Who cares who was a Communist?

Reading about Arthur Miller's alleged Communist connections brings to mind some unfinished business for American historians: a fair account of American Communists. Even today, the image projected by the media is heavily tilted towards the FBI version of the tale, an absurd melding of fact, rumor, fiction, and extreme rightwing bias.

In fact, many American Communists were simply people driven by a deep concern for human justice. If, for example, you went into the south before the civil rights movement and found a white working on the issue, it would not be surprising to discover that the activist was a member of the Communist Party, about the only one that cared at the time. Even in the 1960s, it was not unusual to run into former Communists providing important leadership, using their years of activist experience.

Were these evil people? Far from it. They were among the decent people in politics. Many were in the arts strong, sensitive and deeply idealistic. Others were in the labor movement helping unionists become so successful that more than a few would end up voting Republican. You can't tell the story of American social democracy without the story of American communism.

Where the trouble began was not with domestic politics but with the foreign. Precisely because they were so idealistic, many had a hard time melding ideology with what was actually going on. Even today, there are echoes of this in left debate: a conflict between intellectually-based and reality-based discussions of politics - issues of faith versus those of fact.

Nowhere was this more striking than with American Communists who defended the Stalin regime. A handful engaged in espionage they justified by their beliefs, but most simply tolerated, excused, or explained away the Soviet beast. The fact that Adolph Hitler was there as a convenient negative comparison didn't hurt.

Lest one become too sanctimonious about this, however, it is useful to compare the naivete of American Communists with that of the American establishment which has supported an extraordinary line of dictators and other monsters and helped create more such as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Ladin.

As one who, at the age of 23 because of his parents' not atypical associations in the Washington of the time, found himself a victim of the Communist hysteria foisted by the FBI and others, I have long understood how distorted the story has been.

But when I read Marx in college, I couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. In fact, having stuffed envelopes in a political campaign when I was only 11, I was never sure of what the purpose of political theory was. Both Communists and political science professors struck me as members of odd sects far removed from the reality of politics. I didn't hate or fear them; I just didn't want to join them.

But misguided as some of their views and stupid as some of their allegiances were, the Communists I have run into have been a far better bunch than, say, the cruel, selfish egos of the Republican right.

Besides it can get confusing. I remember covering a major local meeting once and sitting behind the one Republican present. I was amused by the fact that he had been regularly voting in the minority with, among others, a man I knew was still a Communist. At one point the Republican turned to me before a vote and said, "Now we'll see how the hard left handles this one." I replied, "I hate to tell you this but you've been voting with the Communists all evening."

It is now almost time that some historian develop the courage to tell the story of American communism, not as the FBI and media would have us believe, but as the complicated, fascinating, and inconsistent story that it really is.

SUSPECT

Practicing anthropology without a license

{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.

Running things

SAM SMITH - Kind reader William Davidson writes to ask, "Sam, I want to know why we can not get you to be the president." Your editor tries to soft--pedal the many nice notes he receives but this one is so excessive it deserves some sort of response.

In fact, I reached the pinnacle of my political career when I was elected a neighborhood commissioner. One term of this remarkably complex task sated all further political ambition. My problem, I slowly discovered over the years, was that while I have, run, or helped to run, such varied things as a Coast Guard vessel, radio station, political organizations, a band and an alternative agriculture center, I didn't really enjoy the running part all that much. It seems that the more power you have, the more removed you become from what attracted you in the first place. I also found myself enjoying groups and places where no one seemed to be running things because everyone was.

My father liked running things along the principles set forth in Winnie the Pooh: "It was just the day for Organizing Something, or for Writing a Notice Signed Rabbit, or for Seeing What Everybody Else Thought About It.." My mother, however, took an aptitude test that told her she was not likely to do well on boards and committees. She came home and immediately resigned from all of them. I have tried to take a more moderate position, which is to say that I join new boards doing something worthwhile but typically only to the point when they discover they don't have a personnel committee, a sure sign that they are getting too bureaucratic for my tastes.

The serious part of this ramble is that I suspect that there are many people like myself who could do a halfway decent job (thereby busting the curve) in politics or other places of power but avoid them out of ADD: ambition deficit disorder.

The guy who used to print the Review insisted that politicians should only be allowed one term and only one office during a lifetime. This idea fit well with one I have suggested, namely that each legislative body have a certain number of members picked by lot in order to provide a living benchmark. Perhaps, for starters we could have a separate house of Congress for lottery winners and short-timers: the Recalcitrant Branch. Our role model would be Cincinnatus who served as dictator just long enough to defeat the Aequi - it took 16 days - and then returned to his farm where the really serious work remained unfinished. Another model would be Benjamin Franklin who believed one should never seek nor refuse a public position.

I do occasionally have the fantasy that I would make an excellent post-revolutionary leader - the sort of guy who could cool things off, get the various factions working together, and move from armed critique to placid programs. The problem with this fantasy is that I would have had to have also been a revolutionary leader to get the job in the first place, something at which I would have been terrible. Further, a dissident faction would quickly discover my ambivalence towards power and remove me from office either by election or by coup and/or sudden death. At which point I quit my day dreaming and return to my true love, writing.

Seventh Day Agnostics arise

As far as the government and the media are concerned, the world's fourth largest belief system doesn't exist. By one count, In number of adherents it's behind Christianity, Islam and Buddhism but ahead of Hinduism. Globally it's 85% the size of Catholicism and in America just a little smaller than Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Lutherans put together. Perhaps most astoundingly, given today's politics, in the U.S. it is roughly the size of the Southern Baptist congregation. Another count puts it in third place with Buddhism a distant 6th.

Its leaders, however, are not invited to open Senate sessions. Our politicians do not quote them and our news shows do not interview them. And while it is a sin, if not a crime, to be anti-Catholic or anti-Semitic, disparaging this faith is not only permitted, it is publicly encouraged. The media acts as though it doesn't exist. You'd need an exceptional lawyer to sue your employer for ridiculing your belief in it. Its adherents are repeatedly and explicitly excluded from the category of "people of faith" even though they are among the most steadfast and well-grounded in their beliefs. Finally, if one of its major figures dies, you will probably not read about it, let alone find the president, two ex-presidents and Brian Williams flying off for the service.

So completely is this belief system excluded from our national consciousness that we do not even have a name for it. So let's give it one, at least for this article: shafarism - standing for secularism, humanism, atheism, free thought, agnosticism, and rationalism. Shafars are 850 million people around the globe and at least 20 million at home who are ignored, insulted, or commonly considered less worthy than those who adhere to faiths based on mythology and folklore rather than on logic, empiricism, verifiable history, and science.

This might be considered just another of the world's many injustices were it not for the fact that the globe is currently exceptionally endangered by a madness driven by false prophets of major traditional mythologies such as bin Laden, Bush and Sharon. Seldom has organized religion been so ubiquitously harmful. Even in our own country the dismantling of our republic and its constitution is being led by a extremist Christian cabal that not only is a political travesty but a mockery of its own professed faith.

In short, this is not a wise time for those of alternative beliefs to be banned from the airwaves and the public prints, especially since they have contributed so little to the current troubles.

Further, omnipresent evocations of American religiosity ignore some basic facts. Such as the Harris poll that shows about half of Americans go to church only a few times a year or never. In other words, they are at best what is known in some Latin American countries as navi-pascuas, attending only at Christmas and Easter. And among these, one reasonably suspects, are numerous closet shafars, silenced by the overwhelming suppression of skepticism and disbelief. In fact, the same poll found that 21% of Catholics and 52% of Jews either don't believe in God or are not certain that God exists.

