the girls in a family should get a little more than the boys even though all are equally loved," she wrote in a letter. "They need a little cushion to fall back on. Women can stand on the Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it's a lie. It's more of a man's world today than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries."

I thought she was just being Old World, like my favorite jade, Dorothy Parker, when she wrote:

By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying -
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

I thought the struggle for egalitarianism was a cinch, so I could leave it to my earnest sisters in black turtlenecks and Birkenstocks. I figured there was plenty of time for me to get serious later, that America would always be full of passionate and full-throated debate about the big stuff - social issues, sexual equality, civil rights. Little did I realize that the feminist revolution would have the unexpected consequence of intensifying the confusion between the sexes, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence as they entered the 21st century.

Maybe we should have known that the story of women's progress would be more of a zigzag than a superhighway, that the triumph of feminism would last a nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years.

Despite the best efforts of philosophers, politicians, historians, novelists, screenwriters, linguists, therapists, anthropologists and facilitators, men and women are still in a muddle in the boardroom, the bedroom and the Situation Room.

Courtship

My mom gave me three essential books on the subject of men. The first, when I was 13, was "On Becoming a Woman." The second, when I was 21, was "365 Ways to Cook Hamburger." The third, when I was 25, was "How to Catch and Hold a Man," by Yvonne Antelle. ("Keep thinking of yourself as a soft, mysterious cat.. . .Men are fascinated by bright, shiny objects, by lots of curls, lots of hair on the head . . . by bows, ribbons, ruffles and bright colors.. . .Sarcasm is dangerous. Avoid it altogether.")

Because I received "How to Catch and Hold a Man" at a time when we were entering the Age of Equality, I put it aside as an anachronism. After all, sometime in the 1960's flirting went out of fashion, as did ironing boards, makeup and the idea that men needed to be "trapped" or "landed." The way to approach men, we reasoned, was forthrightly and without games, artifice or frills. Unfortunately, history has shown this to be a misguided notion.

I knew it even before the 1995 publication of "The Rules," a dating bible that encouraged women to return to prefeminist mind games by playing hard to get. ("Don't stay on the phone for more than 10 minutes.. . .Even if you are the head of your own company. . .when you're with a man you like, be quiet and mysterious, act ladylike, cross your legs and smile.. . .Wear black sheer pantyhose and hike up your skirt to entice the opposite sex!")

I knew this before fashion magazines became crowded with crinolines, bows, ruffles, leopard-skin scarves, 50's party dresses and other sartorial equivalents of flirting and with articles like "The Return of Hard to Get." ("I think it behooves us to stop offering each other these pearls of feminism, to stop saying, 'So, why don't you call him?"' a writer lectured in Mademoiselle. "Some men must have the thrill of the chase.")

I knew things were changing because a succession of my single girlfriends had called, sounding sheepish, to ask if they could borrow my out-of-print copy of "How to Catch and Hold a Man."

Decades after the feminist movement promised equality with men, it was becoming increasingly apparent that many women would have to brush up on the venerable tricks of the trade: an absurdly charming little laugh, a pert toss of the head, an air of saucy triumph, dewy eyes and a full knowledge of music, drawing, elegant note writing and geography. It would once more be considered captivating to lie on a chaise longue, pass a lacy handkerchief across the eyelids and complain of a case of springtime giddiness.

Today, women have gone back to hunting their quarry - in person and in cyberspace - with elaborate schemes designed to allow the deluded creatures to think they are the hunters. "Men like hunting, and we shouldn't deprive them of their chance to do their hunting and mating rituals," my 26-year-old friend Julie Bosman, a New York Times reporter, says. "As my mom says, Men don't like to be chased." Or as the Marvelettes sang, "The hunter gets captured by the game."

