September 27, 2010

FLOTSAM & JETSAM: THE BIG DISASTER THAT BEGAN WITH A LITTLE DISSIN'

Sam Smith

War is the joint exercise of things we were trained not to do as children.

War is doing things overseas that we would go to prison for at home.

Anyone can start a war. Starting a peace is really hard. Therefore it is much harder to be a peace expert than a war expert.

The media treats war as just another professional sport.

War has rules, which means that we can change the rules.

Murder, rape and slavery still exist. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have banned them. The same is true of war.

Telling a country we won't negotiate with it until it does what you want is like saying you won't play a game unless you are allowed to win.

There is no evidence that supporting war, or telling presidents to do so, improves your testosterone level, so Ivy League professors are better advised to stick to tennis.

There is one way to deal with guerilla warfare and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive. The trick is to undermine the violence of the most bitter by dealing honestly with the problems and complaints of the most rational.

Of course, there can be peace with so-called terrorist organizations; it's just a matter of whether one waits the better part of a century, as the British did in Northern Ireland, or whether you start talking and negotiating now.

Three thousand people is, of course, far too many to die for any reason. But it is also far too weak an argument for the end of democracy.

Peace is a state of reciprocity, of trust, of empirically based confidence that no one is about to do you in. It exists not because of intrinsic goodness or rampant naivete but because of a common, implicit understanding that that it works for everyone.

Implicit in the "what about their violence?" argument is the idea that what we do wrong is excusable because it has been matched by the other side. Of course, the other side sees it the same way so you end up with a perfect stalemate of violence. When I raised a similar argument as a kid, my mother's response was, "If Johnny were to jump off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff, too?" I never could come up with good answer to that and so eventually had to concede that somebody else's stupidity was not a good excuse for my own.

From the moment we commence a moral intervention we become a part of the story, and part of the good and evil. We are no longer the innocent bystander but a full participant whose acts will either help or make things worse. Our intentions become irrelevant; they are overwhelmed by the character of our response to them. The morality of the disease is supplanted by the morality of the cure. In fact, every moral act in the face of mental or physical injury carries twin responsibilities: to mend the injury and to avoid replacing it with another

One of the reasons America is in so much trouble is because it happily makes all sorts of compromises in order to get along with large dictatorships such as Russia and China, but thinks it can handle smaller operations like Hamas, North Korea, and Iran by simple obstinacy and belligerence. In other words, it is happy to talk with big terrorists, but not little ones. In fact, most of these small entities - and those who lead them - suffer from extreme inferiority complexes. By threatening war, imposing massive embargos and so forth, America merely feeds the sense of persecution and encourages the least rational reaction. A more sensible approach would be to constantly negotiate with these leaders and edge them towards reasonable participation in world affairs.

Imagine if we had told Israel and Palestine a few years ago that if they would just make nice we would give them enough money to equal Israel's GDP for one year and Palestine's for three. Take the time off, go to the Riviera or the Catskills, forget about productivity, and just party on thanks to the American taxpayer. Or if Israel and Palestine wanted to be really sensible, they could have invested in their countries' future instead. Think how much safer we would be today. . . But where would such a large sum of money come from? Well, all we would have had to have done was to cancel the invasion of Iraq and used the money as a carrot rather than as a bludgeon. For that is just what it has cost us so far. (2007)

The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we visit their unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption. Like the castle-dwellers behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums to put ourselves inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to provide either security for our bodies nor solace for our souls, for we are simply attacking ourselves before others get a chance.

Empires and cultures are not permanent and while thinking about the possibility that ours is collapsing may seem a dismal exercise it is far less so than enduring the dangerous frustrations and failures involved in having one's contrary myth constantly butt up against reality - like a boozer who insists he is not drunk attempting to drive home. Instead of defending the non-existent, we could turn our energies instead towards devising a new and saner reality.

Places like Harvard and Oxford - and their after-school programs such as the Washington think tanks - teach the few how to control the many and it is impossible to do this without various forms of abuse ranging from sophism to corporate control systems to napalm. It is no accident that a large number of advocates of war - in government and the media - are the products of elite educations where they were taught both the inevitability of their hegemony and the tools with which to enforce it. It will, therefore, be some time before places such as Harvard and the Council on Foreign Relations are seen for what they are: the White Citizens Councils of state violence.

September 23, 2010

FIFTEEN YEARS ON THE WEB

This was written five years ago, on our tenth anniversary on the web:

Sam Smith, 2005 - This fall marks the Review's tenth year on the web - and our 11th year of sending out email updates. In the last quarter of 1995 we got all of 388 page views, and in 1996, we got 27,000. This year we are approaching three million.