Such facts are blatantly ignored by a media which happily assigns absurdly contradictory roles to God in stories such as the recent shootings in Atlanta. In that case one was led to believe that religious faith saved the hostage, even though the abductor professed belief in the same almighty, as presumably did at least some of those killed by the perpetrator. But who needs journalistic objectivity when such cliches are so handy?

None of which is to say that mythology and folklore are necessarily evil or that the non-religious necessarily earn morality by their skepticism. I'd take a progressive cardinal over Vladimir Putin any day. The thoughtfully religious, expressing their faith through works of decency and kindness, are far more useful, interesting and enjoyable than lazy, narcissistic rationalists. There have been times, such as the 1960s, when the church not only lived up to its gospel but proved to be one of the most desirable institutions around. And there are tens of millions of people who act as good Christians, even when their Pope or other leaders make it difficult.

But faith in religion is just one type of faith. Atheism can be called faith in evidence, agnosticism faith in doubt and science faith in logic. These are no less human faiths than those in an unseen God. Then there's deep ecology, a faith motivated, as one evangelist put it, by belief in creation rather than creator. Whether you call it God or Nature, argued Thor Heyerdahl, "the disagreement is about the spelling of a word." As far back as 1979, Vincent Rossi of an Eastern Orthodox holy order formed an Eleventh Commandment Fellowship to foster the biblical injunction that "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof; thou shalt not despoil the earth, nor destroy the life thereon."

Further, mythology and folklore serve the secular as well, picking up where knowledge falters. The wise recognize this as Dr. Einstein did when a friend noticed a horseshoe over his door and asked, "You don't believe in that do you?" "Of course not," Einstein is said to have replied, "but they tell me it works." At the other extreme was Spock who couldn't understand love because it wasn't logical. But then Spock was only half human.

Mythologies - religious and secular - have often made humans better and, at times, saved them in ways that rationality simply couldn't. They have prevented suicides, preserved families, rescued drunks, and helped others climb mountains.

But that is not the issue.

The issue is whether religious faith should be allowed to intrude with impunity in such secular areas as politics or science and still claim the protection of reverence and law. The answer, shafars should loudly proclaim, is no. Once Southern Baptists, Catholics, Jews or Muslims enter the political arena, they are no more entitled to special protection or regulated rhetoric than a Democrat or a Republican.

If the Pope wants to tell Africans not to use condoms, then he has left religion and deserves no more respect than George Bush or Bill Clinton. If Jews encourage Israel to suppress the Palestinians then they can't label as anti-Semitic those who note the parallels to South Africa. And if the Anglican church wants to perpetuate a second class status for gays, then we should give the Archbishop of Canterbury no more honor than Tom DeLay.

In other words, if you want to pray and believe, fine. But to put a folkloric account of our beginnings on the same plain as massive scientific research is not a sign of faith but of ignorance or delusion. And if you want to play politics you've got to fight by its rules and not hide under a sacred shield.

After all, is it worse to be anti-Catholic than anti-African? Is it worse to be anti-Semitic than to be anti-Arab? Is it worse to be anti-Anglican than anti-gay? Our culture encourages a hierarchy of antipathies which instead of eliminating prejudices merely divides them into the acceptable and the rejected. Part of the organization of some 'organized' religion has been to make itself sacred while the devil takes the rest of the world.

We need both faith and doubt, myth and science, but this yin and yang can not work if only faith and myth are allowed to sing in public places. We need to celebrate not just Christmas and Hanukah but the daily faith of the Seventh Day Agnostic and of the free thinker. The existentialist needs to be treated as respectfully as the evangelical, the skeptic as well as the fundamentalist. And we need to hear the wise words of secular philosophers as well as those of Jesus Christ.

Why are we so afraid of such voices? Why do we suppress them, keep them off the air, not mention them in public? Why - at a time when Southern Baptists, Catholics, Muslims and Jews are causing the world so much trouble with their misguided certainties - do we refuse to allow even a question mark?

Before unexamined religious faith causes more death and misery we should at least allow doubt, logic, and secular solutions to sit at the table and raise their voice.

Of course, given the vast cultural bias towards mythic certainties, it won't be a chair offered us by either the traditionally faithful or by an anti-secular media. Rather the secularists, humanists, atheists, free thinkers, agnostics, and rationalists - the shafars - are going to have to stand up and make themselves heard. While they don't have to go as far as to demand that anti-secularism become a hate crime, they do have to start beating on the doors of the media and politicians demanding a decent visibility, a fair hearing, and assurances that Brian Williams will come to some of their funerals, too.

A thinker's guide to conspiracy theories

- A conspiracy does not have to be illegal; it can merely be wrongful or harmful.

- The term 'conspiracy theory' was invented by elite media and politicians to denigrate questions or critical presumptions about events about which important facts remain unrevealed.

- The intelligent response to such events 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 as those ridiculing the questions and doubts typically consider themselves intellectually superior to the doubters. But they aren't because they stopped thinking the moment someone in power told them a superficially plausible answer. Further, to ridicule those still with doubts about such matters is intellectually dishonest.

- There is the further 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 in (1) theories and (2) benign confederacies. Most major media political coverage is based on the great man theory of history. This pattern can be found in everything from Skull & Bones to the Washington Post editorial board to the Council on Foreign Relations. You might even call them conspiracy theorists.

- Other fields - such as social history or anthropology - posit that change for better or evil can come as cultural change or choices and not just as the decisions of "great men." This is why one of the biggest stories in modern American history was never well covered: the declining birth rate. No great men decided it should happen.

- Homicide detectives and investigative reporters, among others, are inductive thinkers who start 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 newspaper editor who has been trained to trust official answers and conventional theories.

- The unresolved major event is largely a modern phenomenon that coincides with the collapse of America's constitutional government and the decline of its culture. Beginning with the Kennedy assassination, the number of inadequately explained major events has been mounting steadily and with them a steady decline in the trust between he people and their government. The refusal of American elites to take these doubts seriously has been a major disservice to the republic.

- You don't need a conspiracy to lie, do something illegal or to be stupid.

Henrik Ibsen made me do it

I'm a little late getting down to work today because I've been attending a Norwegian Embassy symposium at the Library of Congress celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of the death of the man who helped to ruin my life: Henrik Ibsen.

I don't really hold it against him and I'm far from the only one who has been affected by the Norwegian playwright. At this moment, for example, some 184 performances of Ibsen's plays are being readied around the world, including one at Washington's Shakespeare Theater next fall. Others will take place in Nepal, Bangladesh, Palestine, Mexico, Chile, Cuba, Australia, Argentina and South Korea. New translations are underway in Polish, Farsi, Vietnamese, German and French.

Ibsen introduced to the stage, and helped define, the existential and humanistic side of what would become the 20th century. Unfortunately, within a decade of his death, tanks and submarines would make it clear who would really be in charge of the century and it wasn't to be existentialists and humanists.

Nearly a hundred years before Earth Day, he wrote a strongly ecological play and declared in his notes for another work, "There are two kinds of moral law, two kinds of conscience, one in man and a completely different one in woman. They do not understand each other; but in matters of practical living the woman is judged by man's law, as if she were not a woman but a man." He also wrote about child abuse, incest, business ethics, venereal disease and media morality.

