Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Healthy Caring
Healthy Caring
Leo The Great November 10, 2009
Why did I stop by to see Grace Cochran on my way home today? Because she is recovering from a near fatal illness and her husband died. You’re a parish pastor, I’m sure you understand.
There was a barb in his response to my question, but my Uncle Harry, my life mentor, intended, I’m certain, to provide yet another lesson for me to learn what it means to be in the “caring” professions.
In his case medical care. He was an internist of the old school. A medical detective who relied on intuition married to compassion, experience, extensive reading of medical journals, and immersion in the lives of his patients. He died in his early 70s (of untreated high blood pressure) without ever having ordered a CT Scan.
He was my model for 30 years of parish ministry, a model that nearly did me in as it surely did him. He remains my hero. I suspect our national nostalgia – and selective memory – about the “good old days” of health care is based on doctors like him. Boundless attention for little money.
I doubt there is much about him that is transferable to today.
Harry became a national figure for having made a daring diagnosis. Grace Cochran phoned one night. Sam, her husband, had taken violently sick. By the time Harry got there – a five minute drive – Sam was unconscious. Harry, suspecting cerebral hemorrhage, had him transported to a NYC hospital where he died without regaining consciousness.
Shortly after they got home their son called Harry and said his mother was sick. Harry went to the house. What did you have for dinner last night, Grace? In her list was a can of Bon Vivant vichyssoise. But it tasted terrible so we threw it away.
Harry asked the son to retrieve the can from the trash, looked at it, sniffed it, and called the Center For Disease Control in Atlanta. I have a case of botulism and I need the antidote to be flown here immediately.
Dr. Colmore, do you know when the last confirmed case of botulism was reported in this country?
I don’t give a damn. I have a case, one person has died, and another will by tomorrow if you don’t get me the antidote.
It’s going to cost thousands to fly that up to you. If you’re wrong, it’s your ass.
Harry was right. Grace survived and made a full – if painfully long – recovery. He was also right when a friend of his daughter, Julie, came to see him. I think you need to draw blood on me, Dr. Colmore. I’m pretty sure I have mono.
Interesting diagnosis, Jimmy, what makes you think so?
I’m always tired. Every afternoon I nod off at my desk.
They fell into a long conversation about Jimmy’s work at Morgan Bank, where he was an analyst. I hate it, but it pays the rent. Harry remembered that Jimmy loved to write. Harry’s daughter was an editor at Viking Press. Why don’t you give Julie a call?
When Jimmy later became Washington correspondent for Newsweek, I think Harry was as proud of that outcome as he was of Grace’s. He had also helped saved Jimmy’s life, and I never did draw blood.
When I was 8 I jumped from the cedar chest outside my bedroom, grabbed the sill above the door and swung as I had seen Tarzan do from a jungle vine. Less agile than Tarzan, I lost my grip, crashed headfirst to the floor, my glasses imbedding in my temple. Dr. Mayer arrived minutes after my mother found me lying unconscious, blood pooling around my head. He and my mother lifted me onto my bed, and while he shined his penlight into my eyes to see if my pupils responded, my mother drifted to the foot of the bed where she began cutting my toenails.
What the hell are you doing, Peggy?
Blayney is never still long enough for me to do this.
My doctor today was a classmate when we were 16. He tries to humor my wish to avoid all medical intervention until time to euthanize me. He and I have completed three score and ten - our biblical allotment - so we are focused less on some miracle that may spare us, than on a merciful exit. The despised death panels sound like a pretty good idea to me.
I don’t pretend to know how we might provide decent health care for all of us without bankrupting us. That I remember going to the doctor – a solid middle class member of the community – and receiving a bill that we paid, marks my place in history, rather than providing a workable model for national care. In my last post, rector of a large parish, one of our toughest challenges was paying for health insurance for the staff.
The worry about President Obama’s ambitious plans to provide health care, restart the economy, find new forms of energy, the environment, shrinking middle class, and jobs that do something more useful than create financial sleight of hand tricks, is that it will bankrupt us.
It well may. As if the financial Goliaths haven’t already. The purpose – as I understand it – of bankruptcy, is to stand down from the past practices that have become unsustainable, curb ambitions, accept new limits, and begin again, with everyone embracing a more modest life.
Doesn’t read like a winning political platform. And I suppose a mother today, who calmly cut her child’s toenails while he was being examined for brain injury, would find herself under scrutiny by Child Protective Services.


Monday, November 09, 2009
Death Panels
Oh yes, forgot this:
Though I've never seen exactly what Republican catcalls about death panels meant, I have long wished there were people - professional, trained, sensitive people, who might counsel people, old people, terminally ill people, about their choices - assuming they have some - about choices they have about how their lives will end.
When I was a parish pastor I ran a group called "The Blessed Group," (Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Matthew 5) for people terminally ill, or close to someone terminally ill.
It was the liveliest group in the church.
Nothing like a combination of a dose of reality (especially about a matter the culture wishes to deny), along with options people never knew they had, to created energy and enthusiasm.
Medicine
The long, drawn out battle over the health care bill has all the drama of the old civil rights bills that were being debated in the 1960s.
And like those bills, this one is so big and so complex - affecting so many different facets of the way we live - that aside from those who have actually drafted the bill, I daresay no one really knows what's in them. Or how life might be different if the bill should pass.
In the headlines today is the matter of how the bill that passed the House on Saturday, treats abortion. I have done some futile searching, and have yet to find exactly how a woman seeking an abortion might manage under this bill. One quote from an abortion supporter ("choice" is the euphemism, as ""life" is the euphemism for those who oppose abortion) says the bill would prevent even a woman who was willing to pay for the procedure herself, from having one.
In the past there have been battles over whether Medicare or Medicaid should cover abortion, perhaps more legitimate a question than whether abortion - a legal right - should be banned altogether.
But the most basic matter of just how the practice of medicine should be structured in our nation, likely will remain unaddressed.
Because it goes t the heart of every facet of our national life.
Nothing makes me feel older than remembering the days when I got sick as a boy, my mother called the doctor (who was a friend and neighbor), who came to our house, listened to my heart with his stethescope, took my pulse, took my temperature, asked me a couple of questions (Do you feel like you're going to throw up? Are you dizzy? Can you tell me what day it is?), likely then suggested my mother give me an aspirin, and call him in the morning if I wasn't better.
There was the time, during a polio epidemic, when i ran a high fever, and he told my mother to isolate me as much as she could from the rest of the family. And when I fell on my head while swinging from the door jamb, and was unconscious. A favorite family story was that my mother cut my toenails while Dr. Mayer pulled up my eyelids and shined his penlight to see if my pupils responded. Dr. Mayer asked her why she did that and she told him I was never still enough for her to cut them.
I don't know anyone - with the possible exception of me - who would be willing to return to those days of such minimal medicine.
But I do wonder when the way we do it now - expecting vast medical resources to be available to all of us - is going to drive us into national bankruptcy.
An article I did not fully understand, in Sunday's NY Times Magazine, described a clinic in Salt Lake City that practices medicine that relies heavily on statistical analysis for designing its medical protocols, and the article suggests the cost and outcomes are far better than most hospitals and clinics.
Perhaps. But it still seems to me that we might better expect to be faced with the consequences, both of our own choices of how we live, and of the realities and inevitabilities of life, rather than looking for magical intervention to protect us.
But then I am an old man, nearing the natural end of my life. And not hoping to be elected - or reelected - president.
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Obama Making Nice
Maybe because I have a personality like that of our young president - wishing to accommodate, believing reasoned, rational explanation will win everyone over - I have enjoyed the civil discourse of his first year.
And for the same reason, my anxiety has risen with every signal that, not only is he not going to convert his political (and, worse, personal) adversaries, but he is likely to fail in every significant legislative battle, and perhaps lose all his cache between now and the election of 2012.
In the October 22 issue of The London Review of Books, David Bromwich has a devastating critique of all this. I read it with a sinking feeling that I devoutly hope is as much about my over-identification with Obama, as it is about his being likely to fail in his presidency.
It is long, but worth the effort. And I reproduce it below:
Obama’s Delusion
David Bromwich
Long before he became president, there were signs in Barack Obama of a tendency to promise things easily and compromise often. He broke a campaign vow to filibuster a bill that immunised telecom outfits against prosecution for the assistance they gave to domestic spying. He kept his promise from October 2007 until July 2008, then voted for the compromise that spared the telecoms. As president, he has continued to support their amnesty. It was always clear that Obama, a moderate by temperament, would move to the middle once elected. But there was something odd about the quickness with which his website mounted a slogan to the effect that his administration would look to the future and not the past. We all do. Then again, we don’t: the past is part of the present. Reduced to a practice, the slogan meant that Obama would rather not bring to light many illegal actions of the Bush administration. The value of conciliation outweighed the imperative of truth. He stood for ‘the things that unite not divide us’. An unpleasant righting of wrongs could be portrayed as retribution, and Obama would not allow such a misunderstanding to get in the way of his ecumenical goals.
