September 30, 2007

WHAT JUDGES & LAWYERS WON'T TELL YOU ABOUT JURIES

1990

William Penn may have thought he had settled the matter. Arrested in 1670 for preaching Quakerism, Penn was brought to trial. Despite Penn's admitting the charge, four of the 12 jurors voted to acquit. The judge sent the four to jail "without meat, drink, fire and tobacco" for failing to find Penn guilty. On appeal, however, the jurors' action was upheld and the right of juries to judge both the law and the facts -- to nullify the law if it chose -- became part of British constitutional law.

It ultimately became part of American constitutional law as well, but you'd never know it listening to jury instructions today almost anywhere in the country. With only a few exceptions, juries are explicitly or implicitly told to worry only about the facts and let the judge decide the law. The right of jury to judge both the law and the facts has become one of the legal system's best kept secrets.

Now a remarkable coalition has sprung up to challenge this secrecy as undemocratic, unconstitutional and dangerous. Though organized by libertarian activists, the Fully Informed Jury Amendment movement includes liberals and conservatives, Greens, drug decriminalization advocates, gun owner groups, peace activists, both sides of the abortion controversy, helmet and seatbelt activists, alternative medicine practitioners, taxpayer rights groups, environmentalists, criminal trial lawyers and law professors.

Organized by Larry Dodge and Don Doig, both of Helmville, Montana (population: 26; elevation 4300'), FIJA seeks to require that juries be informed of their rights. Informed jury amendments have been filed as an initiative in seven states and legislation has been introduced in the Alaska state legislature.

Merely raising the issue of jury rights can make prosecutors nervous, for it takes only one person aware of the right in order to hang a jury. In Washington, DC, where the concept was discussed in connection with the Marion Barry trial, a local television station reported that the US Attorney was worried that a jury might nullify the law in that case. The joke in DC was that Barry was campaigning, but only for one vote, that of a single juror. The specific charges against Barry revolved around his use of drugs and a growing number of people are coming to accept the argument that drug use or addiction should not be a criminal offense. Further many DC residents were concerned about the prosecution's heavy-handed pursuit of the mayor. Despite the refusal of courts to inform juries of their right to nullify, American juries have periodically exercised it anyway. In recent years, some peace protesters have been acquitted despite strong evidence that they violated the law. In the 19th century northern juries would refuse to convict under the fugitive slave laws. And in 1735 journalist Peter Zenger, accused of seditious libel, was acquitted by a jury that ignored the court's instructions on the law.

Those who have endorsed the right of a jury to judge both the law and the facts include Chief Justice John Jay, Samuel Chase, Dean Roscoe Pound, Learned Hand and Oliver Wendell Holmes. According to the Yale Law Journal in 1964, during the first third of the 19th century judges did inform juries of the right, forcing lawyers to argue "the law -- its interpretation and validity -- to the jury." By the latter part of the century, however, judges and state law were increasingly moving against jury rights. In 1895 the US Supreme Court upheld the principle but ruled that juries were not to be informed of it by defense attorneys, nor were judges required to tell them about it. Stephen Barkan, writing in Social Problems (October 1983), noted that the attacks on jury rights stemmed in part from juries acquitting strike organizers and other labor activists. And in 1892 the American Bar Review warned that jurors had "developed agrarian tendencies of an alarming character."

Today, the constitutions of only two states -- Maryland and Indiana -- clearly declare jury rights, although two others -- Georgia and Oregon -- refer to it obliquely. The informed jury movement would like all states to require that judges instruct juries on their power to serve, in effect, as the final legislature of the land concerning the law in a particular case.

This is not an arcane demand nor is it an anarchistic one. No one is arguing the right of juries to convict in an arbitrary fashion nor to declare a law unconstitutional, merely the right described by George Bernard Shaw, "to deliver an accused person from both the police and the letter of the law."

As the diverse nature of the movement suggests, many groups in this country feel the government has overstepped its power in some way and that there must be protection for the natural rights of American citizens. They are defending not only the right to protest or carry a gun or not wear seatbelts but challenging the right of the government to decide such matters without the mediating effect of a jury's judgement of fairness in a particular case.

For many liberals and progressives, who tend to be confident of the beneficent nature of government power, such a challenge may be a bit uncomfortable -- understandable in a case involving a peace protest, less appreciated if invoked by a member of the National Rifle Association. The libertarians argue that the two are of one cloth. As government intrusion in individual matters has increased, the libertarian view has gained influence, helping to tilt normal left-right divisions on their side. Libertarians, for example, have been key to the growing opposition to the barbaric Reagan-Bush war on drugs, providing some of the best analysis and advocacy available on the issue.

Libertarians are again in the lead on the issue. Many progressives may be uneasy about the thought of a western jury nullifying a case involving a gun control or seatbelt law, but this unease reminds one of little discussed principles that were once considered central to being an American -- not the least of which was freedom from some government official telling you how to live your life. As the design of the modern centralized welfare state frays and becomes increasingly authoritarian, reacquaintance with some of our individualistic roots has much to recommend it.

In fact, it is unlikely that a jury considering a gun control case would excuse the leader of an underground Nazi movement or a gang of bank robbers. It 1is far more likely that it would acquit the respectable rancher who simply believes that gun control represents further destruction of his paradigm of individual liberty. If so, what have we lost?

The history of jury rights suggests there is little to fear. In those states where the concept is respected to some degree it has had minimal effect on the overall functioning of the law. Jury rights have, on the other hand, played a little noted but significant role in the advance of religious and press freedom, the abolition of slavery and the building of a labor movement. Even in the face of hostility by contemporary courts, it has cropped up in political protest trials of the past few decades. And it might have surfaced more frequently absent that hostility. As one of the jurors said following the conviction of the Berrigan brothers in 1980:

We convicted them on three things, and we really didn't want to convict them on anything. But we had to, because of the way the judge said the only thing that you can use is what you get under the law... I would have loved to hold up a flag to show them we approved of what they were doing. It was very difficult for us to bring in that conviction.

The principle of jury rights involves the power to say no to the excesses of government, and thus serves as a final defense against tyranny. As Thomas Jefferson put it to Tom Paine in a 1789 letter, "I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."

September 28, 2007

THE FADING OF RESPECT

Washington's subway system is considering removing some if not most of the seats from its cars, thus converting its rolling stock into high capacity freight cars for those it used to consider its valued customers. In one concept there would be just 16 seats in a car for 225 passengers.

While we have become accustomed to the disrespect of citizens by the police, airport screeners and so forth, we are less aware of the many ways in which government and large corporations increasingly demonstrate contempt for those they are supposed to be serving.

For example, corporations regularly add conditions to what was once a simple transaction. We no longer buy things from a pleased firm; we have to "accept" or "agree" to a lengthy list of stipulations in order to do so. I received an electronic device for Christmas and came within seconds of throwing away a small yellow piece of paper full of small print that in fact contained a code needed to make the thing work. This is a long way from the time when the worst corporate cop-out was that batteries were not included.

Politics also overflows with contempt for the citizen, largely in the form of covert bribes known as campaign contributions that have made a handful of individuals infinitely more important than the average voter.

Respect is essential in a functioning society, yet not only are we losing the concept, we don't even hear much about it - with a few exceptions such as Richard Sennett's interesting book on the topic. In a society where citizens exhibit mutual respect, class and ethnic conflict is mediated, people feel better about themselves and children are sent in good directions. In a society lacking respect, we start to behave like too many rats in a cage, we lose the sense of both the needs of others and of their value to us, and adult and children alike become lonely warriors in false empires of one.

In recent years, thanks in large part to the post-9/11 panic but also to a general disintegration of local culture, respect has been markedly disappearing from my home town of Washington. The cops have gotten meaner and more brutal, the processes more pointlessly complex, the interactions between strangers more sullen, the local politicians less interested in what people say, the bureaucracy more burdensome, and the weakest - including the poor, the homeless and our children - more mistreated or ignored.

It may seem trivial to add to such a list the proposed removal of seats on the Metro. But it is precisely in such small ways that respect or disrespect is demonstrated and announces its priority. I, for example, make a point of saying "sir" or "ma'am" to cabbies and clerks. I suspect I am in a tiny minority, but like Blanche Dubois, I have always relied on the kindness of strangers and have tried to return the favor, not for reasons of ettiquette but because it makes life far more pleasant and interesting.

Our officials - certainly those in my town - have become remarkably indifferent to such concerns. One Metro board member actually said, "Part of the goal is not just squeezing more people on the train, but making the overall experience better." That makes no sense; it convinces no one; but as long as you can get away with it, so what?

The transit system originally meant to serve us has now become our responsibility to save. Our role has shifted from passenger and valued customer to mere input into the ongoing budgetary process.

If you watch for it, you'll come up with your own examples of the increasing disrespect of the powerful towards the ordinary. You don't even have to be poor. You just have to be one of those not in charge.

FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: THE FADING OF RESPECT

[50 years ago last summer, your editor covered his first story in Washington. Throughout the year, the Review will exhume some of his writings]

Sam Smith

Washington's subway system is considering removing some if not most of the seats from its cars, thus converting its rolling stock into high capacity freight cars for those it used to consider its valued customers. In one concept there would be just 16 seats in a car for 225 passengers.

While we have become accustomed to the disrespect of citizens by the police, airport screeners and so forth, we are less aware of the many ways in which government and large corporations increasingly demonstrate contempt for those they are supposed to be serving.

