“Three Cups of Tea” by David Oliver Relin and Greg Mortenson

by Joshua H. Liberatore

In Three Cups of Tea journalist David Oliver Relin and mountaineer-turned-grassroots education activist Greg Mortenson describe the positive change that can come, at impressively low cost, when dedicated and informed leadership tackles a thorny problem with efficiency, persistence, and the courage to work within local conditions and constraints. After an aborted attempt to summit K2 in northwest Pakistan, Mortenson stumbled, almost literally, into another formidable mission, which became his life’s work: to fund and build schools in the tribal villages that for decades have supplied support services and porters to the world’s elite climbing community. Mortenson’s promise began in the early 1990s in Korphe, a tiny Balti village of Shiite Muslims, where he recovered from his failed climbing expedition and whose grinding poverty and lack of opportunity made an indelible impression on him. Having grown up in a missionary family in rural Tanzania, Mortenson had watched his father organize and build a first-rate teaching hospital where there previously had been no medical services and knew that with sensitivity and patience, critical infrastructure could be developed in the world’s most impoverished and isolated corners. From that first project, built on just 12,000 dollars in privately raised donations, Mortenson went on to found the Central Asia Institute, which now boasts a record of over 80 fully functioning schools in the harshest climes of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

    What’s remarkable about the narrative arc of Three Cups of Tea is to recognize that Mortenson was operating in regions now designated as terrorist safe havens before many Americans could confidently locate Pakistan or Afghanistan on a map. Mortenson proved a stubborn and careful student of the region he adopted as his vocation and was not naïve about the immense challenges he faced. His gift for languages and openness to local customs allowed him to integrate with indigenous peoples whom even the national governments in whose territory they reside have written off as intractable tribalists, not worthy of public resources or infrastructure. Mortenson learned that although successful programs had been developed to build schools in Nepal and other Himalayan territories where Buddhists were the beneficiaries, funding village education – for young children but principally girls – in Muslim strongholds brought controversy on both ends of the project cycle, among American audiences where he sought donations and support and among fundamentalist elements in the villages themselves. But Mortenson’s shrewd understanding of local politics and the many important connections he made through years of patient cultivation paid off, and slowly but surely, Mortenson’s organization was delivering basic education to tens of thousands of children in the region’s poorest localities.

    What began as a one-man operation grew into a proper nonprofit with a board and small but loyal donor base, but always remained very lean administratively, relying on local suppliers, labor, and staff as much as possible, with the workaholic and solitary Mortenson providing all of the administrative manpower on the U.S. side. One board member faults Mortenson for keeping too much of the work to himself, maintaining an exhausting schedule in his basement in Bozeman, Montana, with no office or permanent staff, closing deals without accountability or traceable records, and not broadening his reach through delegation. The criticism seems plausible, but misplaced, given that Mortenson started building schools when he was essentially homeless, broke, doing shift work as a nurse in California to raise money for his first project, and continued more or less on that model as the enterprise grew to deliver maximum results at minimum cost. What made his efforts so effective, in fact, was their exemplary cost-efficiency. So many nonprofit organizations working overseas, however well-intentioned their programs, eat up half of their operating budgets in U.S. administrative costs, personnel overhead, and bureaucratic density. Mortenson’s approach comes at a considerable nonmonetary cost though: he lives many months away from his wife and two children, takes incredible risks in very dangerous places, and loses both sleep and general health in the service of his mission.

    Overall, Three Cups of Tea illustrates a humane cause of heroic and noble proportions, but one small incongruity does deserve comment. In a chapter called “Shrouded Figure,” Mortenson describes his deep admiration for the life and work of Mother Teresa and even travels to Calcutta to pay his respects when she dies. Relin takes the trouble to note that Mother Teresa had been roundly criticized for accepting donations from “drug dealers, corporate criminals, and corrupt politicians” and that she believed that such money was “washed clean in the service of God,” but he his silent about Mortenson’s decision to turn down $2.2 million from Donald Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense, which by his own estimate, could have built 100 schools, as functional alternatives to the Saudi-funded Wahhabi madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan that have been widely implicated as hotbeds of terrorist recruitment.