The message about uniting not dividing was not new. It was spoken in almost the same words by Bill Clinton in 1993; and after his midterm defeat in 1994, Clinton borrowed Republican policies in softened form – school dress codes, the repeal of welfare. The Republican response was unappreciative: they launched a three-year march towards impeachment. Obama’s appeals for comity and his many conciliatory gestures have met with a uniform negative. If anything, the Republicans are treating him more roughly than Clinton. Obama appears securer only because the mainstream media, which hated Clinton beyond reason, have showed up on his side. Americans, however, attend to a congeries of substitute media, at the centre of which lie Fox News Radio and Fox TV, the Murdoch stations. From that source, in the late spring and summer, a message percolated through a crowd of 20 million listeners, a message that was coherent, detailed and subversive of public order. I listened a little every day, as I drove to work and back, and I saw what was coming. The talk aimed to delegitimate the president, and it gave promise of an insurrection. A floating army of the angry and resentful were being urged to express contempt for Barack Obama, and to exhibit their loyalty to principles they felt in danger of losing – the right to bear arms, the right not to pay for health insurance. When representatives from Congress addressed town-hall meetings in the late summer, men in several states came armed with guns in leg holsters. Their local grievance was hostility to Obama’s plan for healthcare, a plan which was detested sight unseen, and which has still not been explained with sufficient clarity to remedy the distrust of the rational. (Clinton made the mistake of handing the construction of a national health system to his wife and a group of advisers she consulted in private. Obama, to avoid that error, left the framing and elaboration of a bill to five committees of Congress: an experiment in dissociation that rendered him blameless but also clueless beyond the broadest of rhetorical commitments.) But beneath all the accusations was a disturbance no ordinary answer could alleviate. The America these people grew up with was being taken away from them. That formulation occurred again and again on talk radio. Barack Obama had become the adequate symbol of forces that were swindling the people of their birthright. ‘This guy’ – another common locution – didn’t have a right to give laws to Americans.
When the Clinton impeachment was going forward, Obama was a young Chicago politician with other things on his mind. He could have learned something then about how the Republicans work. The most questionable of his appeals in the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton was the endlessly repeated bromide with which he dissociated himself from ‘the partisan bickering of the 1990s’ – a piece of spurious evenhandedness if there ever was one. Bill Clinton, who gained his national stature in the conservative Democratic Leadership Council, had been as much a prudent adjuster and adapter as Obama. The fury of the attack on Clinton, which started a few months into his presidency, was not the bickering of two rival parties exactly comparable in point of incivility. Yet such was Obama’s convenient picture of the recent past.
Delays in the passage, first, of Obama’s ‘stimulus package’ to strengthen the economy after last September’s financial collapse, and, second, of his healthcare bill, have been due in large part to his public pauses to wait for Republicans to lend these measures a bipartisan glow. A few came along, at a high price, to vote for the economic stimulus. None has taken up the offer on healthcare. The Republicans stand in place, and give no sign, and watch as the president’s stature dwindles. His reason for waiting doubtless has something to do with fear. Obama receives four times as many death threats as George W. Bush did. Yet he is also encumbered by the natural wish of the moderate to hold himself close to all the establishments at once: military, financial, legislative, commercial. Ideally, he would like to inspire everyone and to offend no one. But the conceit of accommodating one’s enemies inch by inch to attain bipartisan consensus seems with Obama almost a delusion in the literal sense: a fixed false belief. How did it come to possess so clever a man?
Obama’s career up to now, lucky as it was, had been wanting in singular achievements for which he alone was responsible. His experience seems not to have taught him the law of natural selection in politics by which majorities are put together out of remainders. Any act that achieves something concrete will leave small multitudes of the disappointed keening but unheard. There are hurt feelings in politics, which only time can cure if anything can. This is a truth now staring at Barack Obama, on several different fronts, but he does not accept it easily. His way of thinking is close to the spirit of that Enlightenment reasonableness which supposes a right course of action can never be described so as to be understood and not assented to.
The Republican Party of 2009 is a powerful piece of contrary testimony. It has become the party of wars and jails, and its moral physiognomy is captured by the faces of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, faces hard to match outside Cruikshank’s drawings of Dickens’s villains, hard as nails and mean as dirt and with an issue still up their sleeve when wars wind down and the jails are full: a sworn hostility towards immigrants and ‘aliens’. The anti-immigrant bias – from which George W. Bush and John McCain were free, but which both were powerless to counteract – is an underground stream of the party that makes it a bearer of racist sentiments no longer avowable in public. I have been studying the ante-bellum South, for a course on the career of Abraham Lincoln, and have been struck by the resemblance between the Republicans today and the pre-Civil War Democrats. The model of the Republicans today is John C. Calhoun, the political theorist of the slave South and deviser of the rationale for local nullification of federal policies.
That the central lesson about his domestic enemies has not yet been learned by Obama is the mystery of the first eight months of his presidency. He has acted as if he were the leader of no party; as if patience and benignity of temper could bring out the best in everyone. This is part of a larger inward confusion about his role. He seems to speak at once, or rather he seems to speak at different times, as organiser and as mediator, national leader and national healer. There is something strange about the alternation of postures, from the point of view of empirical prudence. On the largest issues that he himself raised in his opening months – his decision to close Guantánamo, to press for a two-state solution of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, and to reform healthcare with a national plan – his pattern has been the grand exordium delivered at stage centre, followed by months of silence. He has left his agents or his advisers or his party or both parties to mind the details. During the protracted delay, the very features that give the impress of his intention are sanded away. Thus, a new kind of pressure on Israel and a resolve to create a Palestinian state appeared to be signalled by his Cairo speech in early June. It was a thoughtful speech, and a courageous one, even if you took it as a series of propositions uttered at a certain time in a certain place. Simply to address the Muslims of the world without condescension was sure to make him unforgiving enemies on the American right – including the considerable body of Christian Zionists in the Southern and border states – and Obama went to Cairo and delivered his speech knowing that. Yet the four months since have seemed much longer than four months. Israel has sapped and undermined the settlement freeze. Binyamin Netanyahu gambled that he could trespass against objections by Obama’s negotiators, Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell, and the gamble has worked. The American desiderata were never backed by a sanction, and the Netanyahu government approved thousands of new units for the expansion of the Israeli colonies. This the Americans called ‘not helpful’.
Healthcare has been fretted according to a different schedule of neglect. Here, the undermining came first and Obama’s speech later. After a summer of radio coaching had rendered the opposition to healthcare so clamorous that many town-hall meetings erupted in disorder and some had to be closed early, Obama on 9 September addressed a joint session of Congress, and there, at last, he gave a measured and impressive presentation, which for the first time made the general case for his plan. It sent his approval ratings back above 50 per cent, and it was overshadowed only by the shout of a representative from South Carolina (Calhoun’s state), ‘You lie!’ – in effect a challenge to a duel with the president on the floor of Congress. This breach of protocol could hardly have come from a spontaneous welling-up of anger in Joe Wilson of South Carolina. To violate the hush of that monumental chamber required as much forethought and wild resolution as it would take to shout ‘God damn!’ in a cathedral. Wilson had done nothing previous of note, except mount a defence of the flying of the Confederate flag in the capitol of South Carolina. So the discord that the 9 September address was meant to salve showed its face again at the speech itself. There are people in America who sniff the taint of tyranny in every programme of the federal government; and a lot of them were listening to their radios in April, May, June and July. But there have also been grounds for fear that were genuine: a fact the prosperous neoliberal consensus lightly brushed off. Non-fanatical Americans of modest means have wondered how their children will pay for the emergency measures we are buying now but refusing to tax ourselves for.
Early suspicion of the bank bail-outs found a ready target of displaced resentment in the later demand for health insurance reform. Healthcare had never seemed a main concern of Obama’s as a candidate, and this looked like one more exorbitance. The new president had run up a staggering bill, close to a trillion dollars, to pay the brokerage houses to stave off a depression. He expected a gratitude he did not get. His choice of tactics could never have been easy to explain in a climate where so many bankers survived and so many ordinary people lost their homes and jobs. ‘And you are losing your health coverage, too!’ Obama says. But in a country where 85 per cent have coverage of some sort, more have been worrying about their homes and their jobs. Most people’s health insurance payments are taken out of their monthly pay cheques and put into private plans offered by their employers; when an employer cuts your job you lose the insurance too; but it betrayed a planner’s conceit in Obama to imagine that people would worry first, and most acutely, about the loss of their insurance. Many without a history of political resentment, some of whom voted for Obama, are startled that they keep being asked to foot the bill. It was easier to blame ‘big government’ than to say that the bankers and brokers and the whole financial establishment, with Goldman Sachs at its core, did not deserve the bail-outs. Obama’s speech on 9 September arrived too late to work as a counter-charm.
The pattern of the major announcement, the dilatory follow-up and the tardy self-defence has shown an alarming consistency in his administration. Obama ordered the closing of the prison at Guantánamo Bay as the first act of his presidency. Eight months later, Guantánamo remains open and unsolved, the date of its closing has been postponed, and the question of what to do with the prisoners has become the most explosive of all the matters that confront Obama’s authority. After signing the order in January, he took a long break; and his enemies rallied. Two elements of the syndrome should be distinguished. First, Obama is trying to do a great deal at once, not all of it thrust on him by the disasters of the previous administration. It is also beginning to appear that Obama has a slower ratio to the passage of time than most politicians. When he was attacked for the Guantánamo order, on the grounds that it placed the security of Americans in jeopardy, he let it be known that the issue was undergoing reappraisal; then, on 21 May, he gave a speech on law and national security at the National Archives: the worst speech of his presidency. He said that his paramount duty was ‘to keep the American people safe’: that word, safe, which was accorded a primacy by George W. Bush it had not been given by any earlier president, Obama himself now ranked ahead of the words justice, right, liberty and constitution. The National Archives speech was, more particularly, a response to the charges made by Dick Cheney over several preceding weeks.
In a speech delivered on the same day, 21 May, the former vice president, who has never really retired, gave a digest of his own published criticisms. The decision to release photos of the victims of torture, and to rule out ‘enhanced interrogation methods’ in the future, could only ‘lead our government further away from its duty to protect the American people’. Cheney intimated that if an attack occurred in the coming years, the fault would be Obama’s for having restored an antiquarian understanding of civil liberties and obedience to international law. Obama’s answer was sober and resolute in appearance, but, in detail, the National Archives speech was a capitulation on most of the points specified by Cheney. Prisoners would now be divided into five categories: those who could be freed because they were innocent; those who could be extradited to foreign countries; those who fell under the jurisdiction of military tribunals; those who could be tried in civilian courts in the US; and then a fifth category – those whom we lacked evidence to convict but who (it had been decided) were too dangerous to set free. These prisoners would be held indefinitely under a new legal dispensation still to be devised.