For example, corporations regularly add conditions to what was once a simple transaction. We no longer buy things from a pleased firm; we have to "accept" or "agree" to a lengthy list of stipulations in order to do so. I received an electronic device for Christmas and came within seconds of throwing away a small yellow piece of paper full of small print that in fact contained a code needed to make the thing work. This is a long way from the time when the worst corporate cop-out was that batteries were not included.

Politics also overflows with contempt for the citizen, largely in the form of covert bribes known as campaign contributions that have made a handful of individuals infinitely more important than the average voter.

Respect is essential in a functioning society, yet not only are we losing the concept, we don't even hear much about it - with a few exceptions such as Richard Sennett's interesting book on the topic. In a society where citizens exhibit mutual respect, class and ethnic conflict is mediated, people feel better about themselves and children are sent in good directions. In a society lacking respect, we start to behave like too many rats in a cage, we lose the sense of both the needs of others and of their value to us, and adult and children alike become lonely warriors in false empires of one.

In recent years, thanks in large part to the post-9/11 panic but also to a general disintegration of local culture, respect has been markedly disappearing from my home town of Washington. The cops have gotten meaner and more brutal, the processes more pointlessly complex, the interactions between strangers more sullen, the local politicians less interested in what people say, the bureaucracy more burdensome, and the weakest - including the poor, the homeless and our children - more mistreated or ignored.

It may seem trivial to add to such a list the proposed removal of seats on the Metro. But it is precisely in such small ways that respect or disrespect is demonstrated and announces its priority. I, for example, make a point of saying "sir" or "ma'am" to cabbies and clerks. I suspect I am in a tiny minority, but like Blanche Dubois, I have always relied on the kindness of strangers and have tried to return the favor, not for reasons of ettiquette but because it makes life far more pleasant and interesting.

Our officials - certainly those in my town - have become remarkably indifferent to such concerns. One Metro board member actually said, "Part of the goal is not just squeezing more people on the train, but making the overall experience better." That makes no sense; it convinces no one; but as long as you can get away with it, so what?

The transit system originally meant to serve us has now become our responsibility to save. Our role has shifted from passenger and valued customer to mere input into the ongoing budgetary process.

If you watch for it, you'll come up with your own examples of the increasing disrespect of the powerful towards the ordinary. You don't even have to be poor. You just have to be one of those not in charge.

September 27, 2007

ALTERNATIVE 9/11 REPORT

SAM SMITH, 2004 - It is now almost three years since the World Trade Center attack. During this period we have invaded two Muslim countries and moved far closer to the apartheid regime of Ariel Sharon. We have not taken a single important step to reduce hatred of the U.S., respond to justified complaints of the Muslim world, or create forums where current conflicts can be explored instead of explode.

In short, with psychotic consistency, our leaders have made matter worse, more dangerous, and more complicated to resolve.

To reduce the constituency of the most extreme one must respond to the concerns of the most rational. Our refusal to do so has left us in grave and unnecessary danger.

This is not poor policy, it is madness. It is criminally reckless and negligent and threatens not only those we blame but those we profess to protect.

Our leaders in both parties have condemned Americans to live in perpetual fear in no small part because they are unwilling to make amends for a foreign policy that for more half a century has regarded Arabs and other Muslims much as our south once regarded black Americans.

In the end there are two primary ways to deal with conflict: fight about it or talk about it. It is long past time for the latter. If you fight about it you are going to win, lose, just keep fighting, or grow tired of the whole business. There is no chance, given our current policies, that we can win the war we have chosen to fight and while we may not lose it, we have, in our reaction to 9/11, already lost much of what we are or strove to be as Americans.

The most likely outcome is that we will continue the war at ever increasing cost until we just can't take it any more. At which point, as in Vietnam, we will do what we should have done years earlier, namely to talk and work our way of the situation.

Some might call such a result appeasement, but was it appeasement when Henry Kissinger negotiated with the Vietcong? Today's appeasement is tomorrow's settlement.

Howard Zinn has pointed out that despite all the talk about Muslims hating America for its belief in democracy, Osama bin Laden managed to tolerate it well enough as long as he was getting American funds for his battle against the Soviet Union. It was the change in our foreign policy he couldn't stand.

Usually in a hostage situation - and we are the hostage in this situation - there is considerable curiosity as to the hostage-takers' demands. In this case, however, the media and politicians have blithely ignored the issue almost entirely. Thus many have forgotten what Al-Queda's early anger was about including, most prominently, the Israeli-Palestine situation, the American presence in Saudi Arabia, and the brutal sanctions against Iraq that had cost somewhere in the neighborhood of one million lives.

Looked at out of the context of 9/11 but within the context of the history of international disputes, these are not insurmountable crises. What was insurmountable was the unwillingness of either side to sit down honestly and deal with them.

The cost of our reaction since 9/11, including planetary endangerment as well as damage to our constitution, safety, and economy, bears little relationship to the underlying disputes. What gives them their awesome power is not their intrinsic nature but what they have perversely nurtured in the souls of the antagonists. This includes, in the case of bin Laden, seeing oneself no longer as a mere guerilla but as a holy emperor in waiting.

Shibley Telhami, who teaches peace and development at the University of Maryland, wrote in the Baltimore Sun:

"It's true that many in the Middle East have often criticized US foreign policy in the past 30 years. But in general, their notion of US aims has been largely focused not on profound animosity but on a sense of conflict in strategic interests and domestic politics over oil and Israel. Today, an increasing number of Muslims and Arabs believe that the United States is simply aiming to attack Muslims."

America is not only destroying itself but is destroying its ability to work its way of the situation. The contempt that the elite, including the media, have for this country's anti-war minority - despite its concordance with the views of much of the rest of the world - illustrates the miasma into which America's leaders have fallen.

Finding the right forums and solutions will be extremely difficult but the choice is either to discover some way to reduce the hatred of others in the world or to live in fear and danger all our lives. The progressive movement, in particular, needs to turn its sights from past wrongs to future possibilities.

And it may not be as hopeless as it seems. Of a Zogby survey, the Post wrote: "Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden tied for fourth place on a list of most admired world leaders. Jacques Chirac of France was first on that list. . ."

One way of putting it, therefore, is that the metaphorical distance we have to travel is only that from George Bush and John Kerry to that of Jacque Chirac. With the will, spirit, and patience, it is not an insurmountable trip and at the end we will be and feel far better for it.

FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: AN ALTERNATIVE 9/11 REPORT

SAM SMITH, 2004 - It is now almost three years since the World Trade Center attack. During this period we have invaded two Muslim countries and moved far closer to the apartheid regime of Ariel Sharon. We have not taken a single important step to reduce hatred of the U.S., respond to justified complaints of the Muslim world, or create forums where current conflicts can be explored instead of explode.

In short, with psychotic consistency, our leaders have made matter worse, more dangerous, and more complicated to resolve.

To reduce the constituency of the most extreme one must respond to the concerns of the most rational. Our refusal to do so has left us in grave and unnecessary danger.

This is not poor policy, it is madness. It is criminally reckless and negligent and threatens not only those we blame but those we profess to protect.

Our leaders in both parties have condemned Americans to live in perpetual fear in no small part because they are unwilling to make amends for a foreign policy that for more half a century has regarded Arabs and other Muslims much as our south once regarded black Americans.

In the end there are two primary ways to deal with conflict: fight about it or talk about it. It is long past time for the latter. If you fight about it you are going to win, lose, just keep fighting, or grow tired of the whole business. There is no chance, given our current policies, that we can win the war we have chosen to fight and while we may not lose it, we have, in our reaction to 9/11, already lost much of what we are or strove to be as Americans.

The most likely outcome is that we will continue the war at ever increasing cost until we just can't take it any more. At which point, as in Vietnam, we will do what we should have done years earlier, namely to talk and work our way of the situation.

Some might call such a result appeasement, but was it appeasement when Henry Kissinger negotiated with the Vietcong? Today's appeasement is tomorrow's settlement.

Howard Zinn has pointed out that despite all the talk about Muslims hating America for its belief in democracy, Osama bin Laden managed to tolerate it well enough as long as he was getting American funds for his battle against the Soviet Union. It was the change in our foreign policy he couldn't stand.

Usually in a hostage situation - and we are the hostage in this situation - there is considerable curiosity as to the hostage-takers' demands. In this case, however, the media and politicians have blithely ignored the issue almost entirely. Thus many have forgotten what Al-Queda's early anger was about including, most prominently, the Israeli-Palestine situation, the American presence in Saudi Arabia, and the brutal sanctions against Iraq that had cost somewhere in the neighborhood of one million lives.

Looked at out of the context of 9/11 but within the context of the history of international disputes, these are not insurmountable crises. What was insurmountable was the unwillingness of either side to sit down honestly and deal with them.

The cost of our reaction since 9/11, including planetary endangerment as well as damage to our constitution, safety, and economy, bears little relationship to the underlying disputes. What gives them their awesome power is not their intrinsic nature but what they have perversely nurtured in the souls of the antagonists. This includes, in the case of bin Laden, seeing oneself no longer as a mere guerilla but as a holy emperor in waiting.

Shibley Telhami, who teaches peace and development at the University of Maryland, wrote in the Baltimore Sun:

"It's true that many in the Middle East have often criticized US foreign policy in the past 30 years. But in general, their notion of US aims has been largely focused not on profound animosity but on a sense of conflict in strategic interests and domestic politics over oil and Israel. Today, an increasing number of Muslims and Arabs believe that the United States is simply aiming to attack Muslims."

