The JFK assassination, Vietnam, and the path not taken

The following op-ed was published in the New Bedford Standard-Times this morning.

A half-century has elapsed since that cold Dallas day when President John F. Kennedy was murdered.  Even now, these events continue to capture our imagination.  Why?  Surely some of it stems from the energy and charisma of the young President himself.  Few things shock us more than seeing someone cut down in their prime, their great promise unfulfilled. 

Much like 9/11 for Americans of this century, Kennedy’s seemingly inexplicable murder inspired an almost existential sense of national and individual vulnerability.  But it also marked a profound change in our national story.   One rarely finds anyone who lived through the events of November 1963 that does not think that something profoundly changed in their wake.   

The next five years brought a remarkable expansion of equality and freedom, including an end to racial apartheid in the South.  Kennedy’s successor was ultimately better suited to help with this extraordinary change.  But those five years also included a brutal and unnecessary war, an exponential increase in government dishonesty, and a blunt and still-unresolved confrontation with racial inequality in the urban North.   

And then in 1968, the two public figures that seemed most capable of redeeming the national promise of peace and justice followed JFK to the grave in bloody fashion.

Many historians also believe that JFK’s death was a watershed moment, particularly with regard to Vietnam.    

Exactly two years before that fateful day in Dallas, Kennedy signed National SecurityAction Memorandum 111.  In it, he authorized a significant increase in the American advisory effort in South Vietnam.  He also stepped up aid to the embattled Diem regime, which was under increasing attack not only by Communist-led guerrillas, but also by a large percentage of the broader population.  This document would seem to support the arguments of those who credit Kennedy with starting the Vietnam War.  But if we dig a little deeper, we begin to discern the hazy outlines of another path – one brutally cut short in Dallas. 

One week prior to issuing NSAM 111, on November 15^th 1961, Kennedy met with his advisers.  They were convinced that Kennedy needed to send troops to Vietnam, immediately – as many as 205,000.   

Only 10 months into his first term, Kennedy had already been sorely tested by Cold War emergencies in Cuba and Berlin.  There had been more failure than success.   

But to his credit, Kennedy had also learned from these experiences.  The Bay of Pigs fiasco taught him to question unstated assumptions, particularly about the utility and necessity of deploying military power, when any conflict threatened nuclear holocaust.  His reading of history told him that once loosed, the dogs of war could quickly escape the control of even reasonable men.   

As a consequence, despite a united front among his advisers, Kennedy responded to the call for troops in Vietnam with an emphatic ‘no.’   “The war in Vietnam could be won only so long as it was their war,” he told an aide privately.  “If it were ever converted into a white man’s war, we would lose.”

Kennedy certainly did not retreat from Vietnam in the next two years.  And the documents don’t tell us definitively what he intended to do, when he boarded the plane for Dallas.  It’s not clear even he knew.  Had he returned to Washington unharmed, would he have committed over 500,000 troops to Vietnam, as Lyndon Johnson ultimately did?   

We will never know.  But Kennedy’s hard-won practical wisdom, demonstrated most clearly two years earlier, gives us some hope that the awful, wasting tragedy of the Vietnam War could have been avoided.  And with it, the mortal blow that conflict dealt to the legitimacy of our civic institutions, our sense of national purpose, and our moral standing in the world.  Not far from where Kennedy’s body was laid to rest stands a memorial to the almost 60,000 Americans who died in that conflict.  On the other side of the world one finds comparable memorials to the over 2 million people who died in ‘the American War.’  When this historian mourns the events of November 1963, it is this road not taken that I will have in mind.  I suspect I will not be the only one.    

Rivera is the greatest closer of all time. So what?

Brad, Mason, Rob and I have been having an argument by text about Mariano Rivera. Brad, a Yankee fan, has been talking up Rivera's greatness, and his critical importance to the Yankees success over the past decade and a half.

I disagree.

I'll make 4 points.

First point: Rivera is probably the best closer of all time.

I have great respect for Mariano Rivera. He has been the top player at this position (or close to it) for a very long time. He has been incredibly consistent, and reliable. He will get in the Hall of Fame. Since other closers of lesser quality have already gotten in, he should too. He also appears to be a good guy, modest, and respected by teammates and opponents alike. To me, only two other closers in can be discussed in the same breath as Rivera: Trevor Hoffman, and Dennis Eckersley. The latter is already in the Hall. Hoffman will likely follow (he retired in 2011 I believe).

So what follows is NOT an attack on Rivera, and how good a closer he is. I'm not even going to spend much time talking about his career stats here, because for the most part I don't think they're relevant for what I'm going to argue.

Second point: the save, like 'wins' for a pitcher, is pretty close to a meaningless statistic.

Why does Rivera have more saves than anyone else in the last two decades? Well, obviously one reason is that he's been better than other closers. Another is that he's stayed healthy and effective for a very long time. But another big reason is that he's played for teams that have won between 90 and 110 games virtually year. This means he's had more save opportunities. It also likely means that he has come into more games with 2 and 3 runs leads than many of his peers, making his saves easier. So: coming back at me with song and verse about Rivera's save numbers tells me nothing. Its a weak argument.

Third point: Closers are closers not because they are very good pitchers, but because they aren't.

Baseball pitchers don't go through Little League, Babe Ruth, college and lower minor league ball training as closers. Pitchers become closers, because they aren't good enough (lack the pitch variety or stamina) to be starters. Or because they get hurt, and can no longer do what a pitcher is supposed to do, so they try to 'save' their careers (and their arms). A starter, in theory, can get 27 outs while keeping the other team under 5 runs if they're average, under 4 if they're good. Or, to put it differently, if Rivera were good enough to pitch quality starts consistently, he'd be a starting pitcher. Why? Because a starting pitcher who gets quality starts is more valuable than a closer is. Or to put it differently, the vast majority of starting pitchers in baseball would be effective -- perhaps dominant -- closers. So why aren't they closers? Because they're more valuable as starters, that's why.   A closer plays no role in helping his team to a lead, or in keeping that lead when it is most vulnerable.  In the first 8 innings, he gets no hits, fields no batted balls, records no outs.