    Although Mortenson began his work well before the Taliban and Al Qaida became household words in the United States, his insistence on the primacy of education as the best long-term strategy for mitigating poverty and desperation gained considerably more attention after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Suddenly, Mortenson could add to his argument that proper education was the best bulwark against extremism and fundamentalist violence in the Muslim world. Bin Laden’s networks and local hosts in Central Asia have drawn their strength from exploiting the dire poverty and hopelessness of an ignored population. The relevance of Mortenson’s work is best summarized in the words of Pervez Musharraf’s personal helicopter pilot, on whom Mortenson came to rely for stopovers in remote villages, General Bashir: “Osama, baah! . . . Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America. Thanks to America, Osama is in every home. As a military man, I know you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard. You have to attack the source of your enemy’s strength. In America’s case, that’s not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. The only way to defeat it is to build relationships with these people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever” (310). In 2010, almost a decade into the feckless “war on terror,” we are still badly in need of reminding.

“American Orientalism” by Douglas Little

by Joshua H. Liberatore

American Orientalism, Douglas Little’s sweeping thematic survey of American foreign policy in the Middle East since 1945, was published in the fall of 2002, just as the Bush Administration was beginning the hard work of lying to both Congress and the United Nations that Iraq was a central front in the “war on terror” and that Saddam Hussein had ties to the September 11 hijackers. October 2002 is a date rich in irony for Little’s subject, just months before those lies inveigled our armies and our national resources into a full-scale foreign policy calamity but long enough after the attacks of Black Tuesday for it to be equally apparent that the mission in Afghanistan was plagued by the same misunderstandings and arrogance that had characterized Middle East policy for two generations and that, thus, a review of that recent history was urgently necessary, if not long overdue. Little builds on the pioneering work of Edward Said, whose original application of the term “orientalism” was in the fields of literary criticism, history, and anthropology but obviously had foreign policy implications as well, implications on which Said himself wrote with consummate wisdom and accuracy. Orientalism, in short, is a set of attitudes, clung to in the West but in particular by Americans, positing the Arab or the Muslim or the entire Middle East as fundamentally Other, exotic, irrational, and prone to fanaticism and violence. The theory itself is rather complex, but Little observes with conviction that its manifestation in politics has been nakedly simple for over 60 years.

    American Orientalism is particularly useful because of its convenient organization into broad themes of diplomatic history. After introducing the general history of orientalist attitudes in American culture, working back from Mark Twain’s insights in Innocents Abroad and citing specific films and popular magazines, Little undertakes an administration-by-administration analysis of Middle East policy from various lenses: oil acquisition, democratization and regime change, Arab-Israeli negotiations, Cold War detente, and counterterrorism. Each chapter thus overlaps in chronology but explores in depth a different aspect of this layered history in Middle East relations. The desired effect of this arrangement, I suspect, is not to achieve a mere reinforcement of detail but principally to assert the vexing interconnectedness (and often deleterious interaction) of these various factors in shaping U.S. foreign policy, even when publically, only one or even none is acknowledged as the primary motivation. This convergence is critical to our understanding of our government’s perennial missteps in the Middle East, for just as our cultural imagination has tended to simplify “orientals” as backward, monolithic, and untrustworthy, our leaders have consistently simplified our actions and commitments in the Middle East. And we have allowed them to do so out of ignorance and laziness.