America is not only destroying itself but is destroying its ability to work its way of the situation. The contempt that the elite, including the media, have for this country's anti-war minority - despite its concordance with the views of much of the rest of the world - illustrates the miasma into which America's leaders have fallen.

Finding the right forums and solutions will be extremely difficult but the choice is either to discover some way to reduce the hatred of others in the world or to live in fear and danger all our lives. The progressive movement, in particular, needs to turn its sights from past wrongs to future possibilities.

And it may not be as hopeless as it seems. Of a Zogby survey, the Post wrote: "Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden tied for fourth place on a list of most admired world leaders. Jacques Chirac of France was first on that list. . ."

One way of putting it, therefore, is that the metaphorical distance we have to travel is only that from George Bush and John Kerry to that of Jacque Chirac. With the will, spirit, and patience, it is not an insurmountable trip and at the end we will be and feel far better for it.

September 26, 2007

SURFEIT OF PRIGS

SAM SMITH, 1989 - In pre-revolutionary Connecticut, being a common scold was a felony. Despite the currently overcrowded conditions of our prisons there is much to be said for reviving this offense, for few characteristics of our time have been more burdensome than the noisy priggishness that has come over the land.

For some years we had a woman in our neighborhood who had the disconcerting habit of standing on her front porch heaping opprobrium on passing children. It didn't particularly bother the children, because the very young are blissfully immune to priggishness, knowing that anyone who behaves in such a manner properly belongs in an asylum.

The problem for adult America is that we increasingly seem to be taking such people seriously. We have elected a remarkable number to office, with the inevitable result that prigs are now taking over appointive positions as well - most disastrously on the Supreme Court which now has its first prig majority in many decades.

Worse, prigs are in ascendancy in places where they have previously been disqualified. For example, prigs, while long allowed in the editorial offices of newspapers, were largely banned from newsrooms. Prigs in show business were limited to such activities as the Morman Tabernacle Choir, Up With People and the Lawrence Welk Show. Now we even have priggish rock stars, engaged, among other things, in pelvic proselytizing against drugs. Prigs have even infiltrated the left.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. To some readers, the word may seem a bit arcane so a definition is in order. I like that of Webster's Third, in part because the definer clearly doesn't care for prigs, priggishness or priggism, perhaps because some prig is always trying to keep certain words out of dictionaries.

A prig, according to Webster's is, among other things,"one who offends or irritates by obvious or rigid observance of the proprieties: one self-sufficient in virtue, culture or propriety often in a pointed manner or to an obnoxious degree."

Being priggish is "marked by overvaluing oneself or one's ideas, habits, notions, by precise or inhibited adherence to them."

And priggism "is self-conscious propriety of conduct; stilted correctness of behavior; prim adherence to conventionality."

Woodrow Wilson, one of the few politicians who actually dealt with the prig problem, told a crowd in Pittsburgh in October 1914:" If you will think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself. Character is a byproduct, and any man who devotes himself to its cultivation in his own case will become a selfish prig."

The emphasis on salvation in isolation that is so central to current evangelicalism (not to mention certain strains of psychotherapy and contemporary self-help literature) is an ideal breeding ground for the prig. One can note, in fact, some correlation between the presumed level of God's direct notice and intervention in personal matters and the level of priggishness a religion encourages.

But whatever the cause, the relative priggishness of a religion becomes a matter of critical importance when theology spills over, as it has with a vengeance, into national politics. For when politicians and Supreme Court Justices talk and think about God they are not talking of the God of the deist, the 11th Commandment ecologist, the Unitarian, the Quaker, the liberal Catholic, the low Episcopalian, the Seventh Day Agnostic or even the ancient god of the Jew. It is patently clear from their language that they are describing The Great Prig In the Sky -- lord, master and protector of the unctuous, the self-righteous and the ostentatiously saved.

Creeping propriety has even affected institutions that should, by their nature, be immune, including many of a progressive bent. This is perhaps the inevitable result of a politics which has changed from an emphasis on coalitions to a politics of the most precise special interest. Having moved vigorously in recent decades from such simplistic divisions as labor and capital, farmers and ranchers, and liberal and conservative, we now find ourselves atomized into acronyms. The organizations bearing these acronyms carry out their purported purposes, but they also increasingly define and restrict us.

The problem with over-specialized self-definitions is, firstly, that one's politics can become as prissy as the dress of the dandy and, secondly, that eventually it causes one to act on the belief that the explanation is true and complete, making one seem less a real human and more a bumper sticker.

The recent self-conscious effort to upgrade the status of blacks by calling them African-Americans demonstrates well the problems involved in excessive concern with self-definition. One need only think of how black history might have been different if a publisher had been asked to consider a book called African-American Like Me or if Fats Waller had written, "What did I do to be so African- American and blue?" But the determinedly pious don't sing.

I tend to stay away from political prigs even when I am in sympathy with their cause. I can smell piety a mile away and prefer the company of sinners just trying to do better to those who leave the strong impression that you're not really good enough to join them. Besides they might catch me eating a Big Mac.

Fortunately, there is plenty of activism that doesn't ask too many questions or demand that we save ourselves before, together, we try to mitigate the damage that clearly faces all of us. Besides, the prigs never attain the perfection they pretend. They not only irritate others and deceive themselves, they miss that of the mystery of life which lies in its contradictions and inconsistencies. The sinners know, in their hearts, that they have more fun. Furthermore, as the poet William Stafford pointed out, "If you purify the pond, the lilies die."

FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: A SURFEIT OF PRIGS

SAM SMITH, 1989 - In pre-revolutionary Connecticut, being a common scold was a felony. Despite the currently overcrowded conditions of our prisons there is much to be said for reviving this offense, for few characteristics of our time have been more burdensome than the noisy priggishness that has come over the land.

For some years we had a woman in our neighborhood who had the disconcerting habit of standing on her front porch heaping opprobrium on passing children. It didn't particularly bother the children, because the very young are blissfully immune to priggishness, knowing that anyone who behaves in such a manner properly belongs in an asylum.

The problem for adult America is that we increasingly seem to be taking such people seriously. We have elected a remarkable number to office, with the inevitable result that prigs are now taking over appointive positions as well - most disastrously on the Supreme Court which now has its first prig majority in many decades.

Worse, prigs are in ascendancy in places where they have previously been disqualified. For example, prigs, while long allowed in the editorial offices of newspapers, were largely banned from newsrooms. Prigs in show business were limited to such activities as the Morman Tabernacle Choir, Up With People and the Lawrence Welk Show. Now we even have priggish rock stars, engaged, among other things, in pelvic proselytizing against drugs. Prigs have even infiltrated the left.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. To some readers, the word may seem a bit arcane so a definition is in order. I like that of Webster's Third, in part because the definer clearly doesn't care for prigs, priggishness or priggism, perhaps because some prig is always trying to keep certain words out of dictionaries.

A prig, according to Webster's is, among other things,"one who offends or irritates by obvious or rigid observance of the proprieties: one self-sufficient in virtue, culture or propriety often in a pointed manner or to an obnoxious degree."

Being priggish is "marked by overvaluing oneself or one's ideas, habits, notions, by precise or inhibited adherence to them."

And priggism "is self-conscious propriety of conduct; stilted correctness of behavior; prim adherence to conventionality."

Woodrow Wilson, one of the few politicians who actually dealt with the prig problem, told a crowd in Pittsburgh in October 1914:" If you will think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself. Character is a byproduct, and any man who devotes himself to its cultivation in his own case will become a selfish prig."

The emphasis on salvation in isolation that is so central to current evangelicalism (not to mention certain strains of psychotherapy and contemporary self-help literature) is an ideal breeding ground for the prig. One can note, in fact, some correlation between the presumed level of God's direct notice and intervention in personal matters and the level of priggishness a religion encourages.

But whatever the cause, the relative priggishness of a religion becomes a matter of critical importance when theology spills over, as it has with a vengeance, into national politics. For when politicians and Supreme Court Justices talk and think about God they are not talking of the God of the deist, the 11th Commandment ecologist, the Unitarian, the Quaker, the liberal Catholic, the low Episcopalian, the Seventh Day Agnostic or even the ancient god of the Jew. It is patently clear from their language that they are describing The Great Prig In the Sky -- lord, master and protector of the unctuous, the self-righteous and the ostentatiously saved.

Creeping propriety has even affected institutions that should, by their nature, be immune, including many of a progressive bent. This is perhaps the inevitable result of a politics which has changed from an emphasis on coalitions to a politics of the most precise special interest. Having moved vigorously in recent decades from such simplistic divisions as labor and capital, farmers and ranchers, and liberal and conservative, we now find ourselves atomized into acronyms. The organizations bearing these acronyms carry out their purported purposes, but they also increasingly define and restrict us.

The problem with over-specialized self-definitions is, firstly, that one's politics can become as prissy as the dress of the dandy and, secondly, that eventually it causes one to act on the belief that the explanation is true and complete, making one seem less a real human and more a bumper sticker.

The recent self-conscious effort to upgrade the status of blacks by calling them African-Americans demonstrates well the problems involved in excessive concern with self-definition. One need only think of how black history might have been different if a publisher had been asked to consider a book called African-American Like Me or if Fats Waller had written, "What did I do to be so African- American and blue?" But the determinedly pious don't sing.