These days the key to staying cool in the courtship rituals is B. & I., girls say - Busy and Important. "As much as you're waiting for that little envelope to appear on your screen," says Carrie Foster, a 29-year-old publicist in Washington, "you happen to have a lot of stuff to do anyway." If a guy rejects you or turns out to be the essence of evil, you can ratchet up from B. & I. to C.B.B., Can't Be Bothered. In the T.M.I. - Too Much Information - digital age, there can be infinite technological foreplay.

Helen Fisher, a Rutgers anthropologist, concurs with Julie: "What our grandmothers told us about playing hard to get is true. The whole point of the game is to impress and capture. It's not about honesty. Many men and women, when they're playing the courtship game, deceive so they can win. Novelty, excitement and danger drive up dopamine in the brain. And both sexes brag."

Women might dye their hair, apply makeup and spend hours finding a hip-slimming dress, she said, while men may drive a nice car or wear a fancy suit that makes them seem richer than they are. In this retro world, a woman must play hard to get but stay soft as a kitten. And avoid sarcasm. Altogether.

Money

In those faraway, long-ago days of feminism, there was talk about equal pay for equal work. Now there's talk about "girl money."

A friend of mine in her 30's says it is a term she hears bandied about the New York dating scene. She also notes a shift in the type of gifts given at wedding showers around town, a reversion to 50's-style offerings: soup ladles and those frilly little aprons from Anthropologie and vintage stores are being unwrapped along with see-through nighties and push-up bras.

"What I find most disturbing about the 1950's-ification and retrogression of women's lives is that it has seeped into the corporate and social culture, where it can do real damage," she complains. "Otherwise intelligent men, who know women still earn less than men as a rule, say things like: 'I'll get the check. You only have girl money."'

Throughout the long, dark ages of undisputed patriarchy, women connived to trade beauty and sex for affluence and status. In the first flush of feminism, women offered to pay half the check with "woman money" as a way to show that these crass calculations - that a woman's worth in society was determined by her looks, that she was an ornament up for sale to the highest bidder - no longer applied.

Now dating etiquette has reverted. Young women no longer care about using the check to assert their equality. They care about using it to assess their sexuality. Going Dutch is an archaic feminist relic. Young women talk about it with disbelief and disdain. "It's a scuzzy 70's thing, like platform shoes on men," one told me.

"Feminists in the 70's went overboard," Anne Schroeder, a 26-year-old magazine editor in Washington, agrees. "Paying is like opening a car door. It's nice. I appreciate it. But he doesn't have to."

Unless he wants another date.

Women in their 20's think old-school feminists looked for equality in all the wrong places, that instead of fighting battles about whether women should pay for dinner or wear padded bras they should have focused only on big economic issues.

After Googling and Bikramming to get ready for a first dinner date, a modern girl will end the evening with the Offering, an insincere bid to help pay the check. "They make like they are heading into their bag after a meal, but it is a dodge," Marc Santora, a 30-year-old Metro reporter for The Times, says. "They know you will stop them before a credit card can be drawn. If you don't, they hold it against you."

One of my girlfriends, a TV producer in New York, told me much the same thing: "If you offer, and they accept, then it's over."

Jurassic feminists shudder at the retro implication of a quid profiterole. But it doesn't matter if the woman is making as much money as the man, or more, she expects him to pay, both to prove her desirability and as a way of signaling romance - something that's more confusing in a dating culture rife with casual hookups and group activities. (Once beyond the initial testing phase and settled in a relationship, of course, she can pony up more.)

"There are plenty of ways for me to find out if he's going to see me as an equal without disturbing the dating ritual," one young woman says. "Disturbing the dating ritual leads to chaos. Everybody knows that."

When I asked a young man at my gym how he and his lawyer girlfriend were going to divide the costs on a California vacation, he looked askance. "She never offers," he replied. "And I like paying for her." It is, as one guy said, "one of the few remaining ways we can demonstrate our manhood."