Preventive detention was a step President Nixon had proposed to Congress in 1970, but he never found the support or the temerity to put the programme into effect. Yet here was a Democratic president and professor of constitutional law doing what Nixon and for that matter Cheney and his assistants had only dreamed of. We have yet to see the final result, but the lesson of the encounter would seem to be: when you announce a great change, steal a march on your opponents by clinching the declaration with the deed. In no decision of his administration has Obama followed the wisdom of that Machiavellian precept. His government is also hampered by its want of a spokesman who can hit hard with words when the president wishes not to be seen to strike. Obama’s confidant David Axelrod, who managed his campaign and is often summoned to speak to the press on his behalf, emits a pleasant porridge of upper-media demotic. Another close adviser, Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago friend, is a technocrat to the bone, genially officious but lacking in any pith and point. These people are no match for Cheney, or for the president’s antagonists in the substitute media who speak under no restraint.
What Cheney and the radio demagogues sowed, the less gifted members of the Republican minority in Congress gratefully reaped. The minority leader of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, said on 17 September on the PBS show NewsHour: ‘We’re in the middle of a modern-day political rebellion in America.’ Interviewer: ‘Rebellion?’ Boehner: ‘Rebellion’. He repeated the word without compunction, and added: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’ The tone of our public ‘conversation’ (he chose with malice the soft liberal word) Boehner pronounced to be healthy. He only hoped the crowds ‘would be civil’ or somehow would not become ‘too hateful’. But with Cheney at its head – a rebel against the constitution and a man above the laws since 2002 – the popular movement for nullification of the laws of the federal government has again become a force in American life.
Talk radio in the United States is a law unto itself. With the diffusion of authority that has followed wide adoption of the internet, Fox News Radio and Fox TV may be the only major outlets that still command a sizeable fraction of the audience of the old networks. The intuition of Obama and his advisers must have been that any protest in these byways of discourse was right-wing business as usual. That lazy assumption left them unequipped for the gravity of the challenge. They thought the anger would simmer and die down. It did not occur to them that it might simmer and boil. If a threat is seen to spring from a determined opponent, Obama’s inclination is generally to let it go. He will emerge (he trusts) in the long run as the man who takes long views. By the effects of these postponements, however, he is forever giving new hostages to the truckle of compromise; he is put in the position of backing away while his enemies pick up strength; and in a leader whose nature is conciliatory, this means that the declared scope of every undertaking slowly shrinks and recedes. Guantánamo will be closed but not as soon as we said. Israel must recognise the wrong of further expansion of the settlements, but Israel will not be required to stop soon. Healthcare will be passed on some terms or other, but government will not compete with the big insurers; price reductions will be conceived and executed by private consortiums; illegal immigrants will stay uninsured; and even legal immigrants will be prohibited from buying coverage.
There were plenty of people in December 2008 who nursed a prejudice against Obama but were still in search of reasons to back it. Rush Limbaugh was the radio talker who brought those people to a boil. Limbaugh’s style is a mixture of bluster, clowning and poison, in proportions hard to capture without his voice in your ear – a ‘fat’ voice, someone called it, that shifts in a beat from muttering to imprecation. It is always excited, always breathless, yet the pace is unhurried. Part of the appeal lies in a conscious and amiable egotism. ‘Rush Limbaugh,’ he will introduce himself after an ad, ‘with talent on loan from God.’ ‘El Rushbaugh, serving humanity (simply by being here).’ He tells people to believe him and believe no one else: ‘Shown by scientific study to be right 99.1 per cent of the time.’ He was capable, early, of nicknaming Obama ‘Bamster’ (to rhyme with ‘ham’), a semi-affectionate take-down in the parlance of fraternity boys. He nicknamed the health plan, with automatic sarcasm, ‘ObamaCare’. But the tone grew noticeably more bitter by late July. ‘You don’t know how difficult it is for me to say: the president of the United States is lying through his teeth.’ By 5 August it was ominous to the point of open menace: ‘The president of the United States, who is president of all of us, has decided to take aim at over half of the American people as political opponents.’
He was the scourge of Obama in the summer, a palpable challenge to his claim of legitimacy, as much as Cheney was in the spring. On his show of 27 July, Limbaugh could boast without exaggeration: ‘July is the month of horrors for Obama and the Democrats. And I am largely the reason why.’ In the absence of these accusers, the Republican Party would be adrift. With the impetus of such voices, it now stands a chance of winning the midterm elections in 2010. Limbaugh was placed on the defensive some months ago when he said that he wanted President Obama to fail. This seemed an insult to the office as well as the man. It also seemed to suggest a peculiarly self-separating definition of national loyalty. But he justified himself by remarking that Obama’s success would mean the end of America as we knew it. (The president had to fail for the country to succeed.) A link between Cheney and Limbaugh certainly exists. Limbaugh, unlike the other far right hosts, shuns the interviewing of guests, and yet Cheney, who for his part shuns interviews, was the guest of Limbaugh even when he was vice president. More recently Limbaugh has interviewed him in the role of ex officio party counsellor.
When I started taking notes for this piece at the end of the summer, violence was in the air. Has it passed? A protest march was shepherded to the Washington Mall and a monster rally of 100,000 was held on 12 September, the day after the anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. One message of the demonstration was a rebuke of Obama’s supposed offence against patriotic memory by his naming of 11 September as National Day of Service and Remembrance. Service – except for military service – is heard on the American right as a codeword or moral wedge for socialism: it is to socialism as doubt is to atheism. Probably they wanted something more like Pearl Harbor Day (though that is no longer commemorated). But when was there ever a rational fit between the size of a grievance flourished by an audience like this and a single cause the crowd can name?
‘They’ve taken on too much, too fast,’ Limbaugh said of Obama’s domestic curriculum, ‘and they’re not doing it right.’ That was in late spring; and it was close to common sense. By late summer the mood on the right was reminiscent of the rage against Kennedy in 1962, which passed through November 1963 unchastened, and attained a temporary climax with the nomination of Barry Goldwater as the Republican presidential candidate in 1964. It surfaced again in the run-up to the Clinton impeachment in 1996-97; but the fury of that time was allowed to take a detour through sex mania. Given the emotions he was up against, Clinton may have got off lightly.
Malthus’s doctrine on population and the necessity of many living in adversity, Hazlitt wrote, was a gospel ‘preached to the poor’. Equality in the United States in the early 21st century has become a gospel preached by the liberal elite to a populace who feel they have no stake in equality. Since the Reagan presidency and the dismemberment of the labour unions, America has not known a popular voice against the privilege of the large corporations. Yet without such a voice from below, all the benevolent programmes that can be theorised, lacking the ground note of genuine indignation, have turned into lumbering ‘designs’ espoused by the enlightened for moral reasons that ordinary people can hardly remember. The gambling ethic has planted itself deep in the America psyche – deeper now than it was in 1849 or 1928. Little has been inherited of the welfare-state doctrine of distributed risk and social insurance. The architects of liberal domestic policy, put in this false position, make easy prey for the generalised slander that says that all non-private plans for anything are hypocritical.
Afghanistan is the largest and the most difficult crisis Obama confronts away from home. And here the trap was fashioned largely by himself. He said, all through the presidential campaign, that Iraq was the wrong war but Afghanistan was the right one. It was ‘a war of necessity’, he said this summer. And he has implied that he would accept his generals’ definition of the proper scale of such a war. Now it appears that Afghanistan is being lost, indeed that it cannot be controlled with fewer than half a million troops on the ground for a decade or more. The generals are for adding troops, as in Vietnam, in increments of tens of thousands. Their current request was leaked to Bob Woodward, who published it in the Washington Post on 21 September, after Obama asked that it be kept from the public for a longer interval while he deliberated. The leak was an act of military politics if not insubordination; its aim was to show the president the cost of resisting the generals.
The political establishment has lined up on their side: the addition of troops is said to be the most telling way Obama can show resoluteness abroad. This verdict of the Wall Street Journal, the Post and (with more circumspection) the New York Times was taken up by John McCain and Condoleezza Rice. If Obama declined at last to oppose Netanyahu on the settlement freeze, he will be far more wary of opposing General Petraeus, the commander of Centcom. Obama is sufficiently humane and sufficiently undeceived to take no pleasure in sending soldiers to their deaths for a futile cause. He will have to convince himself that, in some way still to be defined, the mission is urgent after all. Afghanistan will become a necessary war even if we do not know what marks the necessity. Robert Dole, an elder of the Republican Party, has said he would like to see Petraeus as the Republican candidate in 2012. Better to keep him in the field (this must be at least one of Obama’s thoughts) than to have him to run against.
For Obama to do the courageous thing and withdraw would mean having deployed against him the unlimited wrath of the mainstream media, the oil interest, the Israel lobby, the weapons and security industries, all those who have reasons both avowed and unavowed for the perpetuation of American force projection in the Middle East. If he fails to satisfy the request from General McChrystal – the specialist in ‘black ops’ who now controls American forces in Afghanistan – the war brokers will fall on Obama with as finely co-ordinated a barrage as if they had met and concerted their response. Beside that prospect, the calls of betrayal from the antiwar base that gave Obama his first victories in 2008 must seem a small price to pay. The best imaginable result just now, given the tightness of the trap, may be ostensible co-operation with the generals, accompanied by a set of questions that lays the groundwork for refusal of the next escalation. But in wars there is always a deep beneath the lowest deep, and the ambushes and accidents tend towards savagery much more than conciliation.
And for the same reason, my anxiety has risen with every signal that, not only is he not going to convert his political (and, worse, personal) adversaries, but he is likely to fail in every significant legislative battle, and perhaps lose all his cache between now and the election of 2012.
In the October 22 issue of The London Review of Books, David Bromwich has a devastating critique of all this. I read it with a sinking feeling that I devoutly hope is as much about my over-identification with Obama, as it is about his being likely to fail in his presidency.