I tend to stay away from political prigs even when I am in sympathy with their cause. I can smell piety a mile away and prefer the company of sinners just trying to do better to those who leave the strong impression that you're not really good enough to join them. Besides they might catch me eating a Big Mac.

Fortunately, there is plenty of activism that doesn't ask too many questions or demand that we save ourselves before, together, we try to mitigate the damage that clearly faces all of us. Besides, the prigs never attain the perfection they pretend. They not only irritate others and deceive themselves, they miss that of the mystery of life which lies in its contradictions and inconsistencies. The sinners know, in their hearts, that they have more fun. Furthermore, as the poet William Stafford pointed out, "If you purify the pond, the lilies die."

September 25, 2007

POTOMAC PLAYGROUND

2006

Phil Hart said the Senate was a place that did things 20 years after it should have. The same could be said of much of the rest of Washington. In fact the yet-to-be accomplished U.S.-Iranian negotiations are now at 27 years and still counting.

The common presumption is that such tardiness is a function of politics. In fact, it is more a product of culture, a culture founded on infantile presumptions about the proper image one should present. Thus you find grown men walking around the Pentagon with rows of ribbons on their uniformed chests to remind everyone of their purported accomplishments. You have ex-preppies plotting invasions against small countries to prove their machismo. You have graduates of Yale and Princeton, whose daddies - as LBJ said - wouldn't let them into the stock brokerage firm - figuring out the best way to torture people for the CIA. You have drones from business and law schools trained to think that certainty is an adequate substitute for competence. You have journalists getting big bucks for the privilege of sitting through endless, newsless White House briefings and flying off with the president to his ranch. And you have experts at think tanks trading arcane knowledge apparently unaware that their resulting decisions might affect real people.

Although there are far more women engaged in this charade than was formerly the case, the culture is primarily based on childish male notions of strength and prowess. The women who get to the top in such a culture often do so because they emulate its values rather than offering an alternative, witness the cruel capitalism of Margaret Thatcher, the indifference of Madeleine Albright to the deaths caused by Iraqi sanctions, or the heartless aggression of Condoleezza Rice.

We don't read about this or hear about it because the mass media is a fulltime participant in this never consummated ritual of manhood that our politics have become. In tribal times, the ritual would have been followed by manhood. In Washington, the ritual never ends.
The costs can be enormous. The Vietnam War, for example, was driven in part by Harvard faculty members trying to prove their virility. Over the last fifty years, a narcissistic establishment absorbed in its self-image and indifferent to its consequences, has destroyed constitutional government, made the United States hated around the world and done so much damage to the environment that two major scientists recently suggested that we better plan to find ourselves another planet.

The immediate problem is Iraq, now so much a mess that they had to call in a commission, which is to say some adults. As Representative Frank Wolfe put it, "there's almost a biblical thing about wise elderly people. . . I mean, Sandra Day O'Connor is not looking for another job. So they can speak truth."
In other words, to do in Washington what you're supposed to do, you have to be retired.

What's missing here is rational adulthood. What's lacking is a town that attracts those still full of energy but mature enough to put away childish things and moral enough to serve their land ahead of themselves. Instead we have a city overflowing with those whose egos and ambitions are trapped in almost teenage garb.

And so we have to wait 27 years for anyone to dare to suggest that it might be wise to talk with Iran. That's not a thoughtful issue for discussion on NPR or the News Hour. That's a matter for a therapist.

If George Bush has done one service he has brought the capital's destructive childishness out of the closet. What has still to be recognized, however, is that he is not an exception but merely a sadly extreme example how the place really works.

FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: POTOMAC PLAYGROUND

SAM SMITH, 2006 - Phil Hart said the Senate was a place that did things 20 years after it should have. The same could be said of much of the rest of Washington. In fact the yet-to-be accomplished U.S.-Iranian negotiations are now at 27 years and still counting.

The common presumption is that such tardiness is a function of politics. In fact, it is more a product of culture, a culture founded on infantile presumptions about the proper image one should present. Thus you find grown men walking around the Pentagon with rows of ribbons on their uniformed chests to remind everyone of their purported accomplishments. You have ex-preppies plotting invasions against small countries to prove their machismo. You have graduates of Yale and Princeton, whose daddies - as LBJ said - wouldn't let them into the stock brokerage firm - figuring out the best way to torture people for the CIA. You have drones from business and law schools trained to think that certainty is an adequate substitute for competence. You have journalists getting big bucks for the privilege of sitting through endless, newsless White House briefings and flying off with the president to his ranch. And you have experts at think tanks trading arcane knowledge apparently unaware that their resulting decisions might affect real people.

Although there are far more women engaged in this charade than was formerly the case, the culture is primarily based on childish male notions of strength and prowess. The women who get to the top in such a culture often do so because they emulate its values rather than offering an alternative, witness the cruel capitalism of Margaret Thatcher, the indifference of Madeleine Albright to the deaths caused by Iraqi sanctions, or the heartless aggression of Condoleezza Rice.

We don't read about this or hear about it because the mass media is a fulltime participant in this never consummated ritual of manhood that our politics have become. In tribal times, the ritual would have been followed by manhood. In Washington, the ritual never ends.
The costs can be enormous. The Vietnam War, for example, was driven in part by Harvard faculty members trying to prove their virility. Over the last fifty years, a narcissistic establishment absorbed in its self-image and indifferent to its consequences, has destroyed constitutional government, made the United States hated around the world and done so much damage to the environment that two major scientists recently suggested that we better plan to find ourselves another planet.

The immediate problem is Iraq, now so much a mess that they had to call in a commission, which is to say some adults. As Representative Frank Wolfe put it, "there's almost a biblical thing about wise elderly people. . . I mean, Sandra Day O'Connor is not looking for another job. So they can speak truth."
In other words, to do in Washington what you're supposed to do, you have to be retired.

What's missing here is rational adulthood. What's lacking is a town that attracts those still full of energy but mature enough to put away childish things and moral enough to serve their land ahead of themselves. Instead we have a city overflowing with those whose egos and ambitions are trapped in almost teenage garb.

And so we have to wait 27 years for anyone to dare to suggest that it might be wise to talk with Iran. That's not a thoughtful issue for discussion on NPR or the News Hour. That's a matter for a therapist.

If George Bush has done one service he has brought the capital's destructive childishness out of the closet. What has still to be recognized, however, is that he is not an exception but merely a sadly extreme example how the place really works.

September 24, 2007

WHAT'S A HUMANITIES?

1979

I have to confess something. I have strayed from the civic abstinence I promised on these pages a while back. I have once again joined a committee. But it's just a small committee and I think I can handle it. If not, drive me home and I'll never do it again. Promise.

The committee is called the DC Community Humanities Council. Fifty states and Puerto Rico have such committees - and the funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities that follow in their wake - but DC, through a combination of federal inertia and local indifference, has been years late to the gate. . .

I was invited to serve on the committee by the NEH for reasons that are not entirely clear, but presumably have something to do with what is known in the trade as "community outreach," or, as Senator Scoop Jackson put it even less felicitously the other day, providing another "rung on the spectrum." Since I had complained in print about the lack of a local humanities committee, I thought I ought to put some time where my mouth was. But there was another less honorable reason for my willingness to accept the invitation. You see, what the folks at NEH don't know is that not only did I graduate from college magna cum probation but I was so indifferent to the humanities and scholarship in general that my English instructor once sent me a neatly written card that read: "Mr. Cole requests the pleasure of your attendance at the next regular meeting of his course." Many of the courses I did attend left me thoroughly befuddled. The first hint that joining the fellowship of educated men was going to be a treacherous business came when I returned to my room after the initial day of classes. I settled down to dash off a bit of Max Weber before supper. Ten pages in my heart went into a barrel roll and my hands began to rattle. I hadn't understood one word the man was saying. This exquisite form of panic would return many times over the next four years.

I struggled to separate the thoughts of Locke from the sermons of Cotton Mather; Veblin and Bentham congealed in my brain; Karl Marx was, as far as I could discern, the opiate of sadistic professors; and when I walked into an examination hall I was certain that all around me could balance more philosophers within the margins of a blue book than I. The die was cast early as one of my anthropology professors noted on a paper. "This is pretty good journalism," she wrote of my painfully conceived review of the Naga situation, "but it is bad anthropology." I left the ivy-bedizened halls vowing never to return and, in fact, never did except for an occasional guest talk to the class of a professor or two of eccentric tastes. So for me to be invited to share responsibility for the fate of the humanities with genuine, certified, dissertating scholars was too good an offer to pass up - not unlike an ex-con being asked to serve on a judicial nominations commission.

So of course I accepted. This first thing that happened was a friend, when I told her of the project, described herself as "one of nine people in the city who knows what the humanities are." I passed on the remark to an historian who asked, "Don't you think that figure is a little high?"

Right away I knew I was in trouble. One of the real pleasures of graduating from college is that seldom thereafter does anyone ask you to define your terms. I had been away from the academic world for twenty years and had sort of assumed that in the interim they had come up with handy definitions for things like the "humanities." But apparently we were heading for square one -- back to Humanities 10: "Define the humanities and illustrate by example, citing sources where applicable." .

It all came back. The slush of ideas, concepts, symbolisms, metaphors, imagery, and philosophies through which I had so laboriously slogged during college, and so assiduously avoided since, was underfoot once more and I could feel my socks getting wet and clammy.