For this reason, I would submit to you that in most years of Rivera's career, he was perhaps the 3rd or 4th MOST VALUABLE PITCHER on the Yankees (behind Mussina, Cone, Wells, Clemens, etc). When even a middle quality starter for the Yanks pitched 200 innings, he got 600 outs.  A closer like Rivera pitches in less than 1/3 of his teams games, and in only 1/9 of that 1/3.  It stands to reason that he is thus less valuable to his team than someone who pitches 3 times as many innings, and does so when the outcome of the game is still most in doubt. 

4th point: closing baseball games is easy.

Closing baseball games is easy, particularly in the 9th inning closer era. Starting pitchers have to go through the lineup at least twice, sometimes more. This means they must adjust as hitters adjust to them; they must vary their pitches; they have to pitch from the stretch sometimes. As they tire, they must find ways to get hitters out. Closers don't have to deal with any of this, usually. They come in with the bases empty. Hitters only see them once, so technically speaking, they really don't have to 'pitch' at all -- they can get by with just 2 or 3 pitches (1, in Rivera's case). Late innings in close games, their managers have generally put in stronger defensive players behind them, making their job easier.

The notion that getting the last 3 outs somehow requires some kind of extra inner-fire or intestinal fortitude, and that this characteristic is rarely found, is palpable nonsense. Rivera doesn't get guys out with mental toughness. He gets guys out with pitches, and the defense behind him. For the reasons I've stated above, a starter requires far more mental toughness (and mental work) to do his job, than a closer requires to do his.

The overwhelming majority of pitchers who have pitched in the 9th inning with a lead have left the game winning. Let's look at numbers. Statistical studies of MLB history indicate that teams that have gone into the 9th inning ahead have won 95% of the time -- over all of baseball history. Teams winning after the 6th inning win over 80% of the time. Teams winning after 1 inning win 70% of the time.
 
These numbers have varied little over time, and HAVE NOT GONE UP in the era of the 9th inning closer. The 1978 Mariners won the lowest percentage of games they led after 8 innings in history -- and they still won 80% of them.  This tells us that any individual closer is unlikely to have a significant impact on the number of games a team wins in a given year, beyond what any average pitcher has done over nearly a century of baseball.

This tells us that while the emotions might heighten in the 9th, when the game is coming to an end, your chances of success are higher (and the challenge is thus lower) if you pitch only the 9th inning than if you were to pitch in any other single inning prior to it.

Let's say 3 guys are trying to cut down a tree. The first guy ('starter') takes 18 whacks at the tree. The second guy ('middle reliever') takes 6 whacks at the tree. The third guy ('closer') takes 3 whacks at the tree. The tree falls. Rank these 3 guys, in order of greatest importance.

Point 5:  individual closers make very little difference to a team.
 
Look at the Red Sox this year. They've used Koji Uehara as their ninth-inning guy in recent months, after Andrew Bailey and Joel Hanrahan broke down earlier this season. All of a sudden, Uehara looks like the best reliever in the league since the All-Star break, with a 27-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio and five hits allowed in 21 innings. That's Koji Uehara, a 38-year-old right-handed journeyman with a fastball that barely breaks 90 mph, and who had 14 career saves in four years prior to 2013. We might also note that the 2012 Yankees lost Rivera in May, and promptly replaced him with another guy (Soriano) who got 42 saves. In other words, the 'job' of closer isn't a difficult one. The hard and important work has already been done.

95% of all pitchers, in all of baseball history, who have pitched in the 9th inning with a lead, have walked off with their team winning.  Now, you can argue that that 5% really matters -- over a 162 game season, that's approximately 8 games a year, that teams lose when they go into the 9th with a lead. Since even middle-quality closers generally succeed in 70-80% of their opportunities, that means that you could put Joe Closer in and potentially hold 5 to 6 of those 8 leads. Since Rivera has been very effective, let's say he holds 7 of them...but we should of course note that he has played for consistently very good (and often great) teams, and thus has come into many games with 2 and 3 run leads.

A very popular measure that sabremetricians use to figure out how valuable players are to their teams is Wins Above Replacement (WAR): the number of wins that a player added to a team, above what an average player at that position would have added. They can calculate WAR for a player in a single season, or over a career. According to Baseball Reference, Rivera is ranked 209th -- right next to Tim Hudson, and below such sure fire Hall of Famers as Chase Utley and Andruw Jones. And of course, his WAR is somewhat inflated by two things: his longevity, and the fact that his replacement value is measured by the win differential if he were replaced by another closer. WAR counts saves. As I noted above, the save is a deeply problematic statistic. As a consequence, WAR actually overrates the value of closers. WAR tells us that even the greatest closers are only worth about two more wins per season than their eighth-inning counterparts.

Does that make Rivera a great baseball player, a great pitcher?  No.  The closer (particularly the 9th inning closer, which Rivera typified) is vastly overrated by fans and pundits alike. Arguments that Rivera belongs on a list of the greatest Yankees of this era (let alone all-time) are foolish. Obviously if we include intangible things -- consistency, character, face of the franchise, public persona etc -- then Yankee fans are entirely within their rights to consider him a great Yankee. But an all-time great player? No. We overrate the closer, because that's the person on the mound during that dramatic moment when the game is about to end. But the closer is arguably one of the least important players on the winning team that night, particularly if he comes in with the bases empty (as Rivera virtually ALWAYS does).