How early was 1995? Well, the number of Americans using the Internet was still less than the number who were watching TV in the mid 1950s. And the Washington Post hadn't yet found a way to stay on line and be happy with the results.

Some other papers, however, had gotten into the act. Fredric A. Emmert writes that, "In 1992, the Chicago Sun-Times began offering articles via modem over the America On Line computer network, and in 1993, the San Jose Mercury News began distributing most of its complete daily text, minus photos and illustrations, to subscribers of America On Line. The first multi-media news service in the U.S., News in Motion, made its debut in the summer of 1993 with a weekly edition specializing in international coverage, with color photos, graphics and sound.

In 1994, the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service began distributing news to its newspaper customers via computer before their morning editions arrived, and The Washington Post has created a Digital Ink subsidiary, providing an electronic newspaper research service for clients, who can buy custom-made reports on subjects of their choice." The Post dropped the fee-based Digital Ink in favor of its current site in 1996.

Your editor's interest in the internet was not all that surprising, since he had long ago discovered that keeping up with advances in technology helped compensate for his own deterioration. The Review began as a hot type magazine, The Idler, in 1964 and over the years used such novel technology as Press Type, the IBM Selectric, Radio Shack's TRS-80 (or Trash 80 as it was fondly known), the Model 100 - an amazing battery operated laptop with a six line screen, and Exxon's Qyx, among many others.

Before all that, however, were other influences, starting with Alice Darnell, my high school math teacher who went to Harvard in the summer of 1954 to learn about this new thing, the computer. She returned reporting that she had almost been locked up in a computer overnight, as it needed an entire building to do the work of a present day Mac, and she introduced us to the basics of Boolean algebra.

It would be twenty years, however, before I actually touched a computer: an 8K Atari purchased for my sons. As I fleeted up to 16 and then 32 K it occurred to me that these things might have some journalistic use. In fact, if you wasted a whole Saturday you could already program them to do little things like write messages and keep addresses.

It was a time when an earnest father such as I sent his son to computer camp where he learned to write programs that in just a year or so he could buy at the local computer store. It was a time when a computer expert came to speak at that same son's school and, at the end, the headmaster arose and said, "This is all very well and good, but I'm not running a goddamned secretarial school." Within a year he had purchased an impressive array of computers.

It was also a time short on computer expertise. The Review was blessed with two high school students who came by to empty our floor's office trash who were also seminal cyber whizzes. They shall remain nameless to preserve the security clearance of the one who now works for a major defense contractor, but he still provides occasional assistance such as suggesting that I repair a computer suffering from too much atmospheric moisture by putting it in an oven at 150 degrees for an hour. That was a year ago. It worked and the computer still helps produce the Progressive Review.

Some years back I went to a Shaker village in Maine. While on the tour of this vanishing sect I noted a TV antenna atop the dorm. I mentioned this jarring departure from my image of Shakers to our guide, who explained that the Shakers saw no conflict between technology and their faith. After all, she said, their furniture was technologically advanced for the time.

It was not unlike the Quakers who do not shun change but merely apply their faith to it. About a year and a half after launching our website I tried to give a sense of this approach in a book I was writing, The Great American Political Repair Manual:

"The first rule of media survival is use it; don't let it use you. We must ignore the role the media has prescribed for us -- audience, consumer, addict -- and treat it much as the trout treats a stream, a medium in which to swim and not to drown. The trick is to stop the media from happening to you and to treat it literally as a medium -- an environment, a carrier. Then you can cease being a consumer or a victim and become a hunter and a gatherer, foraging for signs that are good and messages that are important and data you can use. Then the zapper and the mouse become tools and weapons and not addictions. Then you turn the TV off not because it is evil but because you have gotten whatever it has to offer and now must look somewhere else."

Sam Smith, 2007 -
The Wall Street Journal's claim that this is the tenth anniversary of the blog - as well as some of the critical reaction to the story - led us to our archives to find what we could about our role in this tale. We've tried to avoid the word blog - preferring to call ourselves an online journal - but the phrase has a ubiquity one can't duck. The Wall Street Journal claimed, "We are approaching a decade since the first blogger -- regarded by many to be Jorn Barger -- began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary.

"On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: 'I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis,' and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the primordial root of the word 'weblog.'

"The dating of the 10th anniversary of blogs, and the ascription of primacy to the first blogger, are imperfect exercises. Others, such as David Winer, who blogged with Scripting News, and Cameron Barrett, who started CamWorld, were alongside the polemical Mr. Barger in the advance guard. And before them there were "proto-blogs," embryonic indications of the online profusion that was to follow. But by widespread consensus, 1997 is a reasonable point at which to mark the emergence of the blog as a distinct life-form."