I had voluntarily agreed to serve a cause whose meaning and purpose I thought I understood, but which I couldn't decently explain to anyone who didn't understand. I had done so somewhat whimsically and capriciously, in part because I sensed it all had something to do with constructive irrelevance, a subject which has come to interest me after years of excessive relevance and the not totally satisfying product of the same. It also seemed to favor my anarchistic side, since the humanities like to ask questions without providing answers while politics tends to provide answers without asking questions. Further, humanists have a reputation for not doing anything useful, so perhaps if I became associated with them, people would stop asking me to do things that were useful.

But that would hardly do when we had to go out and explain what we were about and why anyone should be interested. You can't tell a sullen scribe from one of the dailies who asks "What do you see as the role of the humanities in this city?" something like, "If you have to ask, you'll never know." So I decided I better find out what a humanities really was before the National Endowment blew my cover and decided that this community outreach business had gone far enough. Here is some of what I found:

The word humanities doesn't mean much to most people. Most people to whom it does mean much work on college campuses. For them it means pretty much what it did when I was in college: it's what you major in if you're not in the physical or social sciences, haven't decided what to do with your life or want to go to law school but would like to learn something first.

Here are some of the humanities: philosophy, comparative religion, history, ethics, literature.

Here is one thing the humanities have in common: you feel a little foolish listing them on a job application form.

That may be one reason that most people who know about the humanities are found on college campuses: no one else will hire them.

There's another reason: Some people on campus feel that the humanities shouldn't be talked about too much off campus. They feel the humanities are a profession and that you should have a Ph.D. to be "in" them. They want people to treat them like physicians and lawyers and CPAs and lieutenant colonels, so they call each other 'Doctor' a lot.

It is confusing because it suggests that you might need a license to think about literature, religion, history or philosophy. This is not necessarily true. It is still further confusing because humanities scholars, when they're not calling themselves 'Doctor,' call themselves "humanists." Off campus, the word sometimes has a different meaning. The woman down the street may be called "a real humanist" because she set up a senior citizen center or organized the heart drive, even though she doesn't know who Kierkegaard was. You can't be a humanist on campus without knowing who Kierkegaard was, no matter how much you raise for the heart fund.

Finally, it is confusing because in many people's minds, a doctor is meant to fix something. Humanist-type doctors are hard-pressed to prove that they do. And in our scientific and technological society, we tend to discount what can't be proved. There is no morality program you can slip into the computer, no antibiotic against cultural vacuity, no certifiable benefits to be achieved through an acquaintance with the past and no minimum daily requirement for literature.

I think a part of what the National Endowment for the Humanities is trying to do is to end some of this confusion. This is good because even though the word "humanities" is not used that much off campus, we use what it describes all the time. We just don't have a name for it.

We practice it without a license and without credit. Some of the biggest issues of our lives are concerns of the humanities. Like whether we accept a politician's definition of "acceptable risk" at a nuclear power plant. Like publicly funded abortions or legalized gambling or how we distribute political power .

These are also political questions and their philosophical, historical or religious core often gets hidden behind the politics, which is too bad because good politics is a poor substitute for a good philosophy, whereas good philosophy can makes good politics.

Our best presidents, for example, were those who convinced people not just of their politics but of its philosophical or ethical base. The New Deal, the War on Poverty, the civil rights legislation and the Peace Corps would never have gotten off the ground if people hadn't accepted the philosophy before the politics.

We need, as Martin Marty said, a place from which to view the world. The media and the merchandisers would like us to think otherwise. They want us to acquiesce in their plan to create packaged consumers for their packaged products - whether it be artificial eggs, a new TV series or a president. They would like us to want more than to be. The thing that keeps us in rebellion is a part of what the humanities are about. This is the revolutionary aspect of the National Endowment for the Humanities. It proposes to fund the dangerous notion that we can still think for ourselves. That we still want to know why we do things as well as when and how much it will cost. That we still have some choices left. . .

Whatever a humanities is, it used to be different. Rod French, a scholar at George Washington University who happens to be both an academic and a non-academic humanist, described it this way in a paper prepared for the National League of Cities:

"At the opening of the modern age, in the city states of Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, humanist scholars and poets handled state correspondence, represented their sovereigns as diplomatic emissaries and wrote orations for great civic occasions. But already in the 16th century, this whole class of scholars began a long decline into disgrace and neglect. Their ambition and poor judgment was responsible in part, but they were also the victims of deep social changes. The rise of the middle class and the democratic revolutions of the 18th century further displaced humanists from positions of influence. And then industrialization placed a premium on a set of new skills. Those who persisted in studying the humanities were forced to the margins of public life. . . .In the Renaissance, the term humanist referred to men (almost exclusively} who dedicated themselves to the study of the humanities. That happened to mean to them the study of the literature and history and politics and ethics and art of classical Greece and Rome. Today, hardly anyone in public life feels they need a humanist and few humanists feel they need a public life . . .

"The only way to get the humanist down from the ivory tower is to drag him into public affairs. If his alleged contribution proves in actual experience to be trivial or ephemeral, then the game is up. If the managers of society refuse even to give his questions a hearing then we can conclude fairly that they are not really friends of the good society."

Here is one more historical note: Tocqueville called the French Revolution the first great event in history brought about by men of letters. The Russian Revolution was another. So, as late as this century, some humanists have been found relevant.

The National Endowment for the Humanities says that all programs funded by state humanities committees should have "scholars involved centrally." Artists can get money from their national endowment without scholars being centrally involved in their sculpture or dance. Governments are more leery of unformed ideas than they are of unformed stone, which may be why federally funded thinking must be accompanied by licensed personnel. I think humanities scholars should have to prove that their ideas are worth something, just like anyone else, but they're on the dole far less than most groups, there isn't much risk that they will turn into a mandarin class in the near future, and they need the money, so what the hell. You can always pull the anchovies off the pizza if you don't like them..

One of the problems with defining the humanities is that it is hard to do anything well without them. A doctor or a nuclear physicist who isn't also a humanist can cause a lot of trouble. One of the purposes of the humanities is to give some direction to the other things we do. The humanities are often at their most potent when they modify something else rather than being just an end. Of course, you don't have to justify interest in the humanities on the basis of social utility. After all, the Declaration of Independence ranked the pursuit of happiness only after life and liberty as a basic right. It hasn't fared so well since. The humanities, among other things, have to do with the pursuit of happiness. As Hubert Humphrey said when the bill establishing the National Endowment passed, "At last the Congress voted for fun; at last the Congress voted and said let's have something that celebrates the rights of man to sheer fun."

But, then again, we may be too late. Newsweek seems to think so. It ran a headline over a book review recently that read: "Albert Camus: The Last of the Humanists." I hope not. . .

So what's a humanities? I can't really give you one answer. But I can give you several. It's asking why before we say yes. It's remembering something someone wrote two centuries ago when we can't remember what we wrote yesterday. It's mistakes we don't have to make because they've already been made and solutions we don't have to dream up because someone has already thought of them. It's how we got where we are and where we might go from here. It's things we can't measure yet know have depth and breadth. It's parts of our culture we might lose like the Indian tribe writing its language down and putting it in a book. It's parts of our culture that we're often slow to recognize as such, like the legislature in Georgia finally making "Georgia on My Mind" the state song and inviting Ray Charles to come down and sing it. It's the moral, philosophical, and historical issues hidden behind the political babble. It's rights and beliefs and their protection. It's preserving the past and the future and not just exploiting today. It's thinking as well as talking, questioning as well as answering. And it's placing human values and culture at the center of our world and making machines and technology and Channel Seven serve us rather than the other way around.

If we talk about things like these, we'll be talking humanities whether we know it or not. And I think we'll be reminded that they really do matter. And have all along.

FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: A FIGHT THAT DOESN'T MATTER

[50 years ago last summer, your editor covered his first story in Washington. Throughout the year, the Review will exhume some of his writings]

Sam Smith

Last night, browsing through Sartre before bedtime, I came across this:

"Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God does not exist. Rather it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. . . Not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue."

It struck me as I read this that here was the key to the currently inflated battle between church and state: in the end it doesn't matter. The moral Christian, Jew or Muslim and the moral rationalist will follow much the same path. Keep them away from the pulpit and you may not be able to tell them apart.

The difference lies not in their actual life but in what they believe about it. The existentialist, for example, believes that existence - and behavior in it - precedes and defines essence. The religious true believer thinks it's faith, or what is known in science as speculation and, in gambling, a bet.

Now one can have an interesting debate about this, but the point here is that as far as politics and social policy are concerned the difference should make no difference once it moves to the level of actually doing something rather than just talking about, celebrating or praising why you're doing it.

Of course, politically, it does make a difference. One reason is that there are a hell of a lot more registered practicing Christians than there are registered practicing existentialists. Another is that politicians, aware of this demographic, find it much easier to pander to the faith that drives these voters rather than to the works the faith demands.

Thus, whether in the White House or in Selma, you never hear politicians describe themselves as "works-based Christians," because it is much easier to associate oneself with unchallengeable holiness than with intended products too simple to observe and assess.

There was a time when there were a lot more works-based Christians around to serve as models. At one point, for example, we had Father Drinan in Congress, Father Baroni in the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Father Kemp on the DC school board. During the war on poverty I found myself constantly in the company of preachers, some of whom became close friends. When I asked myself why, my answer was in part that while the engines driving us were different, our intended routes were the same. We accepted uncertainty, honored inquiry and persisted in the hope that what we did that day might make a difference.