I'll go further. Arguably, no closers should be in the Hall of Fame. Why not middle relievers in the Hall of Fame too? Show me how a top-notch middle reliever, often pitching the 7th-8th innings (more, if the starter doesn't pitch well), is less valuable than a closer. An out in the 9th inning is the same as an out in 7th inning. Why not put 3rd down situational backs in the football Hall of Fame? We're talking about 'positions' that have only existed for a very small percentage of the history of the sport -- positions that in fact DON'T EXIST, in terms of the rules of baseball. Many people have argued that the creation of these 'positions' has been bad for the game, and that a franchise could make better use of its talent and resources by getting rid of one or both.

Closers are the placekickers of baseball. They spend almost no time on the field, and thus have no impact whatsoever on the vast majority of plays/innings. 95% of games are won by the team that goes into the 9th with a lead, regardless of who pitches that 9th inning. Closers are statistically interchangeable, easily replaceable, and in most ways unnecessary. But closers are different from kickers in one important sense: they are less valuable to their teams than placekickers are. A team cannot do without a kicker, and expect to win games consistently. A baseball team can (and, for most of the 20th century, did) win without ANYONE serving as the closer.

Now, since there are closers in the Hall of Fame already, we cannot justifiably keep out great closers now or in the future. So on that basis, Rivera will and should get into the HOF. But since most of those 70s/80s era closers tended to go 2 or even 3 innings, most of the best ones were arguably more valuable to their teams than Rivera has been to his. Rivera's longevity and consistency would temper this judgment. So, since there is a precedent, he should be in the Hall of Fame. But if we were taking the Hall seriously, and only putting in great pitchers, no closer would get in. None.

This is a hard argument to make, and I don't particularly want to make it.  Rivera's greatness is sort of like what they say about beauty -- you know it when you see it.  And there is something truly amazing about a guy being able to get outs and dominate with just one pitch, for almost two decades.  I grant all of that.  But the argument I'm making above isn't really about Rivera.  Its about all closers.  I could make it about Gossage, Eckersley, Hoffmann, etc etc.  While its slightly less true about Rivera because he's the greatest of the lot, it is nonetheless still true.

Is it wrong to send your children to a private school?

Allison Benedikt recently posted an article on Slate that has gotten a lot of attention.  In it, she argues that parents with the resources to have a choice about where to send their children to school are morally obligated to send them to public school.  Or, to put it differently, she has serious questions about the morality of sending your children to private school.

Her reasoning is pretty straightforward:

Everyone needs to be invested in our public schools in order for them to get better. Not just lip-service investment, or property tax investment, but real flesh-and-blood-offspring investment. Your local school stinks but you don’t send your child there? Then its badness is just something you deplore in the abstract. Your local school stinks and you do send your child there? I bet you are going to do everything within your power to make it better.

The children of parents with the resources to have educational choices will generally do just a fine in a mediocre (presumably urban) public school, she argues.

Benedikt:

Whatever you think your children need—deserve—from their school experience, assume that the parents at the nearby public housing complex want the same. No, don’t just assume it. Do something about it. Send your kids to school with their kids. Use the energy you have otherwise directed at fighting to get your daughter a slot at the competitive private school to fight for more computers at the public school. Use your connections to power and money and innovation to make your local school—the one you are now sending your child to—better. Don’t just acknowledge your liberal guilt—listen to it.

I agree with the sentiment, for the most part. My kids go to an urban public school, a charter school where the vast majority of the children live in poverty (Title I), and which reflects the racial and ethnic diversity of the city as a whole. I have some pretty big problems with charter schools in the aggregate, for many of the reasons I discuss below. But the larger issues Benedikt raises apply to me as much as to anyone. 

In my ideal world, there would be no private schools. But in my ideal world, there would also be no exclusionary zoning in the suburbs, no racial and class segregation of housing and schools, and urban schools would be funded by progressive income taxes and fully enveloped in metropolitan school districts that include cities and suburbs. But we don't live in that world. So as urban parents of privilege (with enough resources to have choices, in other words), we have to make decisions about where we send our kids to school. And the most useful part of this article is that it stresses that this act -- of choosing where to send your children to school -- is a political and moral act, whether one wants it to be or not. In other words, it has consequences for others, and for our common institutions. 

At the same time, though, I do think Benedikt overlooks or downplays the fact that we do have moral obligations to our own children and their future well-being too. At present, in most American urban school systems, for those parents with the resources to actually have a choice, these moral duties are too often in conflict. Many parents use their resources to resolve the conflict by removing their children (and themselves) from the situation entirely -- private schools, or moving to the suburbs. And there is an ideological rap out there, shamefully shared by liberal Democrats as well as the GOP, that allows too many of us to just blame the problems of urban schools on the teachers, the unions, the kids, bad parents, etc etc., allowing us to get off easily. In some ways this whole set-up is emblematic of what has happened to us in 'Reagan's America' -- public goods and institutions are for suckers, we're told. 

Benedikt is right to say that we (urban parents with resources) should feel a moral conflict here. And she is right (and supported by research) when she says that 'our' kids will do OK regardless. And she is right that we should stay and exercise our 'voice,' rather than just exit because we can. But I do think that policy matters more, in the end, than the moral choices of individual parents. We need far more low and moderate income housing in the suburbs. We need to get away from property tax funding of public schools. We need metropolitan school districts. We need universal public pre-k. But presently both political parties seem committed to policies more likely to destroy public schools than to improve them, so there is nothing in our national discourse that points parents toward realistic change they can believe in or act upon. Given that, we take care of our own, as we are obliged to do. 

Maybe the only way to inject true reform ideas into that discourse and to give us choices that aren't morally conflicted and zero-sum is for more of 'us' to stay in the urban public schools and fight, as Benedikt indicates. At the very least, if we begin to see our acts as inherently weighted politically and morally, perhaps more of us will begin to see where we have to go politically so that our kids don't grow up and face the same dilemma.

A Connecticut Yankee in California, Week One: research on home ownership, and a few Asian culinary adventures

Thanks to an NEH grant, I just finished up 5 days of research at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library (and birthplace) in Yorba Linda, Orange County, California.  