He has been praised as the greatest playwright since Shakespeare. Freud credited him with helping him discover the Oedipus complex. The National Committee for the Promotion of Ibsen describes his writings as "alive and relevant, constantly rejuvenating new generations." And that's just for starters.

But in a new book, Said About Ibsen, novelist Nikolaj Frobenius points out that there is another Ibsen: "An argumentative, provocative, stubborn and prickly sod."

This was the Ibsen I met in the 1950s in high school, an Ibsen alien to everything the 1950s stood for, as removed from the gestalt of 20th century American Pleasantville as he had been from conventional 19th century Norway. A still subversive Ibsen.

One of the Ibsen plays I read was the Arthur Miller adaptation of An Enemy of the People about the doctor had tried to warn his spa-dependent town of the ecological dangers of their polluted water system . At first, the town is receptive but when they find out how much it will cost to repair they turn against Dr Stockmann and he then turns against them. At point he says of the town, "It should be razed to the ground, I tell you! And wiped out, like vermin, all of those who live with the lie."

If the play had been commissioned by Move On and written by Michael Moore, Dr Stockmann would have been an unblemished hero. But Ibsen was a writer, not a polemicist. And so, a half decade before Silent Spring, a young man was able to learn in one play about ecological hazards, whistle-blowing, and the hubris that can come from just being right.

With it, life became far too complicated to just settle down as a happy 1950s lawyer, doctor or corporate executive, especially if you had also read a Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Willie Loman musing, "After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive." Or one year after graduation, picking up William Whyte's Organization Man:

"The corporation man is the most conspicuous example, but he is only one, for the collectivization so visible in the corporation has affected almost every field of work. Blood brother to the business trainee off to join Du Pont is the seminary student who win end up in the church hierarchy, the doctor headed for the corporate clinic, the physics Ph.D. in a government laboratory, the intellectual on the foundation-sponsored team project, the engineering graduate in the huge drafting room at Lockheed, the young apprentice in a Wall Street law factory. . .

"Listen to them talk to each other over the front lawns of their suburbia and you cannot help but be struck by how well they grasp the common denominators which bind them. Whatever the differences in their organization ties, it is the common problems of collective work that dominate their attentions, and when the Du Pont man talks to the research chemist or the chemist to the army man, it is these problems that are uppermost. The word collective most of them can't bring themselves to use--except to describe foreign countries or organizations they don't work for--but they are keenly aware of how much more deeply beholden they are to organization than were their elders."

The problem with such an education is that it is far easier to write and read about it than to actually live with the message. At Germantown Friends School I was, politically and philosophically at least, non-radical and normal. One year later I would learn that Harvard wasn't interested in Ibsen, Sloan Wilson or William Whyte; and, still later, Washington even less so. And so, with no little help from Henrik Ibsen and those who followed, I became an outsider.

Even one among my supposed allies. Because if you approach things as a writer you see too many things to please the truly committed. For example, I have never subscribed to the notion that those who disagree with me politically are therefore evil. Some of this comes from living in a large family but I suspect the lesson of Dr. Stockmann lingers as well: the underrated dangers of righteousness. And so I found myself siding with Al Camus who, when asked if he were willing to die for his beliefs, responded, "of course not, what if I am wrong"?

Yet oddly, and without premeditation, I have spent an extraordinary amount of my life dealing with whistleblowers like Dr Stockmann, both as a journalist and as a board member of a fund backing groups helping whistleblowers. I wrote about it in Why Bother?

Whistleblowers, in the course of doing their jobs, typically stumble upon facts that point to danger, neglect, waste, or corruption. Far too often this discovery is met not with approbation and as a sign of exemplary public service, but rather as a threat to the agency or company. Among the consequences: firing, reassignment, isolation, forced resignation, threats, referral to psychiatric treatment, public exposure of private life and other humiliations, being set up for failure, prosecution, elimination of one's job, blacklisting, or even death. . .

From the doctor in Ibsen's Enemy of the People to Karen Silkwood, the nuclear industry worker killed after her car was forced off the road on her way to talk to a reporter, speaking truth to power has proved costly. The Mongolians say that when you do it, you should keep one foot in the stirrup.

Whistleblowers fall easily into traps that can hurt if not destroy them. They may become monomaniacal, paranoiac, depressed, confused, and terribly lonely.

On the other hand, whistleblowers have forced the cancellation of a nuclear power plant that was 97% completed, potentially prevented widespread illness due to poor meat inspection, ended the beating of patients in a VA hospital, and exposed multi-billion dollar waste in the Star Wars program.

And not all whistleblowers are defeated. When Ernest Fitzgerald discovered a $2 billion cost overrun on a military cargo plane, Richard Nixon personally ordered his staff to "get rid of that son of a bitch." Twenty-five years later Fitzgerald was still on the job. . .

One study found that 232 out of 233 whistleblowers reported suffering retaliation; others found reprisals in about 95% of cases. As Admiral Hyman Rickover told a group of Pentagon cost analysts: "If you must sin, sin against God, not against the bureaucracy. God may forgive you, but the bureaucracy never will."

The whistleblower, the outsider, the rebel, always faces the dilemma that trapped Dr. Stockmann. I didn't like his solution, but I understood it. There is no textbook for the outsider, only stories like Ibsen's. Here's how I tried to explain it in my memoir, Multitudes:

I didn't plan it this way. I didn't want it this way. In truth, a large part of me still would like to have been one of the popular boys in the class, but things kept getting in the way - some addictive confluence of moral aggravation, periodic accident, undisciplined imagination, sporadic and unpremeditated courage randomly suppressing chronic shyness and cowardice, sloppy romanticism, episodic existentialism, recurrent hope, stultifying stubbornness, and an abiding intolerance for the dull. A child's dreams and an adult's faith pounding tide after tide on the rock of reality, thinking that maybe this time I'll float off.

Some people take it personally, as though I rebelled simply to annoy them. They make little jokes about the fact that I'm different, as if I had a moral obligation to be like them. When they see someone like me coming, they close the doors of their institutions, their imaginations, and their hearts. We are, after all, thieves who might abscond with their most precious possession: the tranquility of unexamined certainty.

But it's really more like Vaclav Havel said long ago when he was still a rebel:

"You do not become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society . . . "

Those dissidents who somehow remain connected to the normal find themselves alone in the crowd. Even in my home town, I often feel an exile - as though all had emigrated except for me, as though somehow I had missed the ship. . .

Emerson understood the problem:

"You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

Still, you can't talk about such things because it would further confirm the belief that you are best ignored, dismissed, or considered absurd. So you become the charming stranger from a strange place, you tell the jokes first, and you change the subject when it starts to get too close to the real. Better yet, you fool them into thinking that you are one of them even though you really blend better with those the urban itinerant Joe Gould described as the "cranks and misfits and the one-lungers and might-have-beens and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats."

Still, among the illusions of my life has been that if I stuck it out long enough, time would provide the acceptance that my words and thoughts had prevented. I. F. Stone used to say that when you're young you're blamed for things you didn't do and when you're older you get credit for them. It hasn't worked out like that, in part because just when I should have started coasting, the world around me took a nasty, greedy, and dangerous turn. America began destroying itself. It was the wrong time to start fitting in .

True, the best period for a revolution of the good is when one is young. To be twenty or thirty and part of an uprising of the collective soul is a rare gift of life. It does spoil you, though, for you go through the rest of your time wondering why that moment went away and why nothing seems able to bring it back.

What was unexpected, both in timing and intensity, was that I would not only live through one of America's great revivals but during a subsequent era when my country -- without debate, consideration, or struggle -- decided it really didn't want to be America any more.