Today's obsession with faith is driven by a number of causes, among them the deterioration of American culture and democracy, a desperate searching for certainty, evangelical abuse and heresy, political cynicism and deceit, as well as a media that perpetuates the illusion that it is better to raise one's hands in prayer than to use them for good in this life and on this day.

Of these forces, it is the media that often wields the greatest clout - a media that pretends to be fact-based and objective yet all but writhes in the aisle, screams Hallelujah and shouts Jesus' name when a fraudulent pol mounts the pulpit or a president declares some carefully concocted connection with the Almighty for his war or budget policy. This adulation of false faith and the indifference to true works is not only cynical but is helping to destroy America.

It has also helped turn the press from being reporters to being mere acolytes at the holy communion of America's powerful. If, on the other hand, the media followed the lead of Sartre, it would do us all a great service. Instead of telling us what politicians pretended to believe it would report on what they actually did. . . moving, one might say, from faith-based to fact-based reporting

September 20, 2007

ON GADFLIES

[50 years ago last summer, your editor covered his first story in Washington. Throughout the year, the Review will exhume some of his writings]

SAM SMITH, 1994 - I was recently described in an otherwise kind article in Washington's City Paper as a "political gadfly." This was neither the first time nor will it be the last.

Gadflies are only barely further along in the evolutionary chain of things than maggots and slugs. They are insects frequently found flying around cattle or resting placidly on a pile of excrement. As readers well know, I never am at rest sitting on a pile of shit.

Being called a gadfly is a little like being bitten by one. It's also, notes Jon Rowe, like Ralph Nader being called a "self-styled consumer advocate." Where, Rowe wonders, does one go to get a license to become an properly appointed consumer advocate?

People in Washington who call other people gadflies tend to be either players or people who wish they were. A player is someone trying to be Assistant Secretary of HUD, someone who represents a major polluter and claims to practice environmental law, someone who is paid large sums of money to shout down Eleanor Clift on national TV or who pays large sums of money to get politicians to wrestle with -- and ultimately defeat -- their own conscience.

Players are annoyed by gadflies because they won't play according to the players' rules. On the other hand, gadflies don't clutter up the bureaucracy making dull speeches, and they don't create toxic waste sites or corrupt the political system. They tend to eat Mr. Tyson's chicken rather than fly on his planes. And at the end of the day, they have less explaining to do to their children.

Players tend to be quite insecure which is why they need such an elaborate support system, including the Washingtonian magazine, the Gridiron Dinner, the Washington Post Style section and the Diane Rehm Show. Players consider themselves serious; gadflies not. Russell Baker, a serious man, once addressed this delusion in a column in which he pointed out the difference between being serious and being solemn. Baker observed that children are almost always serious, but that they start to lose the trait in adolescence. Washington is the capital of solemnity but few of its elite are truly serious.

Gadflies, on the other hand, are usually serious. A gadfly tends to be someone with ideas, energy and a modicum of talent but who lacks a PR firm, ghostwriter and a proper flair for networking. A gadfly is someone who actually wants to get something done, but often can't -- largely because of all the players in the way.

EF Schumacher once said, "We must do what we conceive to be the right thing, and not bother our heads or burden our souls with whether we are going to be successful. Because if we don't do the right thing, we'll be doing the wrong thing, and we will just be part of the disease, and not a part of the cure."

Gadflies would agree. They think for themselves. But in Washington thought is something players purchase, just like they purchase gas, condoms or political access. People who think are considered just another part of the service industry with commensurate compensation and social regard.

When gadflies feel like using a bovine analogy, they prefer to think of themselves as mavericks -- animals whose only sin has been to wander off from their colleagues. They also drink upstream from the herd which, if you know anything about cattle, is not a bad idea.

Take a run-of-the-mill gadfly such as myself and then some average players -- say the editorial board the Washington Post -- and compare their records over a couple of decades. The gadfly approach to freeways, urban policy, Vietnam, the environment and Bill Clinton will, I think, hold up pretty well. The problem gadflies face is not that they are irrelevant or wrong but that their timing is a bit off. The FBI used to categorize members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade as "premature anti-fascists." Similarly, many gadflies are just moderates of an age that has not yet arrived.

September 19, 2007

FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: PRACTICING ANTHROPOLOGY WITHOUT A LICENSE

[50 years ago last summer, your editor covered his first story in Washington. Throughout the year, the Review will exhume some of his writings]

Sam Smith

{From a speech delivered to the 100th anniversary conference of the Berkeley School of Anthropology]

Ever since I got the invitation to speak to you all I have been bragging because to an anthropology BA this is a bit like an ex-con being asked to address a conference of the American Bar Association.

At a seminal moment in my career planning - which is to say around sophomore year - the sainted Cora Dubois wrote of my analysis of the Nagas, "This is pretty good journalism but it is bad anthropology," revealing a disorder which, as you may notice, plagues me yet.

Part of what had attracted me to anthropology in the first place was the search for a society that would find my personal traits and rituals acceptable enough for membership. Like, I suspect, many real anthropologists, I was a subculture of one looking for my lost tribe.

I began this search for the lost tribe of Sams at an unusually early age thanks to the fact that my school - Germantown Friends in Philadelphia - was one of only two high schools in the country that offered a course in anthropology at the time. And in ninth grade.

At this precise moment of teenage alienation and confusion, the school offered the reverse of a Pandora's box, for when opened, anthropology freed not evil but hope and possibility, leaving locked safely inside the myth of the single, homogeneous cultural answer.

In the middle of the stolid, segregated, monolithic 1950s, Howard Platt showed us a new way to look at the world. And what a wonderful world it was. Not the stultifying world of our parents, not the monochromatic world of our neighborhood, not the boring world of 9th grade, but a world of fantastic options, a world in which people got to cook, eat, shelter themselves, have sex, dance and pray in an extraordinary variety of ways.

Mr. Platt did not exorcise racism, and he did not teach ethnic harmony, cultural sensitivity, the regulation of diversity or the morality of non-prejudiced behavior. He didn't need to. He taught something far more important. Mr. Platt opened a world of variety, not for us to fear but to learn about, appreciate and enjoy. It was not a problem, but a gift.

Of course, one of the difficulties with a school that teaches such things is that you can come to think the rest of education is like that, an assumption of which I was quickly disabused at Harvard U. Whatever intelligence I possessed did not seem the sort required to excel at Harvard. Long afterwards I would figure out that much of what Harvard was about was a giant game of categories, in which real people, real events and real phenomena were assigned to fictitious groupings such as the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, or the Freudian Tradition.

If you were brazen enough to examine evidence with as few paradigms and as many questions as possible -- in short to use one's innate capacity to imagine, to dream and to speculate -- you risked being regarded as ignorant, or at least odd. In Harvard's cataloging system, the accidental, the chaotic, the imagined, the malevolent, the culturally unfamiliar, and the unique often got misplaced. I would later learn that Washington wasn't much different: education was something one received, rehearsed, and regurgitated. You didn't play with it, experiment with it, and you certainly didn't make it your own.

If I had chosen one of the conventional majors, I might never have made it through. Fortunately, or inevitably, I found my way -- academically and geographically -- to a backwater of the university: the anthropology department, which lived like an Amazonian tribe well off the main campus in the dusty, dim recesses of the Peabody Museum. Out of some four thousand undergraduates, only about 20 majored in anthropology, five of them former students of Howard Platt. To be sure, there were plenty of Principles, Theories, and Categories, but the greater time was spent on observation and reporting, not so far removed from my journalistic interests. Further, once among the artifacts stored with faded labels in long, ancient, wood rimmed cases, or passing a canoe or totem pole en route to class, you felt distinctly free of Harvard, fully liberated from the Major Ideas of Western Civilization. In those dark corridors was the path to a world of variety and exploration, a field trip into all that lay beyond Harvard Square.

Now I had no intention of actually becoming an anthropologist. There were practical problems such as a sybaritic streak that made unappealing the thought of living months with strangers and without radio, bars or jazz.

I admit to having thus taken up good space at the Peabody Museum and wasting the time of some excellent teachers. I used anthropology much the way a student headed towards law school sometimes uses the English Department, as a last quick look around the world before entering the endless dark tunnel of specialized proficiency.

Those who taught at the time included such figures as Clyde Kluckhohn who would pace up and down the lecture hall stage in combat boots. Steve Williams' classes were as well organized as Kluckhohn's were anarchistic. Cora Dubois strode into class in a trench coat as if just off a flying boat from the Pacific. I believe it was Dubois who told us of a Pacific tribe that thought a woman could only conceive as a result of multiple acts of intercourse, thus allowing the semen to accumulate in sufficient quantity to produce a baby. I liked this idea given a growing concern over the precipitous potential of personal relations and I thought it a considerable improvement over those arrangements actually in place.

On the first day of my freshman anthropology class, the professor - William Howells - drew an invisible evolutionary time line on the wall of the lecture hall. As we twisted in our seats the eras, periods, and epochs of musical name and mystical significance boldly circumscribed the room. Finally we came back to where the professor stood and when there was nearly no place further to go, he announced that this was the beginnings of us. We were only inches from the first fire maker.