I stayed in Long Beach, which a) enabled me to go to Los Angeles to eat and explore a bit after work; and b) enabled me to experience Greater L.A. traffic (yippee).  

I had an off-day on Sunday (I arrived the night before), so I started off by going to a great independent bookstore in downtown LA, The Last Bookstore.  Its in what appears to be an old bank building, and in many ways resembles a smaller version of The Strand in NYC.  My goal was to get a copy of Henry Miller's novel Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, since I'm heading up the coast starting Friday.  Or, failing that, Kerouac's Big Sur.  Neither was available, so I grabbed the new Leonard Cohen biography instead.

A man can only spend so much time reading about policy and land-use law, you know?

After the bookstore, I took the advice of friends and drove up to the Griffith Observatory, which provides an amazing view of the city and the Hollywood hills.

I finished the evening up by trying something new:  yakitori!  I've heard Bourdain rave about it for years, so why not?

And boy was he right.  One of the best meals I've ever had, honestly.  I believe the literal meaning of the word is 'grilled,' but that doesn't quite convey it.  The restaurant, Shin Sen Gumi Yakitori, was small and spartan.  I sat at the counter, and watched the chef grill a very wide variety of different meats on a little brazier right in front of me.

They don't do much with the meat -- just a very simple soy/teriyaki base, as far as I could tell.  But that's part of what was so wonderful about it:  just good quality meat (chicken, pork belly, chicken heart/liver, etc), cooked simply.  In some ways its like Brazilian rodizio, just a bit less gluttonous.

So, what would Nixon do (other than bomb)?
 
Why did I go to the Nixon Library?  

As many of you know, I'm writing a book, Castles Made of Sand?  Home Ownership in the Modern U.S.   The book has two objects (warning, dear reader -- scholar-speak forthcoming.  Viewer discretion advised):  

• to examine the history of home ownership since 1928, as an idea, a policy goal, and a reality politically and economically
• to explore whether home ownership has it presently exists in the United States is sustainable -- ecologically, economically, socially, and morally.  While home ownership is often thought of as the symbol of the 'American Dream,' it has also been (and still is) a great source of racial and economic inequality, particularly because of its close connection to educational opportunity.

Home ownership is a critical part of daily life for most Americans, and an aspiration for virtually all of them.  It is so ubiquitous, so embedded in our family histories, our economy and our landscape, that it is very difficult for us to see it as an historical artifact – as something created by (and in turn shaping) the choices of individuals and institutions.  Basically, I'm looking to peak behind the curtain, and explore whether there isn't another path.  

No post-war social phenomenon has been as critical for social mobility, economic growth, the use of metropolitan space, and political re-alignment as homeownership.  Nearly ¼ of the economy is tied up in residential investment, housing consumption and housing-related expenditures.  Most of the wealth possessed by American families (such as it is) is in the form of housing equity.  Because of how homeownership is geographically structured – often taking the form of suburban sprawl, in metropolitan areas that are segregated by both race and class – it is crucially linked to issues of ecological sustainability and inequality.   

One achieves full access to America’s limited range of social rights if one obtains two things: consistent full-time employment, and homeownership. The opportunity to obtain them is powerfully shaped by race and class, but also by where you live. Those with access to these things (and the places where they are found) are able to build wealth across generations, and to make residential choices that enhance educational opportunities for their children. Those without access find themselves both literally and figuratively left behind. 

And of course, particularly in recent decades, homeownership has increasingly lashed the American way of life (and family budgets) to global finance.  This has made us more insecure individually and collectively, it has made us more unequal than ever before, and it has made financial capital so politically powerful that none of us can miss the stench emanating from the Augean stables in Washington.  

So why Nixon? 

My hypothesis is that the 1966-1975 period was a critical stage in the development of our present social geography, and the political economy of home ownership, but that it also had embedded within it a ‘path not taken.’   It remains the only period in our history (other than 1865-1877, perhaps) when the nation actually attempted to understand and unwind the consequences of our racist history.  

Pushed by the civil rights movement, high level figures in both the Lyndon Johnson and Nixon administrations acknowledged the need for a greater federal role in expanding homeownership to low and moderate income citizens, and even contemplated using the lever of the federal purse to desegregate the expanding suburbs along racial and class lines.  These ideas received substantial support among scholars and activists, and by the early 1970s seemed to be making headway in the federal courts.   

As I've discovered in my research at the Johnson Library as well as in my work in Yorba Linda this week, there was a palpable sense of dramatic change in the air during Nixon's first term.  What did I look at this week, at the Nixon Library?  Mostly, I looked at the efforts of his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, George Romney (yes, that Romney) to use federal resources to expand home ownership for working-class people in a desegregated metropolitan America.  For more on this, see my article of last year in The American Prospect.  While this sense of impending change was welcomed by some, it was feared by the suburban white majority, to which both political parties increasingly appealed for votes.

For a variety of reasons this 'open door' slammed shut in the mid-70s, and it has never re-opened.  Essentially, for the first and only time in US history, the federal government appeared to have the resources, the leverage, and the legal, scholarly and political support to begin to unwind the patterns of racial and class segregation in housing (and, by extension, public education).  But it didn’t happen.  By 1975, both the courts and the federal government had fully retreated from all efforts to challenge metropolitan segregation, with dire consequences.  As home ownership was gradually expanded to include growing numbers of black, Hispanic and poor Americans in the last three decades (particularly in the 1990s and 2000s), it was largely facilitated by financial deregulation (which gave them all of the downsides of ownership, and none of the benefits), and built on top of metropolitan segregation. 

It is my sense that many of our present dilemmas are rooted in the opportunities lost during this period.  In other words, white privilege has brought the temple down upon itself.  The wages of whiteness, as DuBois once called them, remain of great consequence -- but the pursuit and protection of those wages has been bankrupting, economically and morally.  