Power Dynamics

At a party for the Broadway opening of "Sweet Smell of Success," a top New York producer gave me a lecture on the price of female success that was anything but sweet. He confessed that he had wanted to ask me out on a date when he was between marriages but nixed the idea because my job as a Times columnist made me too intimidating. Men, he explained, prefer women who seem malleable and awed. He predicted that I would never find a mate because if there's one thing men fear, it's a woman who uses her critical faculties. Will she be critical of absolutely everything, even his manhood?

He had hit on a primal fear of single successful women: that the aroma of male power is an aphrodisiac for women, but the perfume of female power is a turnoff for men. It took women a few decades to realize that everything they were doing to advance themselves in the boardroom could be sabotaging their chances in the bedroom, that evolution was lagging behind equality.

A few years ago at a White House correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful and successful actress. Within minutes, she blurted out: "I can't believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women."

I'd been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with young women whose job it was was to care for them and nurture them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers.

John Schwartz of The New York Times made the trend official in 2004 when he reported: "Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame." A study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggested that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors. Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them. There it is, right in the DNA: women get penalized by insecure men for being too independent.

"The hypothesis," Dr. Stephanie Brown, the lead author of the study, theorized, "is that there are evolutionary pressures on males to take steps to minimize the risk of raising offspring that are not their own." Women, by contrast, did not show a marked difference between their attraction to men who might work above them and their attraction to men who might work below them.

So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? Do women get less desirable as they get more successful?

After I first wrote on this subject, a Times reader named Ray Lewis e-mailed me. While we had assumed that making ourselves more professionally accomplished would make us more fascinating, it turned out, as Lewis put it, that smart women were "draining at times."

Or as Bill Maher more crudely but usefully summed it up to Craig Ferguson on the "Late Late Show" on CBS: "Women get in relationships because they want somebody to talk to. Men want women to shut up."

Women moving up still strive to marry up. Men moving up still tend to marry down. The two sexes' going in opposite directions has led to an epidemic of professional women missing out on husbands and kids.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and the author of "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," a book published in 2002, conducted a survey and found that 55 percent of 35-year-old career women were childless. And among corporate executives who earn $100,000 or more, she said, 49 percent of the women did not have children, compared with only 19 percent of the men.

Hewlett quantified, yet again, that men have an unfair advantage. "Nowadays," she said, "the rule of thumb seems to be that the more successful the woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child. For men, the reverse is true."

A 2005 report by researchers at four British universities indicated that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to marry, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.

On a "60 Minutes" report on the Hewlett book, Lesley Stahl talked to two young women who went to Harvard Business School. They agreed that while they were the perfect age to start families, they didn't find it easy to meet the right mates.

Men, apparently, learn early to protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women. The girls said they hid the fact that they went to Harvard from guys they met because it was the kiss of death. "The H-bomb," they dubbed it. "As soon as you say Harvard Business School . . . that's the end of the conversation," Ani Vartanian said. "As soon as the guys say, 'Oh, I go to Harvard Business School,' all the girls start falling into them."

Hewlett thinks that the 2005 American workplace is more macho than ever. "It's actually much more difficult now than 10 years ago to have a career and raise a family," she told me. "The trend lines continue that highly educated women in many countries are increasingly dealing with this creeping nonchoice and end up on this path of delaying finding a mate and delaying childbearing. Whether you're looking at Italy, Russia or the U.S., all of that is true." Many women continue to fear that the more they accomplish, the more they may have to sacrifice. They worry that men still veer away from "challenging" women because of a male atavistic desire to be the superior force in a relationship.

"With men and women, it's always all about control issues, isn't it?" says a guy I know, talking about his bitter divorce.

Or, as Craig Bierko, a musical comedy star and actor who played one of Carrie's boyfriends on "Sex and the City," told me, "Deep down, beneath the bluster and machismo, men are simply afraid to say that what they're truly looking for in a woman is an intelligent, confident and dependable partner in life whom they can devote themselves to unconditionally until she's 40."