My relationship with that fire maker, and with the creator of the stone ax, the inventor of the spear thrower, and the first potter, would never cease to be both humbling and glorious. Humbling because our true evolutionary insignificance daily mocks our pretensions. Yet also glorious because without the endless random reiteration of individual creation, choice, and imagination, we might still be shivering in the dark instead of reading a book with our feet up and wondering whether there's another beer in the fridge. We are nothing and everything, inexplicably and inseparably bundled together.

Thus armed, I went out into what we call the real world. I did not understand the influence of anthropology on me and I make only a marginal pretense of understanding it now. And I don't want to over-credit it. After all, there were many other influences. For example, I grew up in a large family, at times the ultimate cross-cultural experience. Politics, with which I gained an early fascination, also is far more culturally conscious than most trades. And I am married to a social historian who has influenced me greatly - although I suppose that social historians are really just covert anthropologists - filling in the tiny gap between archeology and ethnography.

I also suspect that I was drawn to anthropology in part out of an instinctive preference for inductive thinking, reflected in my love of reporting and detective stories. And my taste for irony is perhaps related as well since irony is but another form of cultural deconstruction.

Still anthropology has clearly stood me in good stead. For example, writing as a young man on two critical issues of the time - Vietnam and civil rights - I was, in the former instance, a cold war liberal and recently discharged Coast Guard officer struggling to get it straight, But in the latter case, I reflected confident if unpopular thought. Vietnam I had to figure out; civil rights just came naturally.

In the winter of 1966 I took part in a bus boycott in Washington over a fare increase and wrote a story about it afterwards. The leader of the boycott - and the head of the local Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee - called me and said he'd like to meet. Which is how this 28-year-old white kid, who had only a handful of black friends, ended up as Marion Barry's public relations advisor. . .

Unlike most white Washingtonians, I would remain involved in local politics in a city that was two-thirds black. It could be tough - as it was the day Stokley Carmichael walked into SNCC headquarters and said that we whites were no longer welcomed in the civil rights movement. Black power had raised its fist.

My solution was to think of myself as a minority, such as a Jew in New York or a Pole in Chicago. I also drew from two wells - that of anthropology and that of my Quaker education, the former to help me understand what was happening, the latter to encourage continued witness of my own values regardless of what was happening.

And so I relaxed and plunged ahead anyway. In fact, just a few years later I was helping to start the biracial DC Statehood Party that actually held an office or two for a quarter of century.

I continued to fall into an odd series of biracial activities, including five years as the token white on a TV and then a radio show, otherwise comprised of black journalists. On our last show a caller phoned and said of my colleagues and myself, "I've finally got this show figured out. Adrienne and Sam are married and Jerry is Adrienne's father and you all need family counseling." I liked that because I shared the view of intercultural relations of my friend Chuck Stone - former top aide of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. He said treat everyone like they were a member of your family. It doesn't mean false sensitivity or false harmony, but it does mean a sense of reciprocal liberty, underlying solidarity, and a willingness to share the window seat.

I sometimes think of good politics as the art of turning selfishness into virtue and I think good multicultural relations often work the same way - which is why ethnic restaurants are so popular. It's a good deal for everyone.

Just like living in DC's ethnic minority has been a good deal for me. Here are some reasons why:

- Black Washingtonians understood loss, pain, suffering and disappointment. They helped me become better at handling these things.

- Teachers, artists, writers and poets are highly respected in the black community. As a writer, I liked that.

- As a writer, the imagery, rhythm and style of black speech appealed to me far more than the jargon-ridden circumlocution of the white city.

- Besides, white Washington always seemed to want me to conform to it; black Washington always accepted me for who I was.

I had to discover such things by myself because no one - other than a few anthropologists - had ever told me that diversity could be fun.

Anthropology also greatly affected my reportage. For example, most urban plans are typically treated as phenomena with largely economic consequences. Their cultural impact, however, is huge. With few exceptions, every major urban plan I have examined has assumed that if you create a better physical design, people will adapt to it for the better. But these same plans also assumed that a major reason for the improvement would be that the physical design would attract a better class of people. And somebody had to get out of their way to let it happen.

One of my other interests has been political corruption. To many this is a simple matter, did the politician take the bribe or didn't he? But in fact, there has repeatedly lurked a cultural story behind the headlines. For example, one of the big changes in the immigrant experience has been the weakening of institutions that acculturated the newcomer - and top on the list of these institutions were the church and the political machine. Richard Croker, a tough 19th century county boss of Tammany Hall, grew almost lyrical when he spoke of his party's duty to immigrants: "They do not speak our language, they do not know our laws, they are the raw material with which we have to build up the state . . .[Tammany] looks after them for the sake of their vote, grafts them upon the Republic, makes citizens of them." Alexander B. Callow Jr. has written that Boston politician Martin Lomansey met every new immigrant ship and "helped the newcomers find lodging or guided them to relatives." James Michael Curley set up nationalization classes to prepare recent arrivals for the citizenship examination . . . But we don't often hear things like that. Nor of the hidden agendas of those who called themselves reformers, often as corrupt as that those of the machines they were replacing but couched in nicer terms - such as economic revitalization.

Corruption has changed like everything else and today our corrupt politicians no longer even tithe to the people, they no longer carry out feudal responsibilities for their payoffs. . .

There is also for all of us the problem that the nature of culture is drastically changing from being something in which the individual is indoctrinated and absorbed, towards something the individual must preserve, restore or recreate in order to avoid the destruction of all culture save that of the corporate market and the political systems that support it. Whether we like it or not - as reporters or anthropologists we are forced every day to join others in either strengthening or destroying culture. We can write about it dispassionately later but this afternoon we are all part of the problem. We must find ways to blend the detachment of our trades with our existential responsibilities.

We live in what Marshall Blonsky has called a semiosphere which bombards us with the UV rays of advertising, propaganda, and interminable sounds and sights devoid of meaning - and which is controlled in large part by multinational corporations whose intentions include the destruction of both culture and individuality. Their goal, well described by the French writer Jacques Attali, is an "ideologically homogenous market where life will be organized around common consumer desires."

This new world is unlike any in human history - a world in which the destruction of cultural and individual variety is high on the agenda of the earth's political and business leaders; our human nature being to them not a reason for existing but just another obstacle in their path to power.

The strategies by which this onslaught can be countered depend on the imagination, passion, obstinacy, and creativity of ordinary people who refuse their consumptive assignments in the global marketplace, who develop autonomous alternatives, and who laugh when they are supposed to be saluting. The business of constructing culture is no longer an inherited and precisely defined task but a radical act demonstrating to others that they are not alone and to ourselves that we are still human. We badly need you in this. Join the fray, remember that objectivity is just another religion, celebrate what you have found, help us to preserve all our various selves, help us to replace what has been lost, and help us to avoid ending up with nothing but dead bones and still shards - the archeology of human hope that no longer exists.

September 18, 2007

FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: A CONVERSATION WITH GOD

[50 years ago last summer, your editor covered his first story in Washington. Throughout the year, the Review will exhume some of his writings]

Sam Smith, 2004

[Encouraged by our presidential candidates, I decided to also try to have a conversation with the Father Almighty. I got through without any trouble]

SAM - Hey Pops, this is Sam down on earth just checking in.

GOD - Good to hear from you. I get so tired of those suck-ups at the Christian Coalition and the Republican National Committee. Like I told them, the deal was I work six days, take the next day off, and then get at least three millennia in comp time.

But, no, they keep calling me and saying stuff like "You're with us if we take down Fallujah, right?" and I tell them they're on their own but then they run it through the spin cycle and the next thing I know I got a bunch of dead or angry Muslims on my hands.

SAM - Got any thoughts on the race?

GOD - Well, I wish that Shilling guy wouldn't give me so much credit for his pitches in the World Series. I mean, where does that leave me with those born-agains on the Cards and the Yankees? I try to be fair, you know, but everyone keeps insisting I'm their God and then using it as an excuse to beat the shit out of somebody else. Besides, I've been a Red Sox fan since at least 1932 and it hasn't done them much good until now.

SAM - I didn't know you used language like that.

GOD - Where do you think Howard Stern learned it? I'm God to all people, after all, not just to George Bush.

SAM - I was actually asking about the presidential race.

GOD - Oh that one. Well, I got to say I'm pretty disappointed in how you all are handling your democracy. Kind of wished I had thought of that one a little earlier myself, but then when Tommy Jefferson and the gang came along I had real hopes that the earth might work out better than it seemed. Now it's only two centuries later and you folks are about to blow the whole deal. I don't believe in messing with things, but I did try to warn them with those Florida hurricanes and all. I guess I was too subtle. I'd hate to think I'd have to come back down there but I'm getting pretty pissed. . .

SAM - Sounds like you're backing Kerry.

GOD - Well, I'm tempted but my basic rule is create and then stand back. But it's Me damn tough, especially when you've got that Bush guy taking my name in vain every chance he gets and talking about sanctity of life and then going out killing a whole bunch of people. Thing I want to know is why does the sanctity of life expire after only nine months? It should have a longer warranty than that.

SAM - So you got anything less than an endorsement, say like a suggestion?

GOD - Me yes, here's my tip for swing states: vote Kerry and then gain absolution by voting for every Green elsewhere on the ticket. It's that old Catholic trick: sin and then say a few Hail Marys. I like those Catholics because they still sin. The trouble with the born-agains like Bush is that they think they're always right because they claim I said so. Never did no such thing. Ever heard of Bush admitting he was wrong after he found Jesus? I mean, my Me, if that was the case I could close down this place and move to Texas. You don't need two heavens.