It is long, but worth the effort. And I reproduce it below:
Obama’s Delusion
David Bromwich
Long before he became president, there were signs in Barack Obama of a tendency to promise things easily and compromise often. He broke a campaign vow to filibuster a bill that immunised telecom outfits against prosecution for the assistance they gave to domestic spying. He kept his promise from October 2007 until July 2008, then voted for the compromise that spared the telecoms. As president, he has continued to support their amnesty. It was always clear that Obama, a moderate by temperament, would move to the middle once elected. But there was something odd about the quickness with which his website mounted a slogan to the effect that his administration would look to the future and not the past. We all do. Then again, we don’t: the past is part of the present. Reduced to a practice, the slogan meant that Obama would rather not bring to light many illegal actions of the Bush administration. The value of conciliation outweighed the imperative of truth. He stood for ‘the things that unite not divide us’. An unpleasant righting of wrongs could be portrayed as retribution, and Obama would not allow such a misunderstanding to get in the way of his ecumenical goals.
The message about uniting not dividing was not new. It was spoken in almost the same words by Bill Clinton in 1993; and after his midterm defeat in 1994, Clinton borrowed Republican policies in softened form – school dress codes, the repeal of welfare. The Republican response was unappreciative: they launched a three-year march towards impeachment. Obama’s appeals for comity and his many conciliatory gestures have met with a uniform negative. If anything, the Republicans are treating him more roughly than Clinton. Obama appears securer only because the mainstream media, which hated Clinton beyond reason, have showed up on his side. Americans, however, attend to a congeries of substitute media, at the centre of which lie Fox News Radio and Fox TV, the Murdoch stations. From that source, in the late spring and summer, a message percolated through a crowd of 20 million listeners, a message that was coherent, detailed and subversive of public order. I listened a little every day, as I drove to work and back, and I saw what was coming. The talk aimed to delegitimate the president, and it gave promise of an insurrection. A floating army of the angry and resentful were being urged to express contempt for Barack Obama, and to exhibit their loyalty to principles they felt in danger of losing – the right to bear arms, the right not to pay for health insurance. When representatives from Congress addressed town-hall meetings in the late summer, men in several states came armed with guns in leg holsters. Their local grievance was hostility to Obama’s plan for healthcare, a plan which was detested sight unseen, and which has still not been explained with sufficient clarity to remedy the distrust of the rational. (Clinton made the mistake of handing the construction of a national health system to his wife and a group of advisers she consulted in private. Obama, to avoid that error, left the framing and elaboration of a bill to five committees of Congress: an experiment in dissociation that rendered him blameless but also clueless beyond the broadest of rhetorical commitments.) But beneath all the accusations was a disturbance no ordinary answer could alleviate. The America these people grew up with was being taken away from them. That formulation occurred again and again on talk radio. Barack Obama had become the adequate symbol of forces that were swindling the people of their birthright. ‘This guy’ – another common locution – didn’t have a right to give laws to Americans.
When the Clinton impeachment was going forward, Obama was a young Chicago politician with other things on his mind. He could have learned something then about how the Republicans work. The most questionable of his appeals in the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton was the endlessly repeated bromide with which he dissociated himself from ‘the partisan bickering of the 1990s’ – a piece of spurious evenhandedness if there ever was one. Bill Clinton, who gained his national stature in the conservative Democratic Leadership Council, had been as much a prudent adjuster and adapter as Obama. The fury of the attack on Clinton, which started a few months into his presidency, was not the bickering of two rival parties exactly comparable in point of incivility. Yet such was Obama’s convenient picture of the recent past.
Delays in the passage, first, of Obama’s ‘stimulus package’ to strengthen the economy after last September’s financial collapse, and, second, of his healthcare bill, have been due in large part to his public pauses to wait for Republicans to lend these measures a bipartisan glow. A few came along, at a high price, to vote for the economic stimulus. None has taken up the offer on healthcare. The Republicans stand in place, and give no sign, and watch as the president’s stature dwindles. His reason for waiting doubtless has something to do with fear. Obama receives four times as many death threats as George W. Bush did. Yet he is also encumbered by the natural wish of the moderate to hold himself close to all the establishments at once: military, financial, legislative, commercial. Ideally, he would like to inspire everyone and to offend no one. But the conceit of accommodating one’s enemies inch by inch to attain bipartisan consensus seems with Obama almost a delusion in the literal sense: a fixed false belief. How did it come to possess so clever a man?
Obama’s career up to now, lucky as it was, had been wanting in singular achievements for which he alone was responsible. His experience seems not to have taught him the law of natural selection in politics by which majorities are put together out of remainders. Any act that achieves something concrete will leave small multitudes of the disappointed keening but unheard. There are hurt feelings in politics, which only time can cure if anything can. This is a truth now staring at Barack Obama, on several different fronts, but he does not accept it easily. His way of thinking is close to the spirit of that Enlightenment reasonableness which supposes a right course of action can never be described so as to be understood and not assented to.
The Republican Party of 2009 is a powerful piece of contrary testimony. It has become the party of wars and jails, and its moral physiognomy is captured by the faces of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, faces hard to match outside Cruikshank’s drawings of Dickens’s villains, hard as nails and mean as dirt and with an issue still up their sleeve when wars wind down and the jails are full: a sworn hostility towards immigrants and ‘aliens’. The anti-immigrant bias – from which George W. Bush and John McCain were free, but which both were powerless to counteract – is an underground stream of the party that makes it a bearer of racist sentiments no longer avowable in public. I have been studying the ante-bellum South, for a course on the career of Abraham Lincoln, and have been struck by the resemblance between the Republicans today and the pre-Civil War Democrats. The model of the Republicans today is John C. Calhoun, the political theorist of the slave South and deviser of the rationale for local nullification of federal policies.
That the central lesson about his domestic enemies has not yet been learned by Obama is the mystery of the first eight months of his presidency. He has acted as if he were the leader of no party; as if patience and benignity of temper could bring out the best in everyone. This is part of a larger inward confusion about his role. He seems to speak at once, or rather he seems to speak at different times, as organiser and as mediator, national leader and national healer. There is something strange about the alternation of postures, from the point of view of empirical prudence. On the largest issues that he himself raised in his opening months – his decision to close Guantánamo, to press for a two-state solution of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, and to reform healthcare with a national plan – his pattern has been the grand exordium delivered at stage centre, followed by months of silence. He has left his agents or his advisers or his party or both parties to mind the details. During the protracted delay, the very features that give the impress of his intention are sanded away. Thus, a new kind of pressure on Israel and a resolve to create a Palestinian state appeared to be signalled by his Cairo speech in early June. It was a thoughtful speech, and a courageous one, even if you took it as a series of propositions uttered at a certain time in a certain place. Simply to address the Muslims of the world without condescension was sure to make him unforgiving enemies on the American right – including the considerable body of Christian Zionists in the Southern and border states – and Obama went to Cairo and delivered his speech knowing that. Yet the four months since have seemed much longer than four months. Israel has sapped and undermined the settlement freeze. Binyamin Netanyahu gambled that he could trespass against objections by Obama’s negotiators, Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell, and the gamble has worked. The American desiderata were never backed by a sanction, and the Netanyahu government approved thousands of new units for the expansion of the Israeli colonies. This the Americans called ‘not helpful’.
Healthcare has been fretted according to a different schedule of neglect. Here, the undermining came first and Obama’s speech later. After a summer of radio coaching had rendered the opposition to healthcare so clamorous that many town-hall meetings erupted in disorder and some had to be closed early, Obama on 9 September addressed a joint session of Congress, and there, at last, he gave a measured and impressive presentation, which for the first time made the general case for his plan. It sent his approval ratings back above 50 per cent, and it was overshadowed only by the shout of a representative from South Carolina (Calhoun’s state), ‘You lie!’ – in effect a challenge to a duel with the president on the floor of Congress. This breach of protocol could hardly have come from a spontaneous welling-up of anger in Joe Wilson of South Carolina. To violate the hush of that monumental chamber required as much forethought and wild resolution as it would take to shout ‘God damn!’ in a cathedral. Wilson had done nothing previous of note, except mount a defence of the flying of the Confederate flag in the capitol of South Carolina. So the discord that the 9 September address was meant to salve showed its face again at the speech itself. There are people in America who sniff the taint of tyranny in every programme of the federal government; and a lot of them were listening to their radios in April, May, June and July. But there have also been grounds for fear that were genuine: a fact the prosperous neoliberal consensus lightly brushed off. Non-fanatical Americans of modest means have wondered how their children will pay for the emergency measures we are buying now but refusing to tax ourselves for.
Early suspicion of the bank bail-outs found a ready target of displaced resentment in the later demand for health insurance reform. Healthcare had never seemed a main concern of Obama’s as a candidate, and this looked like one more exorbitance. The new president had run up a staggering bill, close to a trillion dollars, to pay the brokerage houses to stave off a depression. He expected a gratitude he did not get. His choice of tactics could never have been easy to explain in a climate where so many bankers survived and so many ordinary people lost their homes and jobs. ‘And you are losing your health coverage, too!’ Obama says. But in a country where 85 per cent have coverage of some sort, more have been worrying about their homes and their jobs. Most people’s health insurance payments are taken out of their monthly pay cheques and put into private plans offered by their employers; when an employer cuts your job you lose the insurance too; but it betrayed a planner’s conceit in Obama to imagine that people would worry first, and most acutely, about the loss of their insurance. Many without a history of political resentment, some of whom voted for Obama, are startled that they keep being asked to foot the bill. It was easier to blame ‘big government’ than to say that the bankers and brokers and the whole financial establishment, with Goldman Sachs at its core, did not deserve the bail-outs. Obama’s speech on 9 September arrived too late to work as a counter-charm.