Ms. Versus Mrs.

"Ms." was supposed to neutralize the stature of women, so they weren't publicly defined by their marital status. When The Times finally agreed to switch to Ms. in its news pages in 1986, after much hectoring by feminists, Gloria Steinem sent flowers to the executive editor, Abe Rosenthal. But nowadays most young brides want to take their husbands' names and brag on the moniker Mrs., a brand that proclaims you belong to him. T-shirts with "MRS." emblazoned in sequins or sparkly beads are popular wedding-shower gifts.

A Harvard economics professor, Claudia Goldin, did a study last year that found that 44 percent of women in the Harvard class of 1980 who married within 10 years of graduation kept their birth names, while in the class of '90 it was down to 32 percent. In 1990, 23 percent of college-educated women kept their own names after marriage, while a decade later the number had fallen to 17 percent.

Time magazine reported that an informal poll in the spring of 2005 by the Knot, a wedding Web site, showed similar results: 81 percent of respondents took their spouse's last name, an increase from 71 percent in 2000. The number of women with hyphenated surnames fell from 21 percent to 8 percent.

"It's a return to romance, a desire to make marriage work," Goldin told one interviewer, adding that young women might feel that by keeping their own names they were aligning themselves with tedious old-fashioned feminists, and this might be a turnoff to them.

The professor, who married in 1979 and kept her name, undertook the study after her niece, a lawyer, changed hers. "She felt that her generation of women didn't have to do the same things mine did, because of what we had already achieved," Goldin told Time.

Many women now do not think of domestic life as a "comfortable concentration camp," as Betty Friedan wrote in "The Feminine Mystique," where they are losing their identities and turning into "anonymous biological robots in a docile mass." Now they want to be Mrs. Anonymous Biological Robot in a Docile Mass. They dream of being rescued - to flirt, to shop, to stay home and be taken care of. They shop for "Stepford Fashions" - matching shoes and ladylike bags and the 50's-style satin, lace and chiffon party dresses featured in InStyle layouts - and spend their days at the gym trying for Wisteria Lane waistlines.

The Times recently ran a front-page article about young women attending Ivy League colleges, women who are being groomed to take their places in the professional and political elite, who are planning to reject careers in favor of playing traditional roles, staying home and raising children.

"My mother always told me you can't be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time," the brainy, accomplished Cynthia Liu told Louise Story, explaining why she hoped to be a stay-at-home mom a few years after she goes to law school. "You always have to choose one over the other."

Kate White, the editor of Cosmopolitan, told me that she sees a distinct shift in what her readers want these days. "Women now don't want to be in the grind," she said. "The baby boomers made the grind seem unappealing."

Cynthia Russett, a professor of American history at Yale, told Story that women today are simply more "realistic," having seen the dashed utopia of those who assumed it wouldn't be so hard to combine full-time work and child rearing.

To the extent that young women are rejecting the old idea of copying men and reshaping the world around their desires, it's exhilarating progress. But to the extent that a pampered class of females is walking away from the problem and just planning to marry rich enough to cosset themselves in a narrow world of dependence on men, it's an irritating setback. If the new ethos is "a woman needs a career like a fish needs a bicycle," it won't be healthy.

Movies

In all those Tracy-Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting. You still see it onscreen occasionally - the incendiary chemistry of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie playing married assassins aiming for mutually assured orgasms and destruction in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." Interestingly, that movie was described as retro because of its salty battle of wits between two peppery lovers. Moviemakers these days are more interested in exploring what Steve Martin, in his novel "Shopgirl," calls the "calm cushion" of romances between unequals.

In James Brooks's movie "Spanglish," Adam Sandler, playing a sensitive Los Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid, just as in "Maid in Manhattan," Ralph Fiennes, playing a sensitive New York pol, falls for the hot Latino maid at his hotel, played by Jennifer Lopez. Sandler's maid, who cleans up for him without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman, in looks and character. His wife, played by Téa Leoni, is repellent: a jangly, yakking, overachieving, overexercised, unfaithful, shallow she-monster who has just lost her job with a commercial design firm and fears she has lost her identity.