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The Nixon Library itself is a nice place to work, though as my historian readers know, one archive looks pretty much like every other one.  It is plopped down on a very well-policed highway in Orange County, on a plot of land that could just as easily contain a strip mall as a Presidential Library.  

The grounds are quite beautiful:
 

Yorba Linda greeted me on Monday morning with a phalanx of state troopers aiming radar guns at me, like a battery of RPG launchers.  Seemed appropriate, though I am sadly too late to find myself on Nixon's enemies list. 

I have always found Nixon to be a sad figure; surrounded this week by photographs and paintings of the man, there is an almost palpable melancholy that seems to weigh on him.

 

At least that's what I saw.  And the whole thing was quite discomforting, because of my own reaction:  rather than feeling empathy, I experienced revulsion.  I realize this visceral reaction on my part is probably political and ideological -- but it caused me to spend as little down time as possible at the Library.  When I wasn't researching, I sat outside in the sun.

My closest encounter with Nixon was in the bathroom.  

I was standing at the urinal on Tuesday morning, when I absentmindedly glanced to my immediate right...and saw a Nixon impersonator staring right back at me.  I thankfully had the presence of mind to keep myself aimed in the right direction, though a liberal like myself doesn't get many opportunities to literally piss on Richard Nixon.  He winked at me (a bit skeezy, that), and headed out.  Apparently Tuesday August 13th was 'meet the president' day for children visiting the Museum.  One hopes their response to him was a bit more continent than mine.  

The Getty Museum, where Mark meets Clio (again):

On my last day in the Los Angeles area (today), I headed up to Malibu to visit the Getty Villa Museum.  I once visited this gorgeous place back in 1984, when I was 17, but aside from the reflecting pool and the breathtaking view, I have little memory of it.

Here's a brief video history of the Getty, if you're interested:




It has changed quite a bit in the intervening decade (as have I).  The Getty is now exclusively dedicated to statuary and artifacts from the ancient world, where once it contained a variety of European paintings and furniture.  But the beauty of the place remains, as you can see in this photograph of the Outer Peristyle:

 Getty himself was an oil baron, and one of the world's first billionaires.  He was notoriously cheap -- he once refused to pay ransom when his son was kidnapped -- and learned Arabic so as to more effectively bilk the people of Saudi Arabia out of their natural resource inheritance.  But Getty was also a scholar and admirer of the art of the ancient world, and sought to place his personal collection in a replica of the Villa dei Papiri (House of Papyrus scrolls, basically), which was destroyed by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D.  The idea was for those who saw his collection to get a sense of how such things might have been placed in an actual Roman villa two millenia ago.

I decided to go here today, seeking a sublime zen-like moment, preferably in the sun.  And I found it.

Aside from the placidity of the Peristyle, I think my favorite space was the one with the statutes of the Greek Muses -- which included Clio, the Muse of History:

 


































Shana arrives tonight, and we drive up the coast toward the Bay Area tomorrow, bringing the work portion of this trip to an end.

next up:  wine!!!!!!

On voting rights and affirmative action, the Court leads us down a color-blind alley

A few brief thoughts on this week's Voting Rights and affirmative action rulings, as a down-payment on a much longer piece on the myth of 'color-blindness' which underpins them.

I don't know what they're going to say today on gay marriage, but the combination of the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action rulings certainly has me disappointed.  Without getting too deep into the intricacies of each, the majority opinion in each case seems to be based on two inter-related fallacies: 

1.  That race as a factor in determining life chances is behind us -- we now live in a color blind America, and our laws (and their enforcement) should therefore ignore the existence of race

2.  That laws and enforcement mechanisms that do not accept #1 do greater harm to either white people or states' rights than they do justice to people of color.

Neither of these things is even remotely true. 

The first one is the key, and it is the one that is most obviously false.  Any reasonable person would agree that one could think about #2 on a case by case basis, as long as you do NOT accept #1.  If you do accept #1 (as the majority in the Supreme Court has for some time, and as many white Americans do), then virtually every law or practice designed to further or protect civil rights will fail the test of #2. 

On this basis the court has essentially eviscerated both the Voting Rights Act and the use of race in college admissions in the past few days, all constitutional circumlocutions aside. 

People who think the court saved affirmative action the other day are mistaken. 

In the past decade the Court has narrowed, step by step, the Constitutionally permissible grounds under which race can be taken into account in pursuit of a state (public) interest.  Decades of rulings did this with K-12 school segregation, too, starting with 1974 Milliken v. Bradley and culminating in the Louisville/Seattle case of a few years ago.  As a consequence, while the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling says that separate is inherently unequal, there no longer exists any Constitutionally acceptable mechanism for actually addressing or fixing it, other than in states which have the appropriate language in their own constitutions.  The Court hasn't overturned Brown -- that would be too controversial.  But they've rendered it toothless, much like the southern Jim Crow states did with the 14th and 15th amendments from the 1870s until the mid-1960s.  The Court just did the same thing with the Voting Rights Act -- and thus, in a sense, with the 15th amendment.  In the next year or two, when the right case reaches them, they will do the same with affirmative action in college admissions.

There is a reckoning coming in the next decade or two with all of this. 

I don't know if it will be peaceful and easy, or periodically ugly and violent.  But the fact of the matter is that demographic change will soon render those folks we've generally called 'white' a minority in this country.  It is well known that by the middle of this century, 'whites' (as Americans have come to define them since World War II) will no longer constitute a majority of the population of the United States.   

On the eve of the financial crash, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that non-Hispanic whites would become a minority in the country in 2042, eight years earlier than had previously been estimated.  In many places, and among people under the age of 40 or so, this has already happened or been peacefully accepted.  Its even happening in large parts of the South -- Virginia, North Carolina, increasingly Florida, and eventually even Texas.  