The pattern of the major announcement, the dilatory follow-up and the tardy self-defence has shown an alarming consistency in his administration. Obama ordered the closing of the prison at Guantánamo Bay as the first act of his presidency. Eight months later, Guantánamo remains open and unsolved, the date of its closing has been postponed, and the question of what to do with the prisoners has become the most explosive of all the matters that confront Obama’s authority. After signing the order in January, he took a long break; and his enemies rallied. Two elements of the syndrome should be distinguished. First, Obama is trying to do a great deal at once, not all of it thrust on him by the disasters of the previous administration. It is also beginning to appear that Obama has a slower ratio to the passage of time than most politicians. When he was attacked for the Guantánamo order, on the grounds that it placed the security of Americans in jeopardy, he let it be known that the issue was undergoing reappraisal; then, on 21 May, he gave a speech on law and national security at the National Archives: the worst speech of his presidency. He said that his paramount duty was ‘to keep the American people safe’: that word, safe, which was accorded a primacy by George W. Bush it had not been given by any earlier president, Obama himself now ranked ahead of the words justice, right, liberty and constitution. The National Archives speech was, more particularly, a response to the charges made by Dick Cheney over several preceding weeks.
In a speech delivered on the same day, 21 May, the former vice president, who has never really retired, gave a digest of his own published criticisms. The decision to release photos of the victims of torture, and to rule out ‘enhanced interrogation methods’ in the future, could only ‘lead our government further away from its duty to protect the American people’. Cheney intimated that if an attack occurred in the coming years, the fault would be Obama’s for having restored an antiquarian understanding of civil liberties and obedience to international law. Obama’s answer was sober and resolute in appearance, but, in detail, the National Archives speech was a capitulation on most of the points specified by Cheney. Prisoners would now be divided into five categories: those who could be freed because they were innocent; those who could be extradited to foreign countries; those who fell under the jurisdiction of military tribunals; those who could be tried in civilian courts in the US; and then a fifth category – those whom we lacked evidence to convict but who (it had been decided) were too dangerous to set free. These prisoners would be held indefinitely under a new legal dispensation still to be devised.
Preventive detention was a step President Nixon had proposed to Congress in 1970, but he never found the support or the temerity to put the programme into effect. Yet here was a Democratic president and professor of constitutional law doing what Nixon and for that matter Cheney and his assistants had only dreamed of. We have yet to see the final result, but the lesson of the encounter would seem to be: when you announce a great change, steal a march on your opponents by clinching the declaration with the deed. In no decision of his administration has Obama followed the wisdom of that Machiavellian precept. His government is also hampered by its want of a spokesman who can hit hard with words when the president wishes not to be seen to strike. Obama’s confidant David Axelrod, who managed his campaign and is often summoned to speak to the press on his behalf, emits a pleasant porridge of upper-media demotic. Another close adviser, Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago friend, is a technocrat to the bone, genially officious but lacking in any pith and point. These people are no match for Cheney, or for the president’s antagonists in the substitute media who speak under no restraint.
What Cheney and the radio demagogues sowed, the less gifted members of the Republican minority in Congress gratefully reaped. The minority leader of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, said on 17 September on the PBS show NewsHour: ‘We’re in the middle of a modern-day political rebellion in America.’ Interviewer: ‘Rebellion?’ Boehner: ‘Rebellion’. He repeated the word without compunction, and added: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’ The tone of our public ‘conversation’ (he chose with malice the soft liberal word) Boehner pronounced to be healthy. He only hoped the crowds ‘would be civil’ or somehow would not become ‘too hateful’. But with Cheney at its head – a rebel against the constitution and a man above the laws since 2002 – the popular movement for nullification of the laws of the federal government has again become a force in American life.
Talk radio in the United States is a law unto itself. With the diffusion of authority that has followed wide adoption of the internet, Fox News Radio and Fox TV may be the only major outlets that still command a sizeable fraction of the audience of the old networks. The intuition of Obama and his advisers must have been that any protest in these byways of discourse was right-wing business as usual. That lazy assumption left them unequipped for the gravity of the challenge. They thought the anger would simmer and die down. It did not occur to them that it might simmer and boil. If a threat is seen to spring from a determined opponent, Obama’s inclination is generally to let it go. He will emerge (he trusts) in the long run as the man who takes long views. By the effects of these postponements, however, he is forever giving new hostages to the truckle of compromise; he is put in the position of backing away while his enemies pick up strength; and in a leader whose nature is conciliatory, this means that the declared scope of every undertaking slowly shrinks and recedes. Guantánamo will be closed but not as soon as we said. Israel must recognise the wrong of further expansion of the settlements, but Israel will not be required to stop soon. Healthcare will be passed on some terms or other, but government will not compete with the big insurers; price reductions will be conceived and executed by private consortiums; illegal immigrants will stay uninsured; and even legal immigrants will be prohibited from buying coverage.
There were plenty of people in December 2008 who nursed a prejudice against Obama but were still in search of reasons to back it. Rush Limbaugh was the radio talker who brought those people to a boil. Limbaugh’s style is a mixture of bluster, clowning and poison, in proportions hard to capture without his voice in your ear – a ‘fat’ voice, someone called it, that shifts in a beat from muttering to imprecation. It is always excited, always breathless, yet the pace is unhurried. Part of the appeal lies in a conscious and amiable egotism. ‘Rush Limbaugh,’ he will introduce himself after an ad, ‘with talent on loan from God.’ ‘El Rushbaugh, serving humanity (simply by being here).’ He tells people to believe him and believe no one else: ‘Shown by scientific study to be right 99.1 per cent of the time.’ He was capable, early, of nicknaming Obama ‘Bamster’ (to rhyme with ‘ham’), a semi-affectionate take-down in the parlance of fraternity boys. He nicknamed the health plan, with automatic sarcasm, ‘ObamaCare’. But the tone grew noticeably more bitter by late July. ‘You don’t know how difficult it is for me to say: the president of the United States is lying through his teeth.’ By 5 August it was ominous to the point of open menace: ‘The president of the United States, who is president of all of us, has decided to take aim at over half of the American people as political opponents.’
He was the scourge of Obama in the summer, a palpable challenge to his claim of legitimacy, as much as Cheney was in the spring. On his show of 27 July, Limbaugh could boast without exaggeration: ‘July is the month of horrors for Obama and the Democrats. And I am largely the reason why.’ In the absence of these accusers, the Republican Party would be adrift. With the impetus of such voices, it now stands a chance of winning the midterm elections in 2010. Limbaugh was placed on the defensive some months ago when he said that he wanted President Obama to fail. This seemed an insult to the office as well as the man. It also seemed to suggest a peculiarly self-separating definition of national loyalty. But he justified himself by remarking that Obama’s success would mean the end of America as we knew it. (The president had to fail for the country to succeed.) A link between Cheney and Limbaugh certainly exists. Limbaugh, unlike the other far right hosts, shuns the interviewing of guests, and yet Cheney, who for his part shuns interviews, was the guest of Limbaugh even when he was vice president. More recently Limbaugh has interviewed him in the role of ex officio party counsellor.
When I started taking notes for this piece at the end of the summer, violence was in the air. Has it passed? A protest march was shepherded to the Washington Mall and a monster rally of 100,000 was held on 12 September, the day after the anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. One message of the demonstration was a rebuke of Obama’s supposed offence against patriotic memory by his naming of 11 September as National Day of Service and Remembrance. Service – except for military service – is heard on the American right as a codeword or moral wedge for socialism: it is to socialism as doubt is to atheism. Probably they wanted something more like Pearl Harbor Day (though that is no longer commemorated). But when was there ever a rational fit between the size of a grievance flourished by an audience like this and a single cause the crowd can name?
‘They’ve taken on too much, too fast,’ Limbaugh said of Obama’s domestic curriculum, ‘and they’re not doing it right.’ That was in late spring; and it was close to common sense. By late summer the mood on the right was reminiscent of the rage against Kennedy in 1962, which passed through November 1963 unchastened, and attained a temporary climax with the nomination of Barry Goldwater as the Republican presidential candidate in 1964. It surfaced again in the run-up to the Clinton impeachment in 1996-97; but the fury of that time was allowed to take a detour through sex mania. Given the emotions he was up against, Clinton may have got off lightly.
Malthus’s doctrine on population and the necessity of many living in adversity, Hazlitt wrote, was a gospel ‘preached to the poor’. Equality in the United States in the early 21st century has become a gospel preached by the liberal elite to a populace who feel they have no stake in equality. Since the Reagan presidency and the dismemberment of the labour unions, America has not known a popular voice against the privilege of the large corporations. Yet without such a voice from below, all the benevolent programmes that can be theorised, lacking the ground note of genuine indignation, have turned into lumbering ‘designs’ espoused by the enlightened for moral reasons that ordinary people can hardly remember. The gambling ethic has planted itself deep in the America psyche – deeper now than it was in 1849 or 1928. Little has been inherited of the welfare-state doctrine of distributed risk and social insurance. The architects of liberal domestic policy, put in this false position, make easy prey for the generalised slander that says that all non-private plans for anything are hypocritical.
Afghanistan is the largest and the most difficult crisis Obama confronts away from home. And here the trap was fashioned largely by himself. He said, all through the presidential campaign, that Iraq was the wrong war but Afghanistan was the right one. It was ‘a war of necessity’, he said this summer. And he has implied that he would accept his generals’ definition of the proper scale of such a war. Now it appears that Afghanistan is being lost, indeed that it cannot be controlled with fewer than half a million troops on the ground for a decade or more. The generals are for adding troops, as in Vietnam, in increments of tens of thousands. Their current request was leaked to Bob Woodward, who published it in the Washington Post on 21 September, after Obama asked that it be kept from the public for a longer interval while he deliberated. The leak was an act of military politics if not insubordination; its aim was to show the president the cost of resisting the generals.