In 2003, we had "Girl With a Pearl Earring," in which Colin Firth's Vermeer erotically paints Scarlett Johansson's Dutch maid, and Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," about the attraction of unequals. The witty and sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for the chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A businessman married to the substantial Emma Thompson, the sister of the prime minister, falls for his sultry secretary. A novelist played by Colin Firth falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese.

Art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection rather than of affection.

It's funny. I come from a family of Irish domestics - statuesque, 6-foot-tall women who cooked, kept house and acted as nannies for some of America's first families. I was always so proud of achieving more - succeeding in a high-powered career that would have been closed to my great-aunts. How odd, then, to find out now that being a maid would have enhanced my chances with men.

An upstairs maid, of course.

Women's Magazines

Cosmo is still the best-selling magazine on college campuses, as it was when I was in college, and the best-selling monthly magazine on the newsstand. The June 2005 issue, with Jessica Simpson on the cover, her cleavage spilling out of an orange crocheted halter dress, could have been June 1970. The headlines are familiar: "How to turn him on in 10 words or less," "Do You Make Men M-E-L-T? Take our quiz," "Bridal Special," Cosmo's stud search and "Cosmo's Most Famous Sex Tips; the Legendary Tricks That Have Brought Countless Guys to Their Knees." (Sex Trick 4: "Place a glazed doughnut around your man's member, then gently nibble the pastry and lick the icing . . . as well as his manhood." Another favorite Cosmo trick is to yell out during sex which of your girlfriends thinks your man is hot.)

At any newsstand, you'll see the original Cosmo girl's man-crazy, sex-obsessed image endlessly, tiresomely replicated, even for the teen set. On the cover of Elle Girl: "267 Ways to Look Hot."

"There has been lots of copying - look at Glamour," Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmo's founding editor told me and sighed. "I used to have all the sex to myself."

Before it curdled into a collection of stereotypes, feminism had fleetingly held out a promise that there would be some precincts of womanly life that were not all about men. But it never quite materialized.

It took only a few decades to create a brazen new world where the highest ideal is to acknowledge your inner slut. I am woman; see me strip. Instead of peaceful havens of girl things and boy things, we have a society where women of all ages are striving to become self-actualized sex kittens. Hollywood actresses now work out by taking pole-dancing classes.

Female sexuality has been a confusing corkscrew path, not a serene progressive arc. We had decades of Victorian prudery, when women were not supposed to like sex. Then we had the pill and zipless encounters, when women were supposed to have the same animalistic drive as men. Then it was discovered - shock, horror! - that men and women are not alike in their desires. But zipless morphed into hookups, and the more one-night stands the girls on "Sex and the City" had, the grumpier they got.

Oddly enough, Felix Dennis, who created the top-selling Maxim, said he stole his "us against the world" lad-magazine attitude from women's magazines like Cosmo. Just as women didn't mind losing Cosmo's prestigious fiction as the magazine got raunchier, plenty of guys were happy to lose the literary pretensions of venerable men's magazines and embrace simple-minded gender stereotypes, like the Maxim manifesto instructing women, "If we see you in the morning and night, why call us at work?"

Jessica Simpson and Eva Longoria move seamlessly from showing their curves on the covers of Cosmo and Glamour to Maxim, which dubbed Simpson "America's favorite ball and chain!" In the summer of 2005, both British GQ and FHM featured Pamela Anderson busting out of their covers. ("I think of my breasts as props," she told FHM.)

A lot of women now want to be Maxim babes as much as men want Maxim babes. So women have moved from fighting objectification to seeking it. "I have been surprised," Maxim's editor, Ed Needham, confessed to me, "to find that a lot of women would want to be somehow validated as a Maxim girl type, that they'd like to be thought of as hot and would like their boyfriends to take pictures of them or make comments about them that mirror the Maxim representation of a woman, the Pamela Anderson sort of brand. That, to me, is kind of extraordinary."