While we refer to Barger as the sainted Jorn Barger - he has been repeatedly kind to this journal over the years - the WSJ has got things somewhat mixed up. It is certainly true that Barger blessed or cursed us with the word blog, but whatever you called it, something was already underway, including at the Progressive Review. As evidence, we would quote from the very issue cited by the WSJ: Barger's December 23, 1997 Robot Wisdom WebLog in which he writes: "There's a new issue of the Progressive Review, one of the few leftwing sources that's vigorously anti-Clinton. . . The lead story this week is Judge Lamberth's condemnation of White House lies about the healthcare taskforce in 1993. Its editor Sam Smith also offers a nice fantasy of what a real newspaper should be, USA Tomorrow . . ."

Barger's contribution was not just one of nomenclature, but of gracing the Web with an eclectic spirit and curiosity, tapping its holistic wonders and happily mixing technology, politics, literature, philosophy and rants. In musical terms, Barger showed us how to swing.

At least as early as 1993, the Progressive Review was sending a faxed blog-like substance to our media list as a supplement to the print edition. The earliest mention of an online edition that we could find comes from the August 1994 edition: "If you have an Internet address, send it to us on a postcard or to ssmith@igc.org and we will add you to our Peacenet hotline mailing list. You can also find us at alt.activism and alt.politics.clinton. Sorry, offer not good for networks that carry e-mail charges"

There then followed a series of blog-like entries. None of that really counts, however, because it wasn't on the Worldwide Web. But by June 1995, the Progressive Review was on the web, where only about 20,000 other websites existed worldwide.

Still not bloggish, as we initially only posted longer articles. But within a few months - we were promising that "The Progressive Review On-Line Report is found on the Web" and our quasi-blogging had begun. While we weren't the earliest we were certainly in same 'hood and we may hold some sort of record for consistency. We are still brought to you by Turnpike and we are still using Adobe Page Mill to post our non-blog pages. A year or two ago we ran into an Adobe sales rep at Best Buy and mentioned our loyalty, saying that "we still love it." She looked quite annoyed and said, "That's what a lot of people say."

The Web would come to value style over substance in design and conventional loyalty over free thinking in politics. But, inspired by a few like Jorn Barger, we have tried to keep our layout simple and our thoughts complex. In the game of Internet high-low poker, we went low and it doesn't seem to have a hurt a bit. Thanks for sticking around.

September 16, 2010

A WARNING TO OBAMA FROM HIS BACK YARD

Sam Smith

If I had been still living in DC last Tuesday I would have been a white voting for a black Gray. According to a City Paper poll before the election, only about 24% of other whites would have agreed with me.

Yet Vincent Gray won easily over Adrian Fenty, who four years earlier had captured every precinct in the city, with nearly all white Ward 3 and nearly all black Ward 8 each giving him 56% of the vote. This year Fenty got 80% of white Ward 3 and 16% of black Ward 8.

Eddie Elfanbeen did a precinct by precinct analysis. Some 31 precincts gave Fenty 75% or more of the vote while 53 gave him 25% or less. All of the top Fenty precincts were heavily white while all the top Gray precincts were heavily black.

Remember: while the precincts might vary markedly in ethnicity, both major candidates were black (or biracial as the pro-Fenty media began suddenly to call him).

There were other huge differences according to the City Paper pre-election poll. For example, those who thought DC should remain a majority black town gave only 11% of their vote to Fenty. Sixty percent of those who had lived in the city for less than four years voted for Fenty while only 32% of those who had lived there over twenty years supported him. Over 45% of home owners supported Fenty, but only 25% of renters.

There has been a lot of talk about post-racial politics both nationally and in DC, but what these figures show is that to the extent ethnicity no longer matters, class increasingly does.

In other words, as one commentator noted, in the DC results are signs of a left wing Tea Party - another strong indicator of how our country is being divided by income and wealth, a topic politicians and the media never want to discuss. The have-nots - whether actual, perceived or misperceived - are highly pissed off.

What happened and why is instructive to anyone interested in politics, from Barack Obama on down.

Obama, Fenty, as well as Newark mayor Cory Booker and Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, belong to a cohort I think of as the black Ivies (although Fenty went to Oberlin, a sort of college Ivy). They were the first generation of modern black politicians to get ahead by passing white examinations rather than crossing white police lines.