To me, the rightward drift of the GOP, the emergence of the Tea Party, and the push for voter ID laws is part and parcel of a rearguard resistance movement by (mostly older, mostly privileged) whites who refuse to accept what the country is becoming.  Its quite similar to the way millions of white Americans reacted to the huge wave of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s (which included my family).  They tried desperately to hold back the tide, in ways that were ultimately inconsistent with many of their OWN values -- and finally, in the 30s and 40s, lost.  Southern whites continued to fight the same fight, this time against blacks, after that.

Much of this white resistance now is limited to the South, and to older folks nationally.  But because they have a stranglehold on one of our two national parties, and because our decentralized federal system has so many veto points that allow a small group of like-minded people to stop what they don't like, what could be an opportunity for the US to model tolerance and multiracial democracy to the rest of the world may become something else entirely.

The collision of the Great Recession with demographic change has lent our already-polarized national politics a discomforting flavor of racial apocalypse, diverting many Americans -- and most of the Republican Party -- away from the inequalities that truly matter, and toward a paranoid defense of the favored racial quarter.  We can see this in our daily lives, as American metropolitan areas re-segregate by race, while economic segregation metastasizes across the national landscape.  We can see it in the racialized rhetoric of the Tea Party.  And we can see it in the 'pull-up-the-ladder-of-opportunity' policies that the GOP increasingly recommends.  

And sadly, we can see a more 'genteel' version of it in the civil rights rulings of the Roberts court.

White Americans, of course, aren't monolithic.  While a lot of whites seem to be hunkering down in the Republicans' racial redoubt (particularly older whites), those who continue to define themselves as Democrats increasingly share the views of most blacks and Latinos not only on economics, opportunity and the role of government, but also on the issues of immigration, affirmative action and social programs.  This is particularly true for younger white voters.


My fear is that as the death rattle of white privilege gets louder, the group of white American dead-enders who continue to rage at the dying of the light will get too large and too influential, and the Republican Party will have boxed itself in.  Rather than occasionally winning elections and governing the polity in the presence of a loyal minority, they will instead choose to change the nature of the polity itself.  The temptation to pull up the ladder, close the doors, and slam shut the ballot boxes as the new day dawns will be too hard to resist.  

The result may be an effort to deprive these new Americans of their access to the levers of economic and political power, by changing the laws (through legislation and through the courts), by undermining the institutions that provide such access, and by underfunding, eliminating or 'drowning in the bathtub' the public institutions and programs that shape and underpin the opportunity structure.
 
It has happened before -- resistance, and the contraction of freedom and opportunity.  As school children we are taught that the American story has involved a gradual-but-inevitable opening up of freedom and access, from the Revolution to the present.  We have slowly if somewhat reluctantly included an ever-larger group of people into the American family, granting civil and voting rights, it is said.  

The problem with this triumphalist narrative is that it isn't true.  

Particularly with regard to the vote, there has been a hard fought ebb and flow, as Alexander Keyssar makes clear in his brilliant book The Right to Vote.  The first time this nation faced massive changes to its demography and identity, in a broader context of rising inequality and insecurity, was in the period between the end of the Civil War, and the Great Depression.  And while the reaction of some was to try to humanize industrial capitalism, and welcome the emergence of a polyglot and contested America, there was an equally strong pull in the other direction -- toward limitations on the franchise (Jim Crow in the South, voting obstacles in the North), toward immigration restriction, toward judicial doctrines and rulings that hampered government and protected capital, and toward an intense and often violent effort to protect and reinforce white privilege (lynching in the South, racially restrictive covenants, riots, and segregation in the North) and capital (strike-breaking and repression by police, state militias, the US military, and court injunctions).  

It was only when the Great Depression so thoroughly de-legitimized many of these rear-guard actions that a new path became possible.  But there was nothing inevitable about the outcome, and we would be living in a very different country today if the herrenvolk nation that millions of 'white' Americans had struggled so mightily for had carried the day, or if the United States had become the 'company town' that so many representatives of capital had sought.

The panic of the pale and privileged will surely go the way of all flesh eventually.  My hope is that they will not take the nation with them.

As long as whites in positions of power continue to believe that we now live in a color-blind nation, we face the possibility that what should otherwise be a peaceful and positive transition to a new America may instead endanger our democratic institutions.  White Americans can bring the temple down upon all of us.  Or they can strengthen it, so it protects everyone, themselves included.

We will either have a multiracial and just democracy, or we will not have a democracy.  Nor, it should be said, will we deserve one.

Actors of unusual size, Losing Their Sh*t

The unexpected passing of the brilliant James Gandolfini got me thinking about another physically imposing and scene-devouring actor:  John Goodman (who turned 61 today).

Aside from being men of unusual size, great talent, and the initials 'JG,' the two shared another memorable trait:  the ability to convey an almost comically volcanic rage.  While the scenes in which they lose their shit occupy different locations on the humor-to-absurdity spectrum (usually), and Goodman hasn't yet gotten a role like Tony Soprano, he's awfully compelling nonetheless.

Film editor Jason Bailey apparently finds powerful actors Losing their Shit hard to resist too, because he's been putting together wonderful film montages for FlavorWire.  He's already done Gary Oldham and Nicholas Cage.

And now comes John Goodman, below.  Surely John Cleese, Robert DeNiro...and James Gandolfini can't be far behind.

Enjoy. 



John Goodman Loses His Shit from Flavorwire on Vimeo.

What Cheer, heathen Yankee?

To my secular humanist peeps in Providence, I present the following. 

According to an apparently detailed survey, the capital of the Biggest Little is the 4th most 'Post-Christian' city in the US -- after Albany, Burlington VT, and Portland ME.

I am not sure where this leaves heathen New Englanders like myself who are in fact 'pre-Christian," but I digress.

You see where your 'tolerance' has led us, Roger Williams? 

I know where all good New Englanders are on Sunday morning: at farmer's markets, drinking fancy coffee, reading the Globe, and making last minute changes to their fantasy football lineups. 

Now THAT is piety.