And so today, sitting in a library that was under construction as Hedda Gabler and the Master Builder were being written, across the street from a US Congress that still won't deal with problems such as polluted water systems, I felt blessed by the ghost of that argumentative, provocative, stubborn and prickly sod. May he rest in peace. And keep everyone else riled up.

MULTITUDES: REBEL

IBSEN SITE
WIKIPEDIA

No dreams on H Street

Sam Smith

IT'S STRANGE HOW SOMETIMES it's the little stories that get you. For example, this morning, April 4, I read Paul Schwartzman's article in the Washington Post metro section about Capitol Hill's H Street strip:

"Bernard Gibson had a simple wish: to open a Cluck-U Chicken in the H Street neighborhood where his grandparents have lived for decades. Bound and determined, he held two jobs to squirrel away the cash: He owned a carwash and worked as a mechanic for the city. Last year, after selling the carwash, he got a permit for a sit-down restaurant and opened his dream. 'Best Buffalo Wingers in the World,' declares the bright purple awning on H Street, between the Family Dollar store and the check-cashing outlet. But in the age-old way that one person's dream is another's bedevilment, the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission said not so fast: H Street in Northeast Washington is a strip trying to shed its bedraggled past and become a gleaming urban paradise.

"Cluck-U is not a sit-down restaurant, the [advisory neighborhood commission] argued. It's a fast-food joint, just like McDonald's and Burger King, and, under zoning laws, neighbors should have had a say before it opened. Because they never got that chance, the ANC wants Cluck-U's permit stripped, an appeal it will make at a hearing today, as the struggle over H Street's future heats up. . .

"ANC Chairman Joseph Fengler said the commission's opposition is all about getting a fair, uniform interpretation of the zoning code. But some merchants and longtime residents see it as a war on black Washington. The ANC, which became majority white in 2002, wants to push 'the African-Americans from the corridor," said Clifton Humphries, owner of the H Street Martini Lounge, who is black. "They're trying to steer what comes down here. They want an upscale environment, where they are comfortable around their own'". . .

"Ravaged by the 1968 riots, H Street -- a strip stretching from Third Street to Bladensburg Road -- is still largely defined by boarded-up storefronts, tattered carryout joints and discount stores, by weekend street preachers and panhandlers loitering on corners. But on the western end, just past Union Station, the developer who helped remake Logan Circle is building Senate Square, a 480-unit condominium complex. At the eastern end, the Atlas Performing Arts Center opened last year with a dance school, near the H Street Playhouse and Humphries's sleek new bar, where the orange-tinged "Dean Martini" costs $10. . ." .

I put down the paper and drove my car to Distads's - about the best repair place in DC, grabbed a free cup of coffee after discussing our mutual maritime pasts with mechanical maestro Mark, walked to my bank and then to Sizzler, the Korean buffet which offers discounts to cops and firefighters so sometimes you'll find a couple of ambulances or a hook and ladder double parked outside. Along the way I counted what some might consider fast food places in what most consider the better part of Capitol Hill. There were about a half dozen including Starbucks, a fast food place for young whites.

It wasn't a new story. It's happening all over urban America. It was happening on Capitol Hill when I lived here in the 1960s. But at least the displacers were a little quieter back then, not as openly boastful and aggressive about the righteousness and bounty of their presence.

One of the reasons we moved back to Capitol Hill after years in more homogenous Northwest Washington was the pleasure of being around people who weren't all like you. And it's not just a matter of ethnicity. Although the Hill is still more biracial than most of DC, blocks near the Capitol were always white or mixed going back to the 19th century. But in our first five years back on the Hill our one block has included a former woman astronaut, two old cab drivers who remember when our house sold for $7,000, Trent Lott's best man, a carpenter, a physicist, a Baptist preacher born again from the legal profession, a former dean of the mostly black University of DC Law School, a gynecologist with her office in the basement, and a hermit lady whose vines covered her entire house and who we never saw before she died. At how many block parties in America do you find a physicist and a born-again preacher discussing eternities with civility if not resolution?

But the recapture of American cities by the white gentry doesn't leave much room for that sort of thing. There are little problems like soaring property values.

For example, Eighth Street SE, a block away from Distad's, was long one of those places progress didn't think was worth messing with. As was true for H Street, they even ran out of fire engines by the time it burned in the 1968 riots leaving the Marines from the barracks at the south end to send sentries to guard the laundry through which their dirty uniforms flowed.

The street offered little but utility - a headquarters and laundry for the Marines; a Popeye's; overflow space for the Shakespeare Theater; a Seven-Eleven and a Subway; one of Capitol Hill's two hardware stores; a dollar emporium; video stores, a fire station, and some restaurants that were looking for cheap space. It was one of the few urban strips where you could find homeless, yuppies, gays, Marines, firefighters, and Shakespearian actors all enjoying the same space.

The secret of such places is their non-discovery and 8th Street was too close to the already found and desiccated to last. It is, after all, the holy jihad of planners to root out such heresies and turn them to the path of progress. And so 8th Street is now being spruced up as part of Main Street, a campaign to cleanse America of urban greasy spoons, seedy emporiums with seedy customers, and places of scruffy usefulness. My neighbors seem to welcome it. I have gently tried to suggest that they should welcome instead being one of the few hoods in America with two hardware stores, but in this land only resurrection ranks ahead of progress.

Eighth Street will become a tree and bench lined paragon of new urban style; one of those places where progress comes in only one flavor. The rents will rise to meet the charm and the scruffy and the seedy and greasy will not be able to pay the rents and will be gone. In its place will come antiseptic, clerical urbanity. Payless Shoes has already been replaced by Paymore Coffee, a.k.a. Starbucks, where you can drink your latte grande and be grateful that 8th Street is becoming just like everywhere else.

Walking the remaining half mile home I was reminded that a couple of blocks away was Montmartre, one of the best restaurants in town, that shared its restroom with the adjoining Ben and Jerry's. Sometimes the hook and ladder would truck pull up in front as the crew went inside for their triple scoop cones.

Sharing is what cities that work are about. The gated minds of today's gentry don't understand it. They think they are bringing culture, taste and value by their presence when they're really just making the place duller. Homogenization in the name of beautification. And other people have to pay the price. Not just in evictions but by having their own culture, their own values, their own tastes declared unacceptable and inappropriate. It's one of the places that anger and hate come from.

I know something about anger and hate on H Street. In the 1960s I started a neighborhood newspaper that attempted to serve both the black and white parts of the community. To do so we had to rename the hood. We called it Capitol East so it included not just the white part known as the Hill but places like H Street as well.

In late 1967 I came up with the idea of pulling together the various leaders of Capitol East into an informal leadership council with the possibility of forming a major neighborhood coalition. Fourteen people attended the first meeting: 7 white and 7 black. But it didn't have much of a chance.

In February 1968, I wrote in the Capitol East Gazette:

"As contrary as the thought is to our national self-image, it is entirely possible that we are giving up the struggle to solve the deepest problems of our cities. . . National Guard troops are undergoing special training. Hotlines are being established. Armored trucks are being purchased. Police riot equipment is being beefed up. . . . Ramsey Clark, the Attorney General, was probably correct when he told a group of police chiefs and city officials recently that the nation's power to deal with urban riots is increasing faster 'than the underlying layers of frustration that cause them.'"

On the evening of April 4, 1968, I was up on T Street at the mayor's house with a group of anti-freeway protesters, when word came of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death. We went home as the police cars poured by filled with shotgun-armed and helmeted police.