All but Patrick came out of successful families including Booker's parents who were the first black executives of IBM and Fenty's parents who ran their own successful small business, which was one of the reasons I foolishly voted for Fenty the last time. I thought the small business ethos would serve the city well. Unfortunately, Fenty didn't have it.

Obama's mother worked for the government (perhaps including the CIA) and his grandmother became vice president of a Hawaii bank.

Patrick, on the other hand, was born in a Chicago housing project. But then things started look up. As Wikipedia notes: "While Patrick was in middle school, one of his teachers referred him to A Better Chance, a national non-profit organization for identifying, recruiting and developing leaders among academically gifted students of African American descent, which enabled him to attend Milton Academy," one of the upscale private schools.

Each of these black Ivies had what was, for blacks, atypical growings up. For example, Booker got a Rhodes scholarship and Obama was shepherded through a variety of white vetting institutions ranging from schools to a corporation working for the CIA to being invited to speak at a Democratic convention despite only being a state senator. And all four of them went to good law schools.

While there are obvious personal advantages to such an upbringing, preparation for the brutally real world of politics and dealing with ordinary citizens is not one of them.

Now Fenty has been kicked out, Obama is on the ropes, Patrick is only 2 to six points ahead in the polls. And even Booker, perhaps the most politically hip of the bunch, has gone from 72% to 59% in his two elections.

The Fenty disaster is the most instructive in looking at Obama, because of their similarities. For example, both

- Won victory by appealing to one constituency and then effectively dumping it when elected.

- Sometimes act like an over-praised child, which is to say one whose life story has been built too much on presumed skills and virtues and not enough on hard knocks and actual achievements.

- Rely too much on legal approaches to politics - in Fenty's case depending on the widely despised attorney Peter Nickles and, with Obama, creating bizarrely complex legislation such as his healthcare bill.

- Sow tone deafness when talking to constituents other than the elite.

- Use public education as a weapon to encourage urban gentrification.One news report noted that "when Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee began her reform of education, she began by closing two dozen schools. None was closed in predominantly white Ward 3, while predominantly black Ward 5 took the brunt." This is another topic that doesn't get discussed in the press, along with the fact that Rhee - like other education deformers - has objectively accomplished little other than a lot of gratuitous chaos.

- Encourage a strong anti-union undercurrent in public education policy and other matters. This backfired in Washington as the unions worked hard for Gray.Nationally, it is another sign that we're really talking about class more than ethnicity. There was a time when Democrats supported unions, without which we would not have had a middle class.

- Rely excessively on words and actions that appeal to upscale whites but leave others wondering what the hell is going on.

- Display an arrogance about it all, at least in the view of many. It's fair, for example, to call Vincent Gray's record unimpressive but he is so clearly rooted in the community and likeable that many would prefer his stumbling efforts to Fenty's false achievements.

In other words, Obama is an Adrian Fenty waiting to happen, albeit, in his case, from the right.

Nikita Stewart and Jeff Mays, The Root, Atlanta - "Despite the fact that he won 40 percent of the black vote, Cory [Booker] does have a problem with blacks in this city," says Rahaman Muhammad, leader of the influential SEIU Local 617. "Cory's secret hasn't got out yet. Most black people outside of Newark think he is beloved by blacks inside the city."

That certainly wasn't the case when Booker first ran for office in 2002. During his first mayoral bid, Booker's opponent, longtime mayor Sharpe James, furiously attacked him for not being black enough. James painted Booker -- who grew up in a wealthy New Jersey suburb, attended Stanford University and Yale Law School, and was a Rhodes scholar -- as a plant by white outsiders who saw Newark's potential and wanted to take over.

Booker has also struggled with black voters. In May he was re-elected with 59 percent of the vote -- down from his 72 percent landslide in 2006 -- despite having spent $5.5 million, more than all the other candidates in the race. In addition, Booker's own polls show him struggling with black voters. A 2008 internal poll conducted by Obama pollster Joel Benenson found that only 69 percent of blacks agreed with the statement that Booker was bringing progress to Newark, compared with 85 percent of whites and Latinos. Forty-four percent of black single mothers, who make up at least 8 percent of the city's electorate, felt Booker was taking the city in the wrong direction.

Muhammad says that he recently met with Booker in his office to discuss a growing concern among blacks in the city about talks of massive layoffs at City Hall and the concern that black contractors were not being brought into the fold.