The political establishment has lined up on their side: the addition of troops is said to be the most telling way Obama can show resoluteness abroad. This verdict of the Wall Street Journal, the Post and (with more circumspection) the New York Times was taken up by John McCain and Condoleezza Rice. If Obama declined at last to oppose Netanyahu on the settlement freeze, he will be far more wary of opposing General Petraeus, the commander of Centcom. Obama is sufficiently humane and sufficiently undeceived to take no pleasure in sending soldiers to their deaths for a futile cause. He will have to convince himself that, in some way still to be defined, the mission is urgent after all. Afghanistan will become a necessary war even if we do not know what marks the necessity. Robert Dole, an elder of the Republican Party, has said he would like to see Petraeus as the Republican candidate in 2012. Better to keep him in the field (this must be at least one of Obama’s thoughts) than to have him to run against.
For Obama to do the courageous thing and withdraw would mean having deployed against him the unlimited wrath of the mainstream media, the oil interest, the Israel lobby, the weapons and security industries, all those who have reasons both avowed and unavowed for the perpetuation of American force projection in the Middle East. If he fails to satisfy the request from General McChrystal – the specialist in ‘black ops’ who now controls American forces in Afghanistan – the war brokers will fall on Obama with as finely co-ordinated a barrage as if they had met and concerted their response. Beside that prospect, the calls of betrayal from the antiwar base that gave Obama his first victories in 2008 must seem a small price to pay. The best imaginable result just now, given the tightness of the trap, may be ostensible co-operation with the generals, accompanied by a set of questions that lays the groundwork for refusal of the next escalation. But in wars there is always a deep beneath the lowest deep, and the ambushes and accidents tend towards savagery much more than conciliation.
Monday, November 02, 2009
Afghanistan
Oh, how I would hate to be in President Obama's shoes as he works to create a plan for Afghanistan that both makes sense and is at least semi-marektable politically, in this country and beyond.
Despite Republican attempts to paint him as indecisive, I have come to believe that he truly is looking for some Solomonic solution. I'm not at all sure there is one.
Which could mean that if he were to do what I suspect he believes - work out a way to withdraw major level forces and concentrate on attacking terrorist groups with small special forces, intelligence and drones - he might well be consigning himself to a single term in office.
The economy may pick up enough in the next couple of years to carry him, but there are more and more indications that unemployment is likely to remain at historic and unacceptable highs for the next few years. And the breathtaking deficit we have already run up to stave off a full blown depression, likely precludes any further major government stimulus spending.
Which means he could be tarred with having run away from our enemies in Afghanistan, and presided over a failed economy.
What follows is an exchange with my oldest friend, Howard, the most highly decorated undercover agent in CIA history, who was station chief in Islamabad when we were supporting the Mujahadin against their Soviet occupiers. He was embroiled in the very insurgent groups now fighting our presence in Afghanistan. He begins by reproducing a piece from the NY Times, and then goes on to comment...
The following article from the New York Times, Transcripts of Defeat is extraordinary: it provides a fascinating look at the Kremlin's difficulties with their Afghan war once it was clear to the Kremlin that the war was unwinnable. There are many parallels between the Soviet and American dilemmas in Afghanistan - both in fighting the enemy and the political problems faced by the leadership in both countries. My comments on some of the parallels follow the article.
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Transcripts of Defeat, NYT
By VICTOR SEBESTYEN
Published: October 28, 2009
London
THE highly decorated general sat opposite his commander in chief and explained the problems his army faced fighting in the hills around Kabul: “There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another,” he said. “Nevertheless much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize.
“Our soldiers are not to blame. They’ve fought incredibly bravely in adverse conditions. But to occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in such a vast land where the insurgents can just disappear into the hills.” He went on to request extra troops and equipment. “Without them, without a lot more men, this war will continue for a very, very long time,” he said.
These sound as if they could be the words of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, to President Obama in recent days or weeks. In fact, they were spoken by Sergei Akhromeyev, the commander of the Soviet armed forces, to the Soviet Union’s Politburo on Nov. 13, 1986.
Soviet forces were then in the seventh year of their nine-year-long Afghan conflict, and Marshal Akhromeyev, a hero of the Leningrad siege in World War II, was trying to explain why a force of nearly 110,000 well-equipped soldiers from one of the world’s two superpowers was appearing to be humiliated by bands of “terrorists,” as the Soviets often called the mujahadin.
The minutes of Akhromeyev’s meeting with the Politburo were recently unearthed by American and Russian scholars of the cold war — these and other materials substantially expand our knowledge of the Soviet Union’s disastrous campaign. As President Obama contemplates America’s own future in Afghanistan, he would be well advised to read some of these revealing Politburo papers; he might also pick up a few riveting memoirs of Soviet generals who fought there. These sources show as many similarities between the two wars as differences — and may provide the administration with some valuable counsel.
Much of the fighting during the Soviet war in Afghanistan was in places that have grown familiar to us now, like Kandahar and Helmand Provinces. The Soviets’ main base of operations was Bagram, which is now the United States Army headquarters. Over the years, the Soviets changed their tactics frequently, but much of the time they were trying and failing to pacify the country’s problematic south and east, often conducting armed sweeps along the border with Pakistan, through which many of the guerrillas moved, as the Taliban do now.
That war was characterized by disputes between soldiers and politicians. As Russian documents show, the politicians ordered the invasion against the advice of the armed forces. The chief of the Soviet Defense Staff, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, raised doubts shortly before Soviet forces were dispatched on Christmas Day 1979. He told Dmitri Ustinov — the long-serving defense minister who had been a favorite of Stalin — that experience from the British and czarist armies in the 19th century should encourage caution. Ustinov replied: “Are the generals now making policy in the Soviet Union? Your job is to plan specific operations and carry them out... Shut up and obey orders.”
Ogarkov went further up the chain of command to the Communist Party boss, Leonid Brezhnev. He warned that an invasion “could mire us in unfamiliar, difficult conditions and would align the entire Islamic East against us.” He was cut off mid-sentence: “Focus on military matters,” Brezhnev ordered. “Leave the policymaking to us.”
The Soviet leaders realized they had blundered soon after the invasion. Originally, the mission was simply to support the Communist government — the result of a coup Moscow had initially tried to prevent, and then had no choice but to back — and then get out within a few months. But the mujahadin jihad against the godless Communists had enormous popular support within the country, and from outside. Money and sophisticated weapons poured in from America and Saudi Arabia, through Pakistan.
The Soviets saw withdrawal as potentially fatal to their prestige in the cold war, so they became mired deeper and deeper in their failed occupation. For years, the Soviets heavily bombarded towns and villages, killing thousands of civilians and making themselves even more loathed by Afghans. Whatever tactics the Soviets adopted the result was the same: renewed aggression from their opponents. The mujahadin, for example, laid down thousands of anti-tank mines to attack Russian troop convoys, much as the Taliban are now using homemade bombs to strike at American soldiers on patrol, as well as Afghan civilians.
“About 99 percent of the battles and skirmishes that we fought in Afghanistan were won by our side,” Marshal Akhromeyev told his superiors in November 1986. “The problem is that the next morning there is the same situation as if there had been no battle. The terrorists are again in the village where they were — or we thought they were — destroyed a day or so before.” Listen to a coalition spokesman now explaining the difficulties its forces are facing in tough terrain, and it would be hard to hear a difference.
There are many in Washington now calling on President Obama to cut his losses and find an exit strategy from Afghanistan. Even if he agreed, it may not be an easy business. When Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader in March 1985 he called Afghanistan “our bleeding wound.” He declared that ending the war was his top priority. But he could not do it without losing face.
The Soviet leadership fatally prevaricated. Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze wanted to pull out of Afghanistan immediately and blame Kremlin predecessors for the unpopular war. So too did Mr. Gorbachev’s most important adviser, the godfather of the perestroika and glasnost reforms, Aleksandr Yakovlev.
But Mr. Gorbachev dithered, searching for something he could call victory, or at least that other elusive prize for armies in trouble: peace with honor. “How to get out racks one’s brains,” Mr. Gorbachev complained in the spring of 1986, according to Politburo minutes. “We have been fighting there for six years. If we don’t start changing our approach we’ll be there another 20 or 30 years. We have not learned how to wage war there.”
Mr. Gorbachev was also haunted by the image of the last Americans leaving Saigon in panic: “We cannot leave in our underpants ... or without any,” he told his chief foreign policy aide, Anatoly Chernyayev, whose diaries have recently become available to scholars. Chernyayev himself called Afghanistan “our Vietnam. But worse.”
Withdrawal was a long, drawn-out agony. By the time the last troops left in February 1989, around 15,000 Soviet soldiers and 800,000 Afghans had died. “We must say that our people have not given their lives in vain,” Mr. Gorbachev told the Politburo. But even his masterful public relations skills could not mask the humiliation of defeat. Indeed, it marked the beginning of the end for the Soviet empire in Europe, as revolution swept through Eastern Europe in 1989, and of the Soviet Union itself two years later.
In 1988, Robert Gates, then the deputy director of the C.I.A., made a wager with Michael Armacost, then undersecretary of state. He bet $25 that the Soviet Army wouldn’t leave Afghanistan. The Soviets retreated in humiliation soon after. Mr. Gates, we can assume, paid up. But is there a gambling man out there who would lay money on the United States Army withdrawing in similarly humbling fashion? And would the defense secretary accept the bet?
END
____________________________________________________________________________
My Comments: Transcripts of Defeat
I will admit to being particularly struck by the Soviet era material that the author brings up: I was on the Pakistani side of the war until 1984, where my job was to try to anticipate and defeat Soviet moves in response to Mujahadin activity once we had established a "real" insurgency. I very often wondered what the Soviet military and its Kremlin masters were thinking once it was clear to them (as it was to us) that the insurgents, now well supplied with weapons and thoroughly motivated, were badly hurting them. Many Soviet units fought well, and their Army commanders tried strategy after strategy (without concern for "collateral damage" or the "hearts and minds" of the population) in attempting to get the upper hand. We found, however, that no matter which tactic/strategy they tried the Mujahadin could defeat or circumvent it - and quite often use it to their benefit.