The next morning things were quiet enough that we went about our business as usual. But I came home that afternoon from the office to find a slow stream of people walking down the street with liberated articles: hangers full of clothes, a naugahyde hassock, a television set. Somewhere in our neighborhood a woman walked off with a case of whiskey from a liquor store. When she got home she realized she didn't have any soda to go with it. She went back and was arrested as she tried to liberate her chaser.

There were only a few whites living in the block; but I felt little tension or hostility. I mainly noted the black smoke drifting down from H Street, four blocks away. My wife was out back working in our foot-wide strip of garden, listening to reports of looting and arson on a portable radio as a black fog settled in. We decided to go up on the roof for a better look. H Street was burning. Others areas had gone first and the radio reported a lack of fire equipment to deal with the situation a few blocks to the north. I tried to count the fires but they congealed under the curtain of smoke.

We decided to pack just in case. For about ten minutes we gathered an instinctive selection of nostalgic items, favorite photos, the non-valuable but irreplaceable. Then we looked at what we had done and laughed. Like loyal children of our generation, we settled down in our smoky living room to watch on television what was happening to us.

At six-thirty the next morning, a white friend rang our doorbell. He wasn't in trouble; he just wanted company on a tour of the area. We got into his car and drove to H, Seventh and 14th Streets. As I looked at the smoldering carcass of Washington and observed the troops marching down the street past storefronts that no longer had any brakes, I thought, so this is what war is like. As we drove past a gutted store on 14th Street it suddenly reignited itself and flames leaped towards the pavement.

For a year and a half of running a neighborhood newspaper, I had observed, and tried to report, a part of the community seething with emotions much of the other part refused to recognize. Now it was worse than even I had thought and anger, frustration, and helplessness washed up on my mind's shore.

The riot did more than $3 million worth of property damage. In the vicinity of H Street and some 124 commercial establishments and 52 homes were damaged. Another 21 businesses were damaged on or near 8th street.

At the time of the riot nearly 25% of the labor force in Capitol East was either unemployed, earning less than $3000 a year or employed only part-time. Over half of all adults living in the east part of the neighborhood had eight years or less of schooling. Over a quarter of the housing units in this same area were listed by the census as dilapidated or deteriorating.

Now, here it is April 4 again. Thirty-eight years since the one you can't forget. During most of those years no one did anything much to help H Street. You could still find the charred wood on some of the buildings. It was like during the riots: all the equipment was someplace else.

Then a few years ago, white America decided it wanted the cities back again. H Street leaped from despair to displacement without ever stopping for a dream. Now you can't even install the car part you just bought in the Auto Zone's parking lot without someone calling the cops. Someone who doesn't understand that the city isn't only theirs. Someone who doesn't understand that there are people with as much right as they to live near H Street but who would rather go to Cluck-U Chicken than Starbucks. Someone who doesn't understand that what you don't do with decency, you pay for in anger.

Pocket paradigms

Israel is a state like all the rest.

AIPAC is just another political group like the National Rifle Association. It is not a religion but one more Washington lobby corrupting the political process and making American voters less powerful.

The policy of the Israeli government is clearly distinguishable from the theology of Judaism to all but a small yet powerful and noisy crowd including neo-conservatives, cable TV anchors and semantic bomb throwers. Israeli policy reflects Judaism about as well as George Bush reflects Christianity.

Our policy towards Palestine, based on polling, is one of the major issues dividing us from the Muslim world. This policy helped lead to the World Trade Center attack and the international disasters that have occurred since. It has also made Israel less safe. We can not solve our current crises nor end our manic fears of the Muslim world without changing our policies towards Palestine and the Middle East.

Osama bin Laden is a monster created by American foreign policy. You can kill him but unless our foreign policy changes, there are more monsters where he came from.

If what goes on in the synagogue doesn't stay in the synagogue than it can not be expected to be treated as though it were still there. In other words, if you're going to ask American taxpayers to subsidize Israel and back its policies, the matter should be handled no differently than building a B2 bomber or putting a federal agency's office in some congress member's district. If you want to play by religion's rules act like a religion. Otherwise, the rules of politics govern. And anyone who calls that anti-Semitic is either a cry baby or a scoundrel.

Just because you're pro-Israel doesn't mean you have to be anti-Muslim. The present crisis stems in no small part from conflating the two. American policy has been anti-Muslim or cynically manipulative of Islamic states for decades. No policy of ours has been more wrong-headed.

If there is another disaster such as the World Trade Center, it will also be in no small part due to our policies in the Middle East including that towards those toward Palestine. No issue has done more damage to America and none continues to cause a greater threat.

Why we need history

Now that Frances Fukuyama has rediscovered history, the Nation Magazine's Katrina Vanden Heuvel would like to put it to bed again. In the best tradition of the establishment's view of "civil discourse" - i.e. avoiding the real issues - Vanden Heuvel suggested in the :Washington Post that we "stop equating our opponents with famous dictators, their chief executioners, police apparatus or ideologies. I'm all for learning from history, but times are hard enough in American politics - with war, threats to national security, the greatest divide between rich and poor in our history and deep cultural divisions. Present differences deserve to be described in contemporary terms. The purpose of public speech is not just to restate anger but to clarify the principles and evidence that fuel it -- in ways that invite discussion, not inhibit it."

Vanden Heuvel is dead wrong. The reason people get away with bad historical analogies is because we don't discuss history enough. We are left with an assortment of myths, stereotypes, and trite metaphors. Our present state is in no small part the result of not understanding and discussing our past. For example:

Have we always been so publicly callous about torture before?

Why have we passed more laws in the past 30 years than we did in our first two hundred?

Whatever happened to the Tenth Amendment?

Have corporations always been granted the status of individuals in our society?

The list is endless, but let's just consider the aspect of history that Vanden Heuvel doesn't want us to mention: similarities between present day American politicians and politics and some unpleasant precedents.

Her examples remind us that people can make these analogies crudely, wrongly, or for nefarious purposes. But if Vanden Heuvel felt more at home with history she would realize that this is part of a great American tradition: putting up with a certain amount of nonsense in order to preserve our freedoms including that of speech.

But what if we ignore Vanden Heuvel's advice and ask ourselves, for example: how close are we to Hitler's Germany? What can we learn from even a cursory consideration of history?

In the first place, one needs to separate Hitler, Nazism and fascism. Conflating these leads the unwary to assume easily that all three are inevitably characterized by anti-Semitism, when in fact only the first two are. By avoiding this distinction we don't have to face the fact that America is closer to fascism than it has ever been in its history.

To understand why, one needs to look not at Hitler but at the founder of fascism, Mussolini. What Mussolini founded was the estato corporativo - the corporative state or corporatism. Writing in Economic Affairs in the mid 1970s, R.E. Pahl and J. T. Winkler described corporatism as a system under which government guides privately owned businesses towards order, unity, nationalism and success. They were quite clear as to what this system amounted to: "Let us not mince words. Corporatism is fascism with a human face. . . An acceptable face of fascism, indeed, a masked version of it, because so far the more repugnant political and social aspects of the German and Italian regimes are absent or only present in diluted forms."

Thus, although the model generally cited in defense of organized capitalism is that of the contemporary Japanese, the most effective original practitioners of a corporative economy were the Italians. Unlike today's Japanese, but like contemporary America, their economy was a war economy.