    Although Little was writing before the extent of the Iraq fiasco became painfully clear, the themes of arrogant overstepping, persistent underestimating, and bullish miscalculating were sufficiently well documented for anyone who cared to look. Middle East policy since World War II was never coherent or consistent, was always expensive in treasure and lives, and has always overshadowed other international priorities with mounting detriment. In his section on the American involvement in Arab-Israeli conflicts, Little cites Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban’s blunt adage that “the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” which in turn becomes a kind of leit motif for the behavior of all parties in the region. Little concedes the truth of Eban’s remark for Palestinian actions from 1948 to 1967, but faults the Israelis for succumbing to the same defeatism since the Six-Day War through the present. The phrase also applies to the many American presidents and State Department officials who have tried to tackle the conflict, and may well serve as a global mantra for our more recent efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq and the intensifying rhetoric against Iran and Syria, all of which bear the marks of an orientalist heritage not yet shaken in the American consciousness.

The Federalist Project 8

“Debating the Constitution” and The Federalist 41 – 44

By the time the authors working under the penname Publius undertook their herculean labor of selling the Constitution to the American reading public, their worries concerning its fate amid general opinion were decidedly acute. Hamilton, Rakove notes, believed Americans were “prone to such ‘preconceived jealousies and fears,’ because they were steeped in a political culture in which innovation portended danger more often than it promised reform” (132). The Revolution itself had been a hard sell for many, and that involved onerous taxes, which seems to be the single oldest rallying theme in American political culture. These “jealousies and fears” threatened the success of the finely tuned Constitution in the 1780s as surely as they threaten the prospects of genuine health care reform in 2010. The Founders had long recognized that the chief political virtue in a republican system was “moderation,” which meant to post-Enlightenment thinkers a proper suppression of “passions” in favor of “reason.” In the 2008 Presidential campaign, one of the most liberal contenders for the Democratic nomination, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, defended himself from his own party’s attacks by arguing that his platform was not “radical” or “leftist” in any way, but in fact “moderate.” He was, after all, arguing on classic Hamiltonian lines, positioning solutions to problems of governance, foreign policy, and domestic economy as a pragmatic (even “conservative”) restructuring of priorities, in line with majority opinion about what was right and needed. His audience took it as a joke.

    So clearly, Hamilton’s anxiety was not parochial. Rakove takes up this very theme in narrating the Constitutional debates that divided period politicians into two starkly oppositional camps, Federalists and Anti-Federalists, whose respective programs seemed all but irreconcilable. “The irony of ratification,” Rakove writes, “was that both sides had to appeal to a public opinion in which they placed little confidence—not because they regarded the American people as an unwashed mass of the ignorant and selfish but because they feared that cunning leaders would manipulate even well-meaning citizens” (134). Madison’s concerns on this score were no duller than Hamilton’s. He fretted about the “impulsive and dangerous influence that public opinion could exert” on the Constitution debate, and his strategy was either to neutralize that influence or channel it properly through a “mechanism of safe expression.” His offerings to that end come down to us as the Federalist essays, that magisterial compendium of republican thought, but in his own day, they were essentially op-ed columns.

    Imagine if today’s partisan warriors only had newspaper columns in which to stump their various talking points and persuade readers to take their side. No pundit blogs, no television commercial spots, no cable talk shows, no Twitter, no YouTube-circulated videos, just tightly worded prose in print. A very different kind of rhetoric obtains in these circumstances, and in Federalist 41–44, Madison pursues nothing less than a point-by-point explication of the more controversial elements in the Constitution. It would be tedious to recapitulate the specifics of his defense in this section, but a few choice nuggets do command our attention. The first concerns his astute recognition that “military precautions” in one country, by their very nature, necessitate concomitant precautions elsewhere, what we now blithely call “the arms race.” Madison understood that the costs of military preparation (standing army, arms stockpiles, and resource mobilization) can feasibly outweigh the benefits, and though we can suppose his purpose here is to make a case for careful centralization rather than provincial competition in matters martial, a more general insight cannot escape us in the post-Cold War era, when the notion as bizarre as Mutually Assured Destruction is credited with having provided a convincing deterrent to warring parties for decades of Soviet-American nuclear tension.