By 1982 I had reached several conclusions, largely shared by my Pakistani colleagues (and which I think history has validated): conclusions which served as my fundamental precepts in fighting the war.
First, so long as we continued and refined our military support, the Afghan mujahadin would essentially fight on "forever.” And, so long as the Soviet Army maintained a politically mandated strength of around 140,000 men, the Soviets could never defeat the insurgents. Second the Soviet Army would remain in Afghanistan as long as its casualties remained at some (unknown to us) acceptable level. It seemed to me that there was a "balance point" in terms of cost in men and money that the Kremlin could and would accept - and that if that cost were increased past the balance point they would quit. Third, assuming we were able to push past their invisible "balance point,” that the Soviet departure would depend entirely on their ability to formulate some sort of face-saving explanation - cover - for their departure.
It was a revelation for me to read what the author of the above article has to say on these exact subjects: the Administration would be wise to study the Soviet example for some valuable guidance. I think we have long since gone past our "balance" point. It is worth noting the parallels between the tactics being used by the Taliban against us today and those used by the Mujahadin against the Soviets.
Ø Mujahadin losses were significant, but, because our fundamental strategy was to avoid set piece "major battles," their losses were never intolerable, and would quickly be made up from the huge (and self-replenishing) pool of volunteer fighters. Their fundamental offensive battle strategy was to strike/ambush carefully selected targets; inflict casualties; and then run like hell before the Soviets could mass their forces in response. The Mujahadin quickly learned that in a surprise attack or ambush they could inflict serious damage on the enemy in a very brief period of time: there was no need to hang around and slug it out.
Ø On defense - i.e., when confronted by aggressive Soviet-initiated fights, usually intended to "clear" an area by killing many insurgents, essentially the same strategy was used. Fight from prepared defensive positions only long enough to check the first enemy advance, and then run like hell. The insurgents very seldom remained and contested a major Soviet assault except on a key insurgent base - usually a major weapons cache and/or a major insurgent "commander's" primary operations base. When they did, the Soviets were often, but not always, victorious.
Ø The Mujahadin's key weapon, then as now, was excellent intelligence. Every Soviet "fixed base,” no matter how small or large, was carefully scrutinized by local insurgent supporters, and exact details of its physical layout, troop strength, weapons availability (i.e., what was there in addition to small arms), operating routines, etc., was relayed to the fighters. Soviet activities - for example, setting up for a major assault, or organizing a major convoy - were watched and reported with astonishing speed to local insurgent commanders.
Ø As long as the Soviet's puppet Afghan Army was around, intelligence obtained by the insurgents from that Army was extraordinary. Once that Afghan Army disappeared (some killed, most deserted/defected) the volume of intelligence dropped significantly, but was still very high. I believe that the "new model" Afghan Army we are attempting to raise to take over the burden of fighting the Taliban will provide a similar bounty of intelligence, this time against us. And the new Army, like its Soviet-sponsored predecessor, will soon disappear in to the ranks of the insurgents or return to their farms.
Ø Next in importance was the infamous Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG), now being used with such deadly effect against us in both Iraq and Afghanistan. My view was that every second insurgent should in time be equipped with this cheap weapon: which made the ordinary "rifleman" into a vehicle killer and gave him a means to deal with enemy fortifications. The RPG, combined with conventional mines, as a practical matter deprived the Soviets the advantageous use of their most prized "modern army" weapon: vehicles to move men and weapons quickly and safely. RPG's defeated both "thin-skinned" vehicles (i.e., trucks) and Soviet Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs). By 1983 sufficient RPG's had been distributed to insurgents that, in effect, the Soviets were denied the use of roads wherever and whenever the Mujahadin chose. And they frustrated Soviet responses to insurgent attacks and ambushes. It became a standard insurgent tactic to ambush or attack Soviet targets (moving or fixed) and wait for the appearance of Soviet vehicles - in order to ambush them in turn.
Ø The use of “IED’s” was only just being introduced at the end of my tour. The IED adds a tremendously successful weapon to the arsenal of insurgents we face.
Ø The insurgency against the Soviets, at least in my years, did NOT see the use of suicide bombers. I have often wondered how and by whom this incredibly effective tactic/weapon was introduced. If our enemy has a good supply of volunteers for suicide attacks, he has a weapon of astonishing effectiveness that is very nearly impossible to defeat.
End
Jean Hart assisted in the preparation of this article.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Candor
I don't suppose it could ever really happen...
Do you wonder who the first American president will be who says:
"It's been a great ride, leading the world in military might, financial strength, political clout. And it's over." ?
I suppose Jimmy Carter - still one of our most disliked presidents - was the one who came closest in my lifetime. Funny, the "malaise" he is remembered for having used to describe us after the first big oil embargo, cannot be found anywhere among what he said.
At a friend's house the other night I saw an episode of a series that spotlights 30 year old athletic events, giving us a chance to see them in the perspective of all these years later. This one was about Mohammed Ali's attempt to regain his title one more time when he was in his late 30s and clearly out of shape and badly impaired by years of pounding.
The real point of the show was the man Ali was fighting, and how angry he still is that what everyone remembers about boxing in that era is Ali and not him. (As if to underline his point, I can't come up with his name now.)
But what I took away was the sad - and unnecessary - agony Ali put himself through trying to prove the false notion that he was the same brilliant and beautiful boxer who fought those now legendary bouts against Joe Frazier.
As the show progressed it became clear Ali was trying to convince himself at least as much as his adoring public. Somehow his rhyming bluster - that had been such an entertaining part of his show - made it painfully clear that he was having even less success in hiding the reality from himself than he was hiding it from the world.
The close of the show gave me the sense that he was relieved when it was over and he no longer could - nor needed to - maintain the fiction. Now he could get on with being an aging man with Parkinson's, who needed to give credence to a body that was in decline.
Analogies all break down somewhere. I don't believe we are a nation so much in decline, as now living in a world in which no one economy will dominate the planet. And military might - when our scariest enemies are not nations, and increasing numbers of even small, poor nations have nuclear weapons - will not serve its former convincing purpose.
Some will regard this as a terrible thing, faulting our leaders and ourselves for having let ourselves lose our hegemony. I regard it not as anyone's fault, but the inexorable march of history unfolding in ways no one could predict or manage.
And as a relief.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Symbiosis
Symbiosis
Simon & Jude October 27, 2009
Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you. - Hafiz of Persia
*****
Maybe someone out there remembers my excitement at the suggestion that the purpose we humans serve here is as host to the organisms that inhabit our innards, our skin, live on our tongue, run around on our eyeballs, hide under eyelids, and garden beneath our fingernails and toenails.
The centuries-old quest for the meaning of our existence is finally settled: we are fertile farms for bacteria, the planet’s truly creative inhabitants.
If you wonder why I take pleasure in this, it is because I live my life in symbiosis. I’m a coattail rider.
Conrad and I passed the 2000 mile marker for the summer last week. If you aren’t a biker that likely sounds like a lot. And it is. For us. Bikers know it’s an average summer’s riding for a couple of old age pensioners.
Here’s the thing: were it not for Conrad, my mileage would be closer to zero. I’ve often said no flatlander should try to live in rural Vermont without a friend like Conrad. I won’t ride without him because I’m still not confident I can fix a flat. He comes over and turns up the furnace when one of our kids is coming for a winter weekend. He fixes my lawnmower and my nemesis the weed-whacker. In our hose he’s called Dr. Conrad.
And then there’s Lacey, whose idea of a great day is one in which the arm-long list she made the night before has a slash through each item.
Our come-to-Jesus dustup the other night was triggered by my persistent urging that my sitting at my keyboard composing words that will disappear into the ether is as useful to the world and productive as the prodigious achievements she checks off after an average day.
Like eremitic monks who pray in solitary silence, I explained.
Things improved when I credited her firm grounding to the earth for my remaining attached here even when gravity has often seemed a nuisance.
My two extraordinary sisters, one a legal assistant, the other a former newspaper editor and now chaplain to people in extremis in Beth Israel Hospital, were so appalled I would allow my second book – God Knows – to go to press in the same undisciplined clutter as the first –In The Zone – they volunteered to slog through the re-editing of it.
Bottom feeders we’re sometimes called. Like the bacteria, we honor our hosts.
That’s Conrad, in his barn with the International Harvester diaper delivery truck that was mired in mud in a junkyard. He’s converting it into a street rod. A few years ago he built a 1952 Jaguar XK. Fire engine red.
And that’s Lacey with the dessert she assigned herself for her book group meeting. I suggested ice cream with chocolate sauce. She’s displaying what I understand to be Pumpkin Remoulade. I had no idea. After her third scatological outburst I retired to turn off the outside faucets, drain and put away the hoses, bring in wood to burn. When I returned, what you see Lacey holding was in its world-class finished form. With a taste for me.
The pictures have been gussied up by my sisters, who agreed the feats portrayed are too over the top for simple photography.
I sense the bacteria’s pleasure, feasting on the Chinese barbecue pork I warmed up for my supper last night. I compose this verbal opus in praise of a few of the hosts who make my life a many-course banquet.
And inadvertently provide me with fancy fare for your palate.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Reading
Reading: The Obsession
James of Jerusalem October 23, 2009
As a first grader I had a hard time learning to read. I Still remember the first time I managed to sound out two syllables in a row and heard a word. Since then reading (and writing) has been my obsession. The next page read, the next sentence to emerge - mysteriously – from my pen/keyboard, could reveal one more clue to the whereabouts of the holy grail.
What follows is a list of titles I have tried this past season, some of which have titillated that fantasy.
The first group is books I read as we all have since Gutenberg. The second is on my Kindle, which – for a compulsive reader who flips around many books at once – has proved as miraculous a development for reading as the computer has for writing.
The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character & Calling. James Hillman. 1996. A friend who has dedicated his life after retirement to the search for proof of the existence the soul, gave me this noble effort.