Adrian Lyttelton, describing the rise of Italian fascism in The Seizure of Power, writes: "A good example of Mussolini's new views is provided by his inaugural speech to the National Exports Institute on 8 July 1926. . . Industry was ordered to form 'a common front' in dealing with foreigners, to avoid 'ruinous competition,' and to eliminate inefficient enterprises. . . The values of competition were to be replaced by those of organization: Italian industry would be reshaped and modernized by the cartel and trust. . .There was a new philosophy here of state intervention for the technical modernization of the economy serving the ultimate political objectives of military strength and self-sufficiency; it was a return to the authoritarian and interventionist war economy."

Lyttelton writes that "fascism can be viewed as a product of the transition from the market capitalism of the independent producer to the organized capitalism of the oligopoly." It was a point that Orwell had noted when he described fascism as being but an extension of capitalism. Lyttelton quoted Nationalist theorist Affredo Rocco: "The Fascist economy is. . . an organized economy. It is organized by the producers themselves, under the supreme direction and control of the State."

The Germans had their own word for it: wehrwirtschaft. It was not an entirely new idea there. As William Shirer points out in the Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich, 18th and 19th century Prussia had devoted some five-sevenths of its revenue on the Army and "that nation's whole economy was always regarded as primarily an instrument not of the people's welfare but of military policy."

Has "civil discourse" been harmed by knowing the foregoing and the uncomfortable similarities it bears with what is happening to our country today?

Another more complex example is Adolph Hitler. On many grounds, the analogy does not serve us well:

Germany's willingness to accept Hitler was the product of many cultural characteristics specific to that country, to the anger and frustrations in the wake of the World War I defeat, to extraordinary inflation and particular dumb reactions to it, and, of course, to the appeal of anti-Semitism. Still, consideration of the Weimar Republic that preceded Hitler does us no harm. Bearing in mind all the foregoing, there was also:

- A collapse of conventional liberal and conservative politics that bears uncomfortable similarities to what we are now experiencing.

- The gross mismanagement of the economy and of such key worker concerns as wages, inflation, pensions, layoffs, and rising property taxes. Many of the actions were taken in the name of efficiency, an improved economy and the "rationalization of production." There were also bankruptcies, negative trade balance, major decline in national production, large national debt rise compensated for by foreign investment. In other words, a hyped version of what America and its workers are experiencing today.

- The Nazis as the first modern political party. As University of Pennsylvania professor Thomas Childers explains, the Nazis discovered the importance of campaigning not just during campaigns but between elections when the other parties folded their tents. With this "perpetual campaigning" they spread themselves like a virus, considering the public reaction to everything right down to the colors used for posters and rally backgrounds. Knowing this, one can not watch the manic manipulations of public moments by the Bush regime without a sense of déjà vu.

- The use of negative campaigning, a contribution to modern politics by Joseph Goebbels. The Nazi campaigns argued what was wrong with their opponents and ignored stating their own policies.

- The Nazis as the inventors of modern political propaganda. Every modern American political campaign and the types of arguments used to support them owes much to the ideas of the Nazis.

- The suddenness of the Nazi rise. The party went from less than 3% of the vote to being the largest party in the country in four years.

- The collapse of the country's self image. Childers points out that Germany had had been a world leader in education, industry, science, and literacy. Much of the madness that we see today stems from attempts to compensate for our battered self-image.

So while many of the behaviors that would come to be associated with Nazis and Hitler - from physical attacks on political opponents to the death camps - seem far removed from our present concerns, there is still much to learn from their history.

We are clearly in a post-constitutional era; the end of the First American Republic. Depending on what day it is we think of its replacement variously - ranging from an adhocracy to proto-fascism. But one does not need to know the end of the story to know that we headed at a rapid pace away from the extraordinary principles of American democracy towards the dark hole of power with impunity, to the sort of world in which, as Rudolph Giuliani has calmly asserted, "freedom is about authority."

If we describe present differences only in contemporary terms then we have nothing to guide us but what happened yesterday.

George Bush and his capos have capitalized on this disinterest in history to rewrite the Constitution and other things. He's not the first.

For example, Article 48 of the constitution of the Weimar Republic stated, "In case public safety is seriously threatened or disturbed, the Reich President may take the measures necessary to reestablish law and order, if necessary using armed force. In the pursuit of this aim, he may suspend the civil rights described in articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153, partially or entirely. The Reich President must inform the Reichstag immediately about all measures undertaken . . . The measures must be suspended immediately if the Reichstag so demands."

It was this article that Hitler used to peacefully establish his dictatorship. And why was it so peaceful and easy? Because, according to Childers, the 'democratic" Weimar Republic had already used it 57 times prior to Hitler's ascendancy.

There are eerie similarities between Article 48 and George Bush's approach. When you add to this the remarkable incompetence of the current regime, the collapse of both traditional liberal and conservative politics, and the economic crises, it feels like a new Weimar Republic setting the stage for awful things we can not at this point even imagine. It may be that history has something to tell us after all.

HISTORY OF HITLER'S EMPIRE
By Thomas Childers

A PHILISTINE AT THE GATES

ONE OF THE MORE enjoyable conspiracies in which I have been involved was helping to start the DC Community Humanities Council, which just celebrated its 25 years anniversary. At the time, every state as well as Guam, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico had a humanities council, but not the capital colony. This was not accidental. Beyond the normal indifference shown to the city by the federal government was the fact that DC was where Congress met and if the local humanities council did anything untoward it could hurt the humanities across the nation.

But the Marion Barry administration was putting on the heat, and finally the NEH began looking for some safe, responsible, non-trouble-making citizens to form the council. At one point they got the list up to 400 names, and I remember a worried looking NEH official coming to our office and interviewing me.

In the end, the vetting down to seven founding members wasn't particularly effective. Not only did they let me in but also Rod French of George Washington University, whose scholarship included a close look at America's free thinkers, the very freethinking author Sophy Burnham, the similarly liberated poet Ethelbert Miller and Del Lewis, later head of NPR and also ambassador to South Africa, who was frequently excellent even before they made him an Excellency.

At the time I noted, "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."

The group was - and remains - the only urban humanities council in the country. It consisted of three blacks, one latino and three whites, four academics and three philistines, and four men and three women. In another first for humanities councils, it had co-chairs, one black and one white.

So on paper in 1981 we looked admirably diverse. What the NEH perhaps wasn't expecting was that we were actually quite unified, got on exceptionally well, had lots of fun, and right under NEH chair William Bennett's nose funded things like a film on liberation theology and another on the role of the sleeping car porters in the civil rights movement.

As a philistine on the council I tried to explain to my readers what a humanities was: "It's probably worthwhile for a city with a budget of over a billion dollars to spend S300,000 on something that only our souls say is cost-effective. . .

"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 as well as 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."

After five years of the Reagan administration I wasn't so sure. Speaking at the fifth anniversary I said,

"Five years ago the DC Community Humanities Council was formed, charged with the diffusion of ideas, the encouragement of thought and the inspiration of rational discourse within this our nation's capital. This was a little like trying to sell Bibles in a brothel, and I think that any fair assessment of what has occurred around us since we began would indicate that we have failed miserably. The best efforts of the council and its sainted staff have failed to halt a national and local stampede towards what is perhaps the most anti-humanistic era of our lifetimes.