    The second involves Madison’s sustained worries about the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery, “a traffic which has so long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern policy” (266). Here his reference is to the slave trade (not slavery itself), but a broader sadness about the persistence of its associative evils in the republic he was trying to build can be detected in his tone. In Federalist 43, in a discussion of the apportioning of electoral representation, Madison can’t help himself from bringing it up again: “I take no notice of an unhappy species of population abounding in some of the States, who, during the calm of regular government, are sunk below the level of men; but who, in the tempestuous scenes of civil violence, may emerge into the human character and give a superiority of strength to any party with which they may associate themselves” (277). Madison here almost seems to presage the role played by freed slaves in Civil War regiments or lower-class black infantry in both World Wars. The Founders were forced to punt the issue of slavery for the sake of political expedience – managing in the meantime to forge a prohibition of the “traffic” of slaves set to take effect in 20 years – but they were certainly aware of the grave consequences of their procrastination.

POTUS Won’t Accept It

by Joshua H. Liberatore

Since the disaffected scion of a wealthy Nigerian banker ignited his briefs aboard Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, POTUS has expended much energy in front of cameras acting the tough Democrat. Although we were tepidly reminded by both our Commander in Chief and his Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that, in general, “the system worked,” POTUS was wise to credit the actual first responders onboard the plane, those decidedly outside “the system,” with thwarting disaster:

Thanks to the quick and heroic actions of passengers and crew, the suspect was immediately subdued, the fire was put out, and the plane landed safely. The suspect is now in custody and has been charged with attempting to destroy an aircraft. And a full investigation has been launched into this attempted act of terrorism, and we will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable. (December 28, 2009)

POTUS concluded that first reaction with a colorful paean to American self-reliance:

Finally, the American people should remain vigilant, but also be confident. Those plotting against us seek not only to undermine our security but also the open society and the values that we cherish as Americans. This incident, like several that have preceded it, demonstrates that an alert and courageous citizenry are far more resilient than an isolated extremist. As a nation, we will do everything in our power to protect our country. As Americans, we will never give in to fear or division; we will be guided by our hopes, our unity, and our deeply held values. That’s who we are as Americans. (December 28, 2009)

In the meantime, the crafters and deciders of the System were busy plugging some major leaks. Their efforts have perplexed many. Various terrorist watchlists are reportedly being refined and expanded (but crotchbomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was already on the biggest list). Screening techniques are being reevaluated, with hundreds of new security technologies and scanners already on order (but again, the net is being widened not narrowed). Improvements in intelligence-sharing and interagency communication have come under consideration (new boards and panels created, hence more layers). Then, in his next update, POTUS began to lift the curtain:

I wanted to speak to the American people again today because some of this preliminary information that has surfaced in the last 24 hours raises some serious concerns. It’s been widely reported that the father of the suspect in the Christmas incident warned U.S. officials in Africa about his son’s extremist views. It now appears that weeks ago, this information was passed to a component of our intelligence community, but was not effectively distributed so as to get the suspect’s name on a no-fly list. (December 29, 2009)

Not exactly confidence inspiring, this. With numerous suspect lists in the government databases and covert human intelligence “assets” in every country of the globe, the system failed to take seriously a father’s worried plea that his estranged son might be up to something in the dusty hills of Yemen. But what’s more disconcerting is the most recent refinement of the System: blatantly racist (and according to most experts, counterproductive) “enhanced” profiling of air travelers from an unlucky thirteen countries, a list that includes the usual suspects of nations we love to hate – often with few tangible reasons – such as Iran and Syria, some other benighted Middle Eastern countries like Sudan and Algeria, innocent Nigeria, and tiny Cuba, which can’t even send its cigars or sugarcane into our country, much less its citizens. In a euphemism to top all euphemisms, POTUS called these “countries of interest”:

As of yesterday, the Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, is requiring enhanced screening for passengers flying into the United States from, or flying through, nations on our list of state sponsors of terrorism or other countries of interest. And in the days ahead, I will announce further steps to disrupt attacks, including better integration of information and enhanced passenger screening for air travel. (January 4, 2010)

I’m no security expert (although I have spent some time in those fancy puffer machines, which once illuminated my hanky as a suspicious item, undisclosed in the conveyor basket), but one thing the record shows is that the System is consistently one or two full steps behind those training themselves to circumvent it. Before Richard Reid blew up his loafers in 2001, no one would have thought to pad through an airport security line in sweaty business socks. Now, it’s become a dismal routine.