SAM - Didn't know you were a Green.

GOD - Well, I got to admit I prefer folks who try to do my will over those who claim I blessed them and then do whatever they want. Remember my man Frankie over at Assisi? He said, always preach the gospel and if necessary use words.

There's too much talk about me and too little action. It was like I was telling my son the other day: you know, if you go back on earth you might want to think about registering Green. And he says, but Dad, I thought Bush was the Big Christian. And I said, my Me, if Bush had been born in that manger instead of you, he would have had cut some Enron type deal with Pontius Pilate, privatized miracles, outsourced charity and give a big tax deduction to crucifix manufacturers.

SAM - I thought maybe you were more the Ralph Nader type.

GOD - Oh, I like Ralph and he and I are pretty much on the same wavelength. But it's like I tried to tell him, you don't have to do my will every damn moment. I said, why don't you take some time off, and get back to my will after the election?

SAM - Doesn't look like he listened to you.

GOD - Nope, but keep in mind that I'd still take him over the whole Democratic and Republican Party combined. And, my Me, have those Democrats been mean to him. They don't hold a candle to him but they treat him like dirt. Now I admit, the saintly can be a real pain in the butt, but, Me knows, they do more for the world than the average politician.

SAM - Well, this is quite a different take on the election than I've been hearing from certain Catholic bishops and members of the Christian right.

GOD - So you think I'm going to go to all the trouble to create a world and then pass on my opinions through the likes of some pompous priest, Pat Robertson or George Bush? I am the almighty after all. I don't have to use charlatans to get my word out. Hell, I'd rather use Jessica Simpson as my emissary.

SAM - Well, that raises a whole new issue, but I've taken enough of your time.

GOD - No problem, mate. Just answer me one question.

SAM - Sure

GOD - I thought you didn't believe in me so how come we're having this conversation?

SAM - Well, you know what they say about us journalists. We'll do anything for a story.

GOD - Okay, but don't go soft on me. I get so tired of talking with phony true believers. Especially the ones who give big tax cuts to the rich and bomb the hell out of people they don't like.

SAM - If you want I could get you a list of states with same day registration

GOD - You tempt me but I think I'll stay up here and wait to see how it all comes out.

September 17, 2007

ON THE CARE AND FEEDING OF THEORIES

Sam Smith

The other day I asked a former TWA pilot - one who had flown TWA 800 just months before its final crash - what a group of his colleagues sitting around a bar would say about the disaster. Overwhelmingly, he said, they would think the plane had been brought down by a missile - either the result of Navy error or a terrorist attack.

By the standards of the media and the rest of the American establishment, these pilots would thus qualify as conspiracy theorists. This is a bit odd since the average former TWA pilot knows far more about planes and what can go wrong with them than 99% of commentators, politicians and think tankers in Washington. Yet it is the latter who claim not only consummate access to the truth but the prerogative to determine who amongst us is a paranoid nut for not accepting their version of it.

We do not even need to discuss the facts of the TWA 800 incident to appreciate the enormous hubris involved in such a presumption. Yet almost every time the phrase 'conspiracy theory' is used, this hubris lurks to some degree just behind the protective shield of derision.

In fact, unproven or unprovable theories are all around us. They not only guide our everyday choices - I think if I turn right here I'll get home quicker - but our intellectual ones, witness the time spent absorbing the guesswork of Marx, Freud and Ayn Rand. The greatest conspiracy theory in our culture is probably the notion that J. Christ ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty. If the Washington Post and the FBI had been around at the time, they might have insisted that his body had been snatched by members of a contemporary version of Al Qaeda. But no one would have paid much attention because the truth back then was controlled by religion and not by a secular elite. In more recent times, the secular elite has wrested ownership of unprovable theses from the priests.

And own them they will. An early example was a 1967 CIA report, 1035-960, on how to handle doubts about the JFK assassination. Among the recommendations:

"The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. . .

"To discuss the publicity problem with and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors), pointing out that the Warren Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.

"To employ propaganda assets to . . . refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (I) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories."

In other words, only the CIA and their toadies in politics and the media - aka 'friendly elite contacts' - are allowed to have theories before the evidence is in, be politically interested, financially interested, hasty and inaccurate in their research or infatuated with their own theories. And so it has been with every major unsolved mystery ever since.

The government often does not even have to conceal the truth because it, like everyone else, may not know it. But that doesn't matter; the issue is control of the presumption. Just as the church was once broadly in charge of interpreting the unknown, today the right belongs to agencies like the CIA, the corporate media and bipartisan commissions.

Regardless of the ultimate facts of the matter, therefore, the process is dishonest, misleading, unfair and anti-intellectual in the extreme. A competent homicide detective, investigative reporter or serious academic would have nothing to do with the sort of elite theoretical manipulation that has occurred in numerous incidents from the JFK assassination to the present day.

This is not to say that popular alternative theories are inherently correct, only that the acceptability of any theory should not be based on the status of those who propose it but on the internal consistency of the premise and the external evidence to support it.

Obviously, if you want to rig the evidence, the approach favored by the secular elite is a good one. But what about those who go along with ill founded conclusions and prattle about conspiracy theories while sincerely believing that they are being responsible? This latter class includes much of the best educated and most powerful in Washington and other power centers.

One important cause of such behavior is simple caution and fear. To question the conventional wisdom in Washington is not a wise career move whether you're part of the government or merely reporting on it. It takes a lot of work and a lot of courage to challenge accepted presumptions.

Further, you can signal your willingness to play by the rules by the use of such terms as 'conspiracy theories.' It's a code that says to the powerful, you don't have to worry about me.

Finally, a major key to success in Washington is using certainty as a substitute for competence and disdain as a substitute for comprehension. Calling someone a conspiracy theorist is so much easier than actually investigating an issue or engaging in an honest intellectual debate, something that rarely happens in the capital.

The intelligent response to unsolved matters is to remain agnostic, skeptical, and curious. Theories may be suggested - just as they are every day about less complex and more open matters on news broadcasts and op ed pages - but such theories should not stray too far from available evidence. Conversely, as long as serious anomalies remain, dismissing questions and doubts as a conspiracy theory is a highly unintelligent response. It is also ironic, since those ridiculing the questions and doubts typically consider themselves intellectually superior to the doubters. But they really aren't because they stopped thinking the moment someone in power told them a superficially plausible answer.

There is the additional irony that many who ridicule doubts about the official version of events were typically trained at elite colleges where, in political science and history, theories often take precedent over facts and in which substantive decisions affecting politics and history are presumed to be the work of a small number of wise men (sic). They are trained, in effect, to trust theories rather than evidence and to support purportedly benign confederacies - such as Skull & Bones or the Council on Foreign Relations - as opposed to the malevolent conspiracies imagined by lesser minds.

Further, those in power have their own conspiracy theories - the justifications for the Iraq war being a prime example - but these must fit comfortably within the capital canon.

Other fields - such as social history or anthropology - posit that change for better or worse can come as a cultural phenomenon and not just as the decisions of a few individuals. People in other fields - such as detectives and investigative reporters - use inductive thinking which starts with evidence rather than with theories and aren't happy when the evidence is weak, conflicting or lacking. They keep working the case until a solid answer appears. This is alien to the well-educated Washington scribe who has been trained to trust official answers and conventional theories regardless of the paucity of facts.

For America, the unresolved major event is largely a modern phenomenon that coincides with the collapse of constitutional government and the decline of our culture. Beginning with the Kennedy assassination, the number of inadequately explained significant incidents has been mounting steadily and with them a steady reduction in the trust between the people and their government.

Most of the time, the secular elite wants neither new facts nor new theories. On the other hand, the intellectually curious are not afraid of either. In the best scientific tradition, they will take new facts and, if they warrant it, contrive a hypothesis about them. They will test that hypothesis, and then take it from there, revising, discarding or refining what was originally proposed as the evidence accumulates. They will follow the story as far as the facts lead and leave the remaining anomalies out in the open to be dealt with in the future.

Admittedly, there are plenty who offer alternative theories who do not follow such a rigorous approach. The irony is that such critics of accepted wisdom have far more in common with the editorial board of the NY Times than either would admit. Both place faith over facts. It's just that their faiths clash.

This doesn't, however, mean that the alternative theorists' criticisms of official explanation are without merit. One does not have to accept the notion that the Bush regime was behind the WTC attack to question the gaps in the government's version of the story or to raise the mostly ignored issue of whether the World Trade Center was built right in the first place.

But critics who insist on ill-formed conclusions actually play into the hands of those in power who happily use the most extreme hypotheses to ridicule all doubt and questioning. This has happened with virtually every unsolved mystery of recent times. The serious remaining questions are thus obscured or lumped with the unreasonable. It is far better not to reach a final conclusion, offering instead several possibilities or just pressing for answers to the unresolved aspects of a case.

Thus, like the TWA pilots, I do not trust the official story on what happened to Flight 800. But I also do not know what really did happen. Like so many other incidents in our recent history, the case can not be closed, in no small part because those in power refused to deal with it in an honest and thorough manner. So it up to others to both investigate and come up with alternative hypotheses - to test them, to write about them and, perhaps some day, to finally discover the truth.

Meanwhile, we can do our country a great favor by encouraging others to keep asking these questions and seeking answers and not to insult or dismiss them as conspiracy theorists for attempting, as best they can, to do what those with far more power, knowledge and money, should have, and were meant to have, done.