"I said, 'Mayor, you have a black problem,' " Muhammad recounts. "He said to me, 'I only need 30 percent of the black vote to get elected.' I said, 'You might be right, but is that the strategy a black elected official wants to pursue?' "

Bill Turque, Washington Post - Speaking at the Newseum to an auditorium studded with Washington A-listers gathered for the red carpet premiere of the edu-documentary "Waiting for Superman," [DC school chancellor Michelle] Rhee said she would not "mince words" about Tuesday's Democratic primary defeat of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty.

"Yesterday's election results were devastating, devastating," Rhee said. "Not for me, because I'll be fine, and not even for Fenty because he'll be fine, but devastating for the schoolchildren of Washington, D.C."

Courtland Milloy, Washington Post - In a stunning repudiation of divisive, autocratic leadership, District residents Tuesday toppled the city's ruling troika: Mayor Adrian Fenty, Attorney General Peter Nickles and Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. All busted up. The trio's contempt for everyday people was handed back to them in spades at the polls.

Having taken office promising to cradle the most vulnerable residents, Fenty set out almost immediately shooting the wounded. Closing homeless shelters. Forgetting about job-training programs. Firing city workers with the wave of a callous hand -- black female heads of households more often than not.

Don't ask Fenty or Rhee whom this world-class school system will serve if low-income black residents are being evicted from his world-class city in droves.

What happened Tuesday involved more than just the unseating of a mayor with an abrasive style. It was a populist revolt against Fenty's arrogant efforts to restructure government on behalf of a privileged few. The scheme was odious: re-create a more sophisticated version of the plantation-style, federally appointed three-member commission that ruled the city for more than a century until 1967.

So people went to the polls and politely delivered a message: Most residents actually believe in representative democracy, thank you very much, messy though it may be.

Derek Kravitz Washington Post - If there was one vote that D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray had locked up before Tuesday's mayoral primary, it was the cabdriver bloc.

The city's roughly 6,000 taxi cabdrivers, a group made up largely of African-born immigrants, have long been upset with Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) over his 2007 change from the city's zone fare system to meters. On Tuesday, they waged what one union leader called "the fight for our very lives."

"We supported Fenty, but he turned on us," said Aklile Redie, 52, of Silver Spring, a cabdriver for 15 years. "We know how important this is to our way of life and our families."

Many of these drivers had voted for Fenty in 2006. That year, a few dozen cabbies drove Fenty voters to the polls for $150 a day, said Nathan Price, chairman of the D.C. Professional Taxicab Drivers Association.

This year, hundreds of cabdrivers offered their services to Gray for free.

September 02, 2010

A LABOR DAY ADMISSION

Sam Smith

The week leading up to Labor Day reminded me of something journalists never admit: we don't just report the news, we help to create it.

The eerie disappearance of news during certain predictable times such as Labor Day, the Christmas & New Year holidays, and even come mid-June (when news releases mysteriously dry up), is not an accident. It's just that we and our sources have better things to do.

There are, of course, exceptions such as acts of God and human stupidity. I still recall coming home from college, turning on the TV and being surprised by the glut of fires, accidents, and criminal activities that seemed to absorb the Christmas holidays. It took me awhile to realize the correlation between my vacations and what I was viewing. A five car crash simply becomes more important around Christmas or Labor Day.

This year, of course, we've had not only Hurricane Earl to fill the gap but another oil disaster in the Gulf. Yet still there was a huge void in political crises, pronouncements, upcoming decisions and recent actions passing noisily into the death chambers of history.

It brought back my early days as a radio reporter, being stuck in a newsroom on Thanksgiving or Christmas, comforted only by the realization that there were far fewer listeners as well as far fewer events.

Does this mean that humanity could get along with less news than it muddles through normally? What if we made Thanksgiving a year long experience? Would that end wars, shut up Sarah Palin, and cause Charles Krauthammer to reflect permanently in silence?

Perhaps not, but it is worth recalling that during the 19th century when Congress only met part of the year, the capital's crime rate regularly fell when it was out of session.

There is no question but that a high percentage of what passes for news - especially political news - is not really news at all, but a bunch of sock puppets imitating news. Of course, the media doesn't tell you this.

For example, years ago, I learned that one way to find time for real reporting was to hardly ever attend a news conference. It was one of the great gifts of freedom in my work life. News conferences are devices designed to make reporters the indentured servants of their sources.

Gene McCarthy once said that Washington journalists were like blackbirds on a telephone wire. One flies off and they all fly off. One secret of good journalism is to stay away from that telephone wire in the first place.

So if the only disasters on such occasions as Labor Day are of the natural variety, if trivia seems to have suddenly soared in importance, and if all commentators appear obsessed with what will happen next because they can't find anything happening right now, enjoy it. It won't last long. Besides, a five car crash can be pretty interesting.