The luscious babes on the cover of Maxim were supposed to be men's fantasy guilty pleasures, after all, not their real life-affirming girlfriends.

Beauty

While I never related to the unstyled look of the early feminists and I tangled with boyfriends who did not want me to wear makeup and heels, I always assumed that one positive result of the feminist movement would be a more flexible and capacious notion of female beauty, a release from the tyranny of the girdled, primped ideal of the 50's.

I was wrong. Forty years after the dawn of feminism, the ideal of feminine beauty is more rigid and unnatural than ever.

When Gloria Steinem wrote that "all women are Bunnies," she did not mean it as a compliment; it was a feminist call to arms. Decades later, it's just an aesthetic fact, as more and more women embrace Botox and implants and stretch and protrude to extreme proportions to satisfy male desires. Now that technology is biology, all women can look like inflatable dolls. It's clear that American narcissism has trumped American feminism.

It was naïve and misguided for the early feminists to tendentiously demonize Barbie and Cosmo girl, to disdain such female proclivities as shopping, applying makeup and hunting for sexy shoes and cute boyfriends and to prognosticate a world where men and women dressed alike and worked alike in navy suits and were equal in every way.

But it is equally naïve and misguided for young women now to fritter away all their time shopping for boudoirish clothes and text-messaging about guys while they disdainfully ignore gender politics and the seismic shifts on the Supreme Court that will affect women's rights for a generation.

What I didn't like at the start of the feminist movement was that young women were dressing alike, looking alike and thinking alike. They were supposed to be liberated, but it just seemed like stifling conformity.

What I don't like now is that the young women rejecting the feminist movement are dressing alike, looking alike and thinking alike. The plumage is more colorful, the shapes are more curvy, the look is more plastic, the message is diametrically opposite - before it was don't be a sex object; now it's be a sex object - but the conformity is just as stifling.

And the Future . . .

Having boomeranged once, will women do it again in a couple of decades? If we flash forward to 2030, will we see all those young women who thought trying to Have It All was a pointless slog, now middle-aged and stranded in suburbia, popping Ativan, struggling with rebellious teenagers, deserted by husbands for younger babes, unable to get back into a work force they never tried to be part of?

It's easy to picture a surreally familiar scene when women realize they bought into a raw deal and old trap. With no power or money or independence, they'll be mere domestic robots, lasering their legs and waxing their floors - or vice versa - and desperately seeking a new Betty Friedan.

Maureen Dowd is a columnist for The New York Times. This essay is adapted from "Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide," to be published next month by G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Collected Essays

Greetings from Idiot America

AMERICAN IDIOTS

Nightmare in Paradise

O'Reilly's Sheepish Response to Hertzberg

War on Xmas--Hendrik Hertzberg Filets O'Reilly

Junking Science

In the Kingdom of the Half-Blind

No Jokes, Please, We're Liberal

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Medium is the Message

Marshall McLuhan:"The Medium is the Message"

Todd Kappelman

The High Priest of Pop-Culture

Objects of Desire

Technology as Extensions of the Human Body

The Dangers of Over-extended Technology

Four Questions Applied to Media

Europe vs. US Labor Practices

The Devil Proposes a Toast

Four eyes aren't better than two

Cracks in the Wall Between Advertising and News

Cracks in the Wall Between Advertising and News

Too Close to the Source?

Woman of Mass Destruction

1943 Supreme Court Opinion on Jehovah's Witness Free Speech Case

Thank Jehovah's Witnesses for speech freedoms

Coffee Tawk With Maureen Dowd

Who Will Control the Internet?

What's a Modern Girl to Do?

What's a Modern Girl to Do?

Marshall McLuhan:
"The Medium is the Message"