Some of us saw it coming, and said no: on the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq

I am re-posting below the very first piece I published on this blog, nearly a decade ago.  I am doing so to remind readers that many, many people around the world saw the disaster of the Iraq invasion and occupation coming before it started -- and spoke out.

The reaction among pundits and politicians to the 10th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq has been fascinating -- and at times sickening -- to watch.  While one expects unrepentant troglodytes like William Kristol and other neo-cons to continue to defend this war of choice, the more morally compromised reactions have come from centrists and liberals who supported the war back in 2003.  Like many of the advisers to Vietnam-era Democratic presidents, they have claimed a kind of retrospective innocence based on ignorance:  "who could have known it would have turned out this badly?"  Or, "How could we have known that the Bush Administration would be so dishonest and incompetent?"  The 'success' of the surge has provided another moral escape hatch for some of these folks, or so they assume.  They argue that while Iraq was clearly FUBAR into 2007, the surge redeemed the entire enterprise -- and thus, their position on the conflict at the outset.

Much like the Vietnam conflict, this defense is a disingenuous, self-serving re-writing of history.  It was abundantly clear to millions of Americans in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq not only that the attack was being sold under false pretenses, but that the aftermath would be an unmitigated disaster, strategically and morally.  The surge did not redeem this disaster.  It merely enabled the US to gradually wash its hands of it.  I submit that even if the war had gone swimmingly from the outset, the dishonest way in which the war was initiated did enormous -- and possibly permanent -- damage to the rule of law at home, and our reputation abroad. 

This is not hindsight.  And one should be held morally responsible for one's ignorance, if similarly situated people were capable of seeing things clearly at the time.  Some of our fellow citizens tried to stop the war from inside the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department.  Others wrote, talked and marched, in an effort to wake their fellow Americans up to irreversible rubicon that the Bush Administration was about to cross.  I was among that latter group, and vocally so -- as a leader of the anti-war movement in Spokane, and as vice-chair of the Human Rights Commission in that city.  I spoke at rallies, I wrote newspaper editorials; hell, I even criticized the war on Mark Fuhrman's radio show.

I said it 10 years ago, and I'll say it now.  The American invasion of Iraq was the greatest strategic blunder in the history of the country.  It was a criminal act, a violation of American and international law.  It was the single greatest violation of the letter and spirit of the law in the history of the American presidency.  It is an insult to the rule of the law, and the thousands of American lives wasted and wounded in Iraq, that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld still walk the earth as free men.  That they were able to falsely lead this nation into an unprovoked attack on another sovereign state is surely one of the greatest failures in the history of American democracy.  Fifty years from now, when we look back on the decline of the American way of life, I'm quite certain we will zero in on two related events:  the 2000 election fiasco, and the invasion of Iraq.  One hopes that we can use the 20th anniversary of the start of the war to harvest a bit of wisdom on the limits of American power, and military force.  We seem to have wasted the 10th.

"On Patriotism," a talk presented March 26th, 2003 at St. Al's church at Gonzaga University, Spokane WA

A 12 year-old school girl in Maine wrote the following essay last year for her 6th grade class:
“The American flag stands for the fact that cloth can be very important. It is against the law to let the flag touch the ground or to leave the flag flying when the weather is bad. The flag has to be treated with respect. You can tell just how important this cloth is because when you compare it to people, it gets much better treatment. Nobody cares if a homeless person touches the ground. A homeless person can lie all over the ground all night long without anyone picking him up, folding him neatly and sheltering him from the rain.

School children have to pledge loyalty to this piece of cloth every morning. No one has to pledge loyalty to justice and equality and human decency. No one has to promise that people will get a fair wage, or enough food to eat, or affordable medicine, or clean water, or air free of harmful chemicals. But we all have to promise to love a rectangle of red, white, and blue cloth.

Betsy Ross would be quite surprised to see how successful her creation has become. But Thomas Jefferson would be disappointed to see how little of the flag's real meaning remains.”

As an opponent of this war, and an American historian, I have spent a great deal of time recently agonizing over what patriotism demands of us. Like millions around this nation, my acts of protest before the war began have inspired accusations of disloyalty; even within the anti-war movement, many have said that all protests must stop once the first shots are fired – that patriotism demands that we support the troops, and unify behind our leaders and our soldiers. I do not agree. Or, at the very least, I do not share the same definition of patriotism, nor of ‘support.’ Indeed, it is my patriotism that drives me to speak louder now that the war has begun. The logic is simple. If it is right to oppose a wrong when it is being publicly contemplated, how much more important is it to do so when it is in the process of commission? “When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart.”

It is not those who protest the war who need to justify themselves. The burden of proof is on the makers of war. As former President Jimmy Carter said recently, “war is sometimes a necessary evil. But it is ALWAYS an evil.” I’d like to share my thoughts on war, patriotism and support of the troops with you this morning. This will not simply be a plea for peace; it will also be a plea to stop THIS war. I can’t help that. I apologize if this talk will seem strident to you, but I believe it is important for those who support this war, and those who oppose it, and those who aren’t sure, to understand how much in common we share.
Why do I oppose this war? There are many reasons, but among the most important is my belief as an American in the rule of law over the rule of force. Under the new Bush Doctrine, a bold military strategy of preemptive attacks–including the possibility of a unilateral nuclear first strike– is intended to prevent any state or group of states from challenging our preeminent role in the world. The war in Iraq is the first application of this doctrine. Preemptive war, however, is unequivocally illegal. This prohibition was incorporated into the United Nations Charter after WWII as the basis for a new system of collective security in which no state retained the unilateral right to attack another–with two specified exceptions: self defense and Security Council authorization.

All of us should consider whether this radical new strategy is good for our country and the world, and whether it best represents what this nation stands for. What would happen in a world stripped of the very laws designed half a century ago to protect humanity from the carnage of unrestrained force? Can pure military might really defend us from evil and secure our freedom at the same time? The passage of the USA-Patriot Act should tell us no.