"It is an era, to be sure, not without ideas and a sense of history but what ideas and what history. It's as if the worst of the past had been resyndicated and put on Channel 20, with none of the other stations working. We draw from the economics of Morgan, Mellon and the British East India Company, the morality of Comstock, the civil liberties of Palmer and McCarthy, the civil rights of Tara, the lifestyle of Babbitt and Gatsby, the religion of Gantry, the political ethics of Teapot Dome, the business ethics of Ponzi, the gentleness of Nietzsche, the altruism of Ayn Rand, the ecological sensitivity of General Sherman, the spiritualism of Warren Gameliel Harding, the imagination of Rutherford Hayes the brilliance of Franklin Pierce, the expressiveness of Calvin Coolidge and the evolutionary theories of William Jennings Bryan. . . 

"We have become the first society to know more about the external world than we do about ourselves. And now we even seem to be losing the ability to talk or write about the problem. It is an era in which, like the fifties, the man in the gray flannel suit is in the ascendancy, but unlike the fifties, when he was viewed with the ambivalence that economics forces upon us, he or she is now a cultural role model, and, unbelievably, even considered hip, charismatic and sexy.

"And it is an era in which we know how to promote, facilitate merge, network, manage, integrate, finalize and bottom line, but are losing the ability to make or to create. I have a nightmare that one day the country will awake and discover that there is nothing to manage, finalize and facilitate. There will be no one left to build anything.

"So we have failed -- here in the jaws of the lion -- but I would argue that given the powers arrayed against the humanistic ideal, failure has been the only sane and honorable course. And the failure, one hopes, is only temporary. Long ago, John Locke warned of the constant decay of ideas, and how they must be 'renewed by repeated exercises of the senses.' If not, 'the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen.'

"The print is fading, but, thanks in part to this band of happy humanistic warriors, it could have been a lot worse. . . In a city that is obsessed with style, it is one of the few real class acts. So a toast to the Council for all it has done and will do and to the humanistic spirit. May we live to see it once more."

Twenty years later, we are still waiting.

The care and feeding of unsolved mysteries

We recently ran an excerpt from the History News Network about a controversial article on the JFK assassination written for the Nation magazine by Max Holland. We included, with certain gratuitous glee, a snipe of two at the Nation which has long struck us as a bit too close to the foreign policy establishment.

We subsequently received a nice note from the Nation's publicity director pointing to a number of letters highly critical of the Holland piece. It is all, in the best manner of JFK assassination literature, complex, contentious, and highly time consuming. The links are below

But our own complaint is not with Holland's conclusions about the assassination but with the contemptuous tone in which he writes about the matter. A sample: "Then-Senator Gary Hart was more responsible than most of his committee colleagues for twisting unpalatable truths into the logical equivalent of pretzels and milking the tragedy for political gain."

In any one of the great mysteries of our time, there tend to be a number of conclusions worthy of consideration. The one thing many have in common is that they are more worthy of consideration than the accepted wisdom on the matter as approved by official commissions and so forth.

It is safe to say that we have not found the full story behind the JFK assassination, the TWA 800 crash, Vincent Foster's death and a number of other matters. In fact, this verges on conventional wisdom outside the mainstream media and other establishment circles. And even within the conventional media there is an ambivalence or even acceptance, witness this comment on JFK by the Washington Post's Stephen Rosenfeld more than a decade ago: "That the assassination probably encompassed more than a lone gunman now seems beyond cavil."

It is also safe to say that there is no common understanding of what the rational explanation of these unsolved mysteries is. Intelligent inductive thinkers will continue to come to differing conclusions as long as the mysteries remain.

Finally, it is safe to say that those who ridicule these inquiries, describe their researchers as conspiracy theorists, and are generally dismissive of any residual curiosity fall into a number of categories themselves including fools, CIA or similar operatives with a vested interest, sedated members of the establishment, or those fearful that the land of Oz may not, after all, exist and would like to postpone their acceptance of the fact.

The very use of the term 'conspiracy theorist' is an anti-intellectual attempt to silence argument for which the labeler has no factual answer. Ironically, it is often the very accuser who is more inclined to believe in conspiracies, albeit benign ones, because it implies a small number of people deciding the course of history, which is how these critics were taught in college that society properly functions. They are, after all, more likely to be Skull & Bone or Council on Foreign Relations members than they are to be social historians or anthropologists who view change as occurring in less elite ways.

Thus anyone who attacks someone else as a conspiracy theorist should be ignored on grounds of simple incompetence with the possible additional liability of disingenuousness.

At the end of the film Match Point is an instructive episode involving two detectives. As described in the Movie Spoiler: "The police know about the affair from Nola's diary, but do not suspect him. Then, that night, the lead detective has a dream, and wakes proclaiming that Chris Wilton murdered Nola and the old lady. When he gets to the office the next day, he details out exactly as it happens to his partner. The partner says that would be a plausible story, if they hadn't already solved the case. The night before, a robber was shot after burglarizing a house. In his pocket was the old lady's wedding band, engraved and everything. Case closed."

What is striking is that neither man berates or disparages the other. They act like good detectives rather than like spoiled members of the establishment. What determines the outcome are the perceived facts of the matter (with the emphasis on perceived).

If Max Holland does not believe the CIA was involved in JFK's murder then he should prove it, understanding, however, that the proof does not in any way lie in the personal imperfections of, say, Mark Lane.

The same applies to anyone investigating anything. To do the job right, one must follow the evidence and be clear when it stops. The rest is theory or hypothesis, acceptable and worthy of debate, but in a lesser category than fact. We know, for example, that it is highly likely that Oswald did not act alone. But were the other parties connected to the Mafia, rightwing Cubans, or the CIA? The facts overwhelmingly suggest that Vince Foster was not killed at Ft. Marcy Park. Did he commit suicide in some inconvenient locale or was her murdered someplace else? And if so, why?

We don't know yet. But the massive effort to stop people from wondering about such matters is itself reasonable cause for suspicion to the inductive mind since the effort relies so heavily on ridicule and so little on fact. Not probably of the result of a conspiracy, mind you. More likely, one might theorize absent further evidence, just common stupidity.

MAX HOLLAND ARTICLES
LETTERS IN RESPONSE

Integrity doesn't need a law

THERE IS A WIDESPREAD ASSUMPTION that once the Bush mob leaves office, things will get better. I'm not so sure of that. After all, America has been deteriorating since the Reagan administration took office regardless of who was in the White House. The president is the ultimate canary in the mine shaft of our culture, more typically reflecting where we are rather than determining it. 

I was reminded of this by a nasty incident, small yet so revealing  of how engrained the American institutional culture of cruelty and inhumanity has become. A student at George Washington University went to the hospital for depression and because he was feeling suicidal. According to the Washington Post, "Within a day and a half of arriving there, he got a letter from a GWU administrator saying his 'endangering behavior' violated the code of student conduct. He faced possible suspension and expulsion from school, the letter said, unless he withdrew and deferred the charges while he got treatment. . .

"GWU was Nott's dream school, he said recently. He'd always wanted to study foreign relations in Washington, he said, so after starting classes, making friends his freshman year and getting straight A's, he was the happiest he'd ever been.

"But it was a tough year for GWU, with several sudden student deaths. One evening in April, near the end of the semester, a freshman jumped from the fifth floor of a dorm. He was one of Nott's closest friends; they had planned to room together sophomore year.

"When he jumped, the complaint says, Nott and two others were trying to open his locked door to help.

"In fall 2004, when Nott came back to school, he started feeling depressed, he said. He kept thinking about how his friend had died. In September, another student committed suicide."

According to the American College Health Association, 38% of college students experience some depression and nine percent seriously consider suicide.