Apology For Wonder. Sam Keen. 1969. Giift from another friend. Keen was among the most spirited apologists in the 60s for stepping out of our old culture-bound straightjackets. Well worth revisiting.
The Mindbody Prescription. John Sarno. 1998. Sarno’s frustration as an orthopaedic surgeon doing multiple back surgeries on people who didn’t seem to get better, led him to a fascinating notion about where most body pain comes from and how to heal it.
Levels of the Game. John McPhee. 1969. One of our master essayist’s first hints of what lay ahead. This intriguing unpacking of the semi-final match between Clark Graebner and Arthur Ashe when the national tennis championships were still played at the West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills, appeals to many senses like a great symphony.
All My Bone Shake. Robert Jensen. 2009. Jensen has returned to church after determining that Christianity is a search for truth and justice, not a set of formulae to believe. An antidote to the mindless debates that pass for religious quest in contemporary political USA.
Poems, 1959-2009. Frederick Seidel 2009. Critics all hate Seidel because his subjects are cruel, heartless. They can’t keep from reading him because his language is spellbinding.
Ballistics. Billy Collins. 2008. If you are among the 90%+ who don’t read poetry and wonder why we 10% do, start with Billy Collins.
Littlefoot. Charles Wright. 2007. Epic poem for instructions on “the other side of my own death,” daring to ask, “Will you miss me when I’m gone.”
Kindle Books
Cahokia. Timothy Pauketat. I never knew there was an elaborate, sophisticated civilization along the Mississippi 1000 years ago. Pauketat provides a captivating picture of what it may have been like.
1959: The Year Everything Changed. Fred Kaplan. 2009. You think it was the 60s? Kaplan says it all began in 1959. Rich, fascinating.
Traffic; Why We Drive The Way We Do. Tom Vanderbilt. 2009. Do you swear at the guy who waits until the last second to cut into the line creeping toward the one lane construction site? Vanderbilt will persuade you he’s speeding up the flow of traffic. You may never leave your driveway after reading this amazing study.
The Clinton Tapes; Wrestling History With The President. Taylor Branch. 2009. I love Clinton, you may hate him. Branch does both and he and Clinton spent many hours over 8 years shooting the breeze about just about everything. If you’re a political junkie – of whatever Party – this is for you.
Tears in Darkness; The Story of the Bataan Death March and its Aftermath. Michael Norman & Elizabeth Norman. 2009. I lived in the Philippines so this caught my eye. But it is a wrenching story of war in the Pacific. Though mostly about American and Filipinos, the Normans manage to humanize the Japanese in unbalancing ways.
A Whole New Life; An Illness and a Healing. Reynolds Price. 2003. A gifted writer leads us through the trauma of terrible illness and pain with beautiful prose and poetry that rescues meaning from meaningless suffering.
Sag Harbor. Colson Whitehead. 2008. I admire Whitehead’s writing, and I am fascinated by life among middle class black kids who summer on Long Island next door to Manhattan’s super rich. But, after the initial fun of seeing their antics, I found the writing lost its oomph.
The Battle For America 2008. Haynes Johnson. 2009. Another great read for political junkies of all stripes. How ever did a young, mixed-race man from Chicago – via Indonesia, Hawaii and Kenya – end up in the White House? Johnson documents it without the usual silly puffing up.
Biocentrism; How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe. Robert Lanza and Bob Berman. 2009. Likely you thought it settled that mind and consciousness emerge from evolution of matter. Suppose it is the reverse; consciousness creates matter? These guys make a pretty mind-boggling case for that.
The Forever War. Dexter Filkins. 2009. If you can bear the heartbreak, Filkins’ unflinching accounts of young American soldiers in the horrors of battle in mystifying circumstance – Filkins was there – there is no finer or braver writing. It didn’t make me hope we send more kids there.
The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Order Constantly Amazes Us and What We Can Do About It. Joshua Cooper Ramo. 2009.
Critics find Ramo lacking scientific rigor in his many claims that we must adapt to unprecedented change. Maybe so, but his argument that we better become flexible and innovative is so lively and compelling, he got me.
Flotsametrics and the Floating World. Curtis Ebesmeyer & Eric Scigliano. 2009. You’ve likely read about the Texas-sized island of plastic garbage in the western Pacific. Ebesmeyer began following ocean currents after thousands of Nike sneakers washed up on beaches from Washington State to Japan and Fiji.
Endpoint and Other Poems. John Updike. 2009. You like Updike? Wonder what he was thinking about as he faced his end? This is for you.
I have 13 other titles on my Kindle waiting for me to dig in. We’re going sailing with friends in January. The Kindle was invented for that trip.
Bon voyage.
James of Jerusalem October 23, 2009
As a first grader I had a hard time learning to read. I Still remember the first time I managed to sound out two syllables in a row and heard a word. Since then reading (and writing) has been my obsession. The next page read, the next sentence to emerge - mysteriously – from my pen/keyboard, could reveal one more clue to the whereabouts of the holy grail.
What follows is a list of titles I have tried this past season, some of which have titillated that fantasy.
The first group is books I read as we all have since Gutenberg. The second is on my Kindle, which – for a compulsive reader who flips around many books at once – has proved as miraculous a development for reading as the computer has for writing.
The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character & Calling. James Hillman. 1996. A friend who has dedicated his life after retirement to the search for proof of the existence the soul, gave me this noble effort.
Apology For Wonder. Sam Keen. 1969. Giift from another friend. Keen was among the most spirited apologists in the 60s for stepping out of our old culture-bound straightjackets. Well worth revisiting.
The Mindbody Prescription. John Sarno. 1998. Sarno’s frustration as an orthopaedic surgeon doing multiple back surgeries on people who didn’t seem to get better, led him to a fascinating notion about where most body pain comes from and how to heal it.
Levels of the Game. John McPhee. 1969. One of our master essayist’s first hints of what lay ahead. This intriguing unpacking of the semi-final match between Clark Graebner and Arthur Ashe when the national tennis championships were still played at the West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills, appeals to many senses like a great symphony.
All My Bone Shake. Robert Jensen. 2009. Jensen has returned to church after determining that Christianity is a search for truth and justice, not a set of formulae to believe. An antidote to the mindless debates that pass for religious quest in contemporary political USA.
Poems, 1959-2009. Frederick Seidel 2009. Critics all hate Seidel because his subjects are cruel, heartless. They can’t keep from reading him because his language is spellbinding.
Ballistics. Billy Collins. 2008. If you are among the 90%+ who don’t read poetry and wonder why we 10% do, start with Billy Collins.
Littlefoot. Charles Wright. 2007. Epic poem for instructions on “the other side of my own death,” daring to ask, “Will you miss me when I’m gone.”
Kindle Books
Cahokia. Timothy Pauketat. I never knew there was an elaborate, sophisticated civilization along the Mississippi 1000 years ago. Pauketat provides a captivating picture of what it may have been like.
1959: The Year Everything Changed. Fred Kaplan. 2009. You think it was the 60s? Kaplan says it all began in 1959. Rich, fascinating.
Traffic; Why We Drive The Way We Do. Tom Vanderbilt. 2009. Do you swear at the guy who waits until the last second to cut into the line creeping toward the one lane construction site? Vanderbilt will persuade you he’s speeding up the flow of traffic. You may never leave your driveway after reading this amazing study.
The Clinton Tapes; Wrestling History With The President. Taylor Branch. 2009. I love Clinton, you may hate him. Branch does both and he and Clinton spent many hours over 8 years shooting the breeze about just about everything. If you’re a political junkie – of whatever Party – this is for you.
Tears in Darkness; The Story of the Bataan Death March and its Aftermath. Michael Norman & Elizabeth Norman. 2009. I lived in the Philippines so this caught my eye. But it is a wrenching story of war in the Pacific. Though mostly about American and Filipinos, the Normans manage to humanize the Japanese in unbalancing ways.
A Whole New Life; An Illness and a Healing. Reynolds Price. 2003. A gifted writer leads us through the trauma of terrible illness and pain with beautiful prose and poetry that rescues meaning from meaningless suffering.
Sag Harbor. Colson Whitehead. 2008. I admire Whitehead’s writing, and I am fascinated by life among middle class black kids who summer on Long Island next door to Manhattan’s super rich. But, after the initial fun of seeing their antics, I found the writing lost its oomph.
The Battle For America 2008. Haynes Johnson. 2009. Another great read for political junkies of all stripes. How ever did a young, mixed-race man from Chicago – via Indonesia, Hawaii and Kenya – end up in the White House? Johnson documents it without the usual silly puffing up.
Biocentrism; How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe. Robert Lanza and Bob Berman. 2009. Likely you thought it settled that mind and consciousness emerge from evolution of matter. Suppose it is the reverse; consciousness creates matter? These guys make a pretty mind-boggling case for that.
The Forever War. Dexter Filkins. 2009. If you can bear the heartbreak, Filkins’ unflinching accounts of young American soldiers in the horrors of battle in mystifying circumstance – Filkins was there – there is no finer or braver writing. It didn’t make me hope we send more kids there.
The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Order Constantly Amazes Us and What We Can Do About It. Joshua Cooper Ramo. 2009.
Critics find Ramo lacking scientific rigor in his many claims that we must adapt to unprecedented change. Maybe so, but his argument that we better become flexible and innovative is so lively and compelling, he got me.
Flotsametrics and the Floating World. Curtis Ebesmeyer & Eric Scigliano. 2009. You’ve likely read about the Texas-sized island of plastic garbage in the western Pacific. Ebesmeyer began following ocean currents after thousands of Nike sneakers washed up on beaches from Washington State to Japan and Fiji.
Endpoint and Other Poems. John Updike. 2009. You like Updike? Wonder what he was thinking about as he faced his end? This is for you.
I have 13 other titles on my Kindle waiting for me to dig in. We’re going sailing with friends in January. The Kindle was invented for that trip.
Bon voyage.