Before it is too late, we would do well to heed Sir Thomas More’s advice on the rule of law in the play “A Man for All Seasons.”

And when the last law was cut down and the devil turned around on you,
where would you hide, the laws all being flat? Do you really think
that you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

Why do I believe that it is a patriotic act to protest against this war? There are two visions of America, I believe, with deep roots in our history. One precedes our founding fathers and finds its roots in the harshness of our puritan past. It is very suspicious of freedom, uncomfortable with diversity, unfriendly to reason, contemptuous of personal autonomy. It sees America exclusively as a religious nation. It views patriotism as akin to allegiance to God. It secretly adores coercion and conformity. Despite our Constitution, despite the legacy of the Enlightenment, it appeals to millions of Americans and threatens our freedom, in peace and wartime.

The other vision finds its roots in the spirit of our founding revolution, and in the words of the Declaration of Independence. It loves freedom, encourages diversity, embraces reason and affirms the dignity and rights of every individual. It sees America as a moral nation, neither completely religious nor completely secular. It defines patriotism neither as blind obedience to government, nor as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one's country and one's fellow citizens (all over the world), and as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy.

The admirable obligation human beings feel to their neighbors, their loved ones, and their fellow citizens, all too often becomes confused with blind obedience to government. Most of the evils in world history have come from obedience, not disobedience; from conformity, not from dissent. Unity, stability and order are not the only desirable conditions of social life, even in wartime. There is also justice, meaning the fair treatment of all human beings, the equal right of all people to life, liberty and prosperity. Absolute obedience to law may bring order temporarily, but it may not bring justice. And when it does not, patriotism may require us to disobey the law; and citizens may protest, may rebel, may cause disorder, as the American revolutionaries did in the eighteenth century, as antislavery people did in the nineteenth century, as Chinese students did in the last century, and as anti-war protesters are doing now.

It is this second vision which is my vision, my patriotism. It is the vision of a free society. We must be bold enough to proclaim it, and strong enough to defend it against all its enemies, even during wartime. When he spoke out against the Vietnam war, Martin Luther King explained his protest simply: “I criticize America because I love her. I want her to stand as a moral example to the world.” If we do not speak out in protest, King continued, “we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.” With Dr. King, I claim, without pretense or apology, a place in the long and honorable tradition of those who demand that American ideals apply to all and oppose the efforts of those, from whatever quarter, who try to reserve them for privileged groups and ignoble causes. The most effective way to love our country, I submit, is to fight like hell to change it. Through most of U.S. history, this brand of patriotism was indispensable to the cause of social change. As the poet Langston Hughes wrote, "Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed. Let it be that great strong land of love where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme; that any man be crushed by one above."

Given this vision of patriotism, what does ‘support the troops’ mean to me? First, supporting the troops means preparing the nation as a whole to join with the soldiers in equally and justly sharing the burdens of a democratically declared war (though this is not, as of yet, a ‘declared’ war). This should include an ongoing public debate over the rightness, the wrongness, and the feasibility of this war. This means to me, among other things, following the precedent of WWII and initiating economic and fiscal policies that call on all of us to sacrifice, and that support the troops and their families. This would decidedly NOT include a series of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and punishing budget cuts in the programs which provide social and economic security for the American working and middle classes -- who provide most of the soldiers, and build most of our weapons.

Second, Supporting our troops means seeing to it that they have jobs, and the means to re-adjust to civilian life upon their de-mobilization. Recently, the Republican majority on the House Budget Committee voted for $25 billion in cuts in the Department of Veterans Affairs budget, and a $204 million cut in the Impact Aid program that supports the education of soldiers' children. 163,000 veterans of the Gulf War continue to suffer from largely unaddressed illnesses from exposure to the fall out from destroyed chemical weapons, ammunition depots, oil fires, depleted uranium and experimental drugs. I question where the compassionate conservative support for our troops will be in a few years time, when they come back home, and seek employment, a union contract, a safe workplace, a living wage, and a labor market and system of higher education free from racial discrimination. History (as well as the President’s budget) tells us the support of our troops will fall somewhat short of this, unless we speak up for them. Supporting the troops doesn’t mean abject silence. It means seeing them as real human beings, with families, with fears, with rights, with opinions, and with moral consciences which will be stretched to the limit by the nature of modern war. And as human beings who will hopefully live long lives upon their return.

Last, and most important: supporting the troops means speaking up on their behalf, and demanding that our elected representatives do so as well. The men and women in our armed forces are duty-bound to follow the orders of our commander-in-chief. That is their job; it is their citizenship duty, and they should be honored and respected for fulfilling it, in an age when too many of us see democracy as a spectator sport. I salute them for their sacrifice on behalf of our nation. I thank them for their willingness to risk their lives. Even as I praise our servicemen and women, however, I regret that the President of the United States has ordered them to start a preemptive war fought without international support. A preemptive, unilateral war is unworthy of the honor and tradition of the U.S. military. Our armed forces should not be invading and occupying other countries. In a democracy, it is we the people that send them to war; it is we, the people, who choose when to bring them home. They die in our name, and they kill in our name. To attempt to cut off public discussion once the war starts – or even to question whether the public has any legitimate say at all – both undermines our essential values, and jeopardizes our soldiers far more than any protest ever could. We cannot shirk this responsibility, nor can we allow others to fulfill it for us. We must speak up for the soldiers, regardless of what we think about the war itself. Do you want to know how to support the troops in wartime? Do not be a cheerleader. Be a citizen. Speak up for them, in all their diversity. When we silence any of us, we silence them as well.

The idea of 'support our troops' is troubling for those who oppose this war, because it is being used by many to hammer dissenting voices into silence. Given my definition of support above, I intend to get louder, not quieter, once the war begins. It is my patriotic duty to do so.

I would like to conclude with the words of Mark Twain:

“Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak. And it is a solemn and weighty responsibility, and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government, or the empty catchphrases of politicians. Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country- hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of.”