Could this have anything to do with the future college students see for themselves? The false expectations of parents?  Or how they are treated at places like George Washington? Such questions don't get asked and don't have to because today it is the responsibility of individuals to conform to the rules and, if they can't, there are plenty willing to take their place as the country's employment opportunities dwindle.

Where once America primarily controlled its employment market by race, increasingly it is being done by other specious moral judgments as well: the use of marijuana, weighing too much, or becoming depressed. In the end, places like GW are left with more students willing to do just what they're told.

If you want to know where things like Abu Ghraib start it is in incidents like this where simple decency and compassion are drowned in the paperwork of a bureaucratic, legalistic, institutionally self-serving society. A place where what was once handled with a handshake now takes a 52 page document.

There is no shame in GW's reaction to the incident. Shame has all but disappeared from Washington. Instead you have a suffering human being reduced to an administrative headache.

One of the ways you can tell there is no shame is when the institution - and the newspaper that covers it - reduces the matter to a legal problem. It has been wisely said that integrity doesn't need a law. And no law can create it. The same is true with compassion, wisdom, and decency. George Washington University has apparently dispensed with such virtues in its business model.

As for the student, he has recovered, left GW, and will graduate from the University of Maryland this spring at the age of 20.

Jamming with James

APEX BLUES 1990 WITH GEORGE JAMES

This recording of the Phoenix Jazz Band was made at the Central Ohio Jazz Festival in 1990 and features George James on saxophone, band leader Bob Walter on trumpet, Coleman Hankins on clarinet and your editor on piano, among others.

George James was 84 years old at the time and had to be helped to the stage. Once he got there it was a different story as is apparent on the cut. He had sixty recordings behind him and had been a regular with both Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller. The tune we played was the Apex Blues written by Jimmy Noone in honor of the second floor Apex Club on the south side of Chicago where Noone had an orchestra in the 1920s. The club was raided and closed in 1930 by federal agents enforcing prohibition. One of those who played with Noone was Earl 'Father' Hines. Another was George James who played in Noone's group before going on the road with Louis Armstrong.

We played just two tunes with James - the other was Misty - but for a stride piano player like myself to go even eight bars with one of Fats Waller's sidemen is about as close to heaven as one can reasonably expect to get. And who would have guessed it would happen in Columbus Ohio? But, then, as Fats used to say, "One never knows, do one?"

APEX BLUES 1990 WITH GEORGE JAMES

APEX BLUES 1929 WITH JIMMIE NOONE

The mythology of immigration

IT IS taken as a given in the immigration debate that our current system for dealing with the issue has some sort of historical logic. It doesn't. The story of immigration in the U.S. is a mishmash of hospitality and hatred, encouragement and restriction.

The Naturalization Act of 1790, for example, said that "any alien, being a free white person, may be admitted to become a citizen of the United States." Blacks, indentured servants, and most women couldn't be citizens no matter where they came from, but the underlying approach to immigration would boggle the mind of today's strict constructionists. If you were a free white male, you came, you saw, and you signed up. As the Citizenship and Immigration Services describes ti, "the law required a set period of residence in the United States prior to naturalization, specifically two years in the country and one year in the state of residence when applying for citizenship. When those requirements were met, an immigrant could file a Petition for Naturalization with "any common law court of record" having jurisdiction over his residence asking to be naturalized. Once convinced of the applicant’s good moral character, the court would administer an oath of allegiance to support the Constitution of the United States."

The essence of immigration as we know it today - i.e. the restriction of immigration - didn't become a major issue until the Chinese exclusion Act of 1882, hardly something of which Americans should be proud. This was the period of the great post-reconstruction counter revolution during which corporations gained enormous power but the rest of America and its citizens lost it.

The counter-revolution was not only an attack on would-be immigrants, it was aimed at American ethnic groups who had proved far too successful at adding to their political clout in places like Boston and New York City.

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 . . . There is no denying the service which Tammany has rendered to the republic. There is no such organization for taking hold of the untrained, friendless man and converting him into a citizen. Who else would do it if we did not? . . . [Tammany] looks after them for the sake of their vote, grafts them upon the Republic, makes citizens of them."

Alexander B. Callow Jr. of the University of California has written that Boston pol Martin Lomansey even 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 newcomers for the citizenship examination . . . Friendly judges, anticipating election day, converted their courts into naturalization mills, grinding out a thousand new Americans a day. . . . Flags were waved, prose turned purple, celebrations were wild on national holidays. . . . Patriotism became a means for the newcomer to prove himself worthy."

By 1891 the federal government had assumed control of admitting or rejecting all immigrants and one year later Ellis island opened. By 1903 we had a law restricting Mexican laborers and during and after World I, laws were expanded greatly including a ban on all Asians save the Japanese.

We did not have the equivalent of a green card until 1940 and the actual card of that name only came in during the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s. What we think of as our immigration system is in no small part a leftover from the McCarthy era.

It is common today to discuss immigration as though it were primarily an employment and economic matter. The trouble with this claim is that many of the people who are most anti-immigration are the same who have caused infinitely more economic harm to the country through globalization and outsourcing.

In truth, what really scares the exclusionists is the politics of immigrants, potentially more progressive than they would like. From Nordic populists in the northern middle west to European socialists, to the right immigration has meant left.

This, of course, isn't always true as in the case of Cuba but it helps to make the debate a bit clearer to understand what it is about.

In the end, we don't really have an immigration policy but an exclusion policy, outsourcing our prejudices by not letting their targets enter the country.

Premature aging

Sam Smith
 
One of the most striking changes in Washington culture over recent decades has been the disappearance of radical youth and their replacement  by a culture of elite, young right libertarians coming to the capital intent on increasing their own capital, financial and political. The recently jailed graffiti artist Borf is a rare exception to the rule, but the weekly paper and many local blogs, for example, rarely break out of a culture of self absorption and when they do it is with a snobbery and contempt - which they mistakenly regard as hip - towards those portions of the city not yet blessed by their gentrification.
 
Thus, reading that Harvard students supported the lately departed Lawrence Summers comes as no surprise. After all, the students are at Harvard to do as well as Summers did until confronted by some declasse groups such as blacks and women. And as the author of a forthcoming book on Harvard students put it, "There is not a speck of irony on the campus."
 
And now we learn from Donald MacLeod in the Guardian that things are no better in Britain: "Universities have appealed to lecturers to call off industrial action over pay as a student union broke ranks and condemned the strike and boycott of exam marking. Bristol students' union said it strongly condemned the tactics used by the lecturers' unions. . . in pursuit of their 20% pay claim. . . 'We will put pressure on [the unions] to resolve their pay dispute before targeting students at their most vulnerable time of their academic year.' But the unions look set to go ahead with a one-day strike on Tuesday, followed by a boycott of setting and marking exams and coursework."
 
Consider in contrast some of the slogans of an earlier young constituency, the French student rebels of 1968:
 
- Boredom is counterrevolutionary.
 
- No replastering, the structure is rotten.
 
- We want nothing of a world in which the certainty of not dying from hunger comes in exchange for the risk of dying from boredom.
 
- The boss needs you, you don't need him.
 
- Your happiness is being bought. Steal it.
 
From such thoughts, so odd today, we have come to student bodies that can't even tolerate a one day strike for better teacher pay. One need no better warning of the collapse of the west than that its elite young have become so, and even gloatingly, conservative. It now seems a race as to which will do us in first: the unprecedented warming of the earth or the unprecedented aging of its youth.