Now, I will accept that intelligence, by its nature, is imperfect, but it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged. That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it. Time and again, we’ve learned that quickly piecing together information and taking swift action is critical to staying one step ahead of a nimble adversary. (January 4, 2010)

“Enhanced screening” based on national origin ignores some basic realities. Muhammad Atta and his 9/11 comrades were not sipping tea in Damascus awaiting their marching orders; they were taking architecture classes in Hamburg and flight lessons in south Florida. Do the managers of the System imagine that suicidal extremists clever enough to hotwire a pair of drawers and elude European security protocols – in my experience much more rigorous than those of Newark and Baltimore – will not find a way to fabricate a Belgian or Turkish passport? Do they imagine that Al Qaida won’t find a way to recruit young men from other landscapes not covered by the baker’s dozen countries of interest, say Oman, Malaysia, or Azerbaijan? Will our undereducated and likely underpaid TSA frontliners be able to tell the difference between a 22-year-old Argentine and his Libyan counterpart?

As these violent extremists pursue new havens, we intend to target Al Qaida wherever they take root, forging new partnerships to deny them sanctuary, as we are doing currently with the Government in Yemen. As our adversaries seek new recruits, we’ll constantly review and rapidly update our intelligence and our institutions. As they refine our tactics, we’ll enhance our defenses, including smarter screening and security at airports and investing in the technologies that might have detected the kind of explosives used on Christmas. (January 4, 2010)

In the opinion of Robert Baer, the veteran CIA field operative whom George Clooney made famous in Syriana, our biggest post-9/11 policy blunder has been the stubborn misapprehension that Al Qaida is “an organization not an idea.” No matter how many Predator drones we deploy to desert caverns around the world, ideas are fluid, cross borders easily, and spread in coded language on the Internet, going dormant one place and resurfacing in another.

As we saw on Christmas, Al Qaida and its extremist allies will stop at nothing in their efforts to kill Americans. And we are determined not only to thwart those plans but to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat their networks once and for all. Indeed, over the past year, we’ve taken the fight to Al Qaida and its allies wherever they plot and train, be it in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Yemen and Somalia, or in other countries around the world. (January 4, 2020)

To mad dog senators like Joe Lieberman and Jim DeMint already fantasizing about making war on yet another Muslim country, we offer the humble reminder that thus far, the military option – and it has always been an option, despite tough talk about “wars of necessity” – has not produced brilliant results for us. Dropping bombs on more brown-skinned people will not make us feel safer in Topeka and Providence. Furthermore, politicians of the bellicose variety should consult the British on the prospects of subduing a country like Yemen (they tried it and got licked in the late 1960s). No cake walk, no slam dunk, in short, no fun.

Our reviews, and the steps that we’ve taken and will continue to take, go to the heart of the kind of intelligence and homeland security we need in the 21st century. Just as Al Qaida and its allies are constantly evolving and adapting their efforts to strike us, we have to constantly adapt and evolve to defeat them, because as we saw on Christmas, the margin for error is slim and the consequences of failure can be catastrophic. (January 4, 2010)

POTUS’s own self-hypnotic mantra that we must “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat” (sometimes he swaps in “destroy” in the third position) betrays precisely the kind of misunderstanding Baer warns against. If Baer is right – and I suspect he is – the “war on terror” (not in name but in practice unchanged since October 2001) will be lost for the same simple reasons that our other fastidious struggles with demons on which we have previously declared wars – drugs, crime, poverty – have failed. Terrorism – terror! – just as any other abstraction we abhor, cannot easily be squashed by brute force; rather, it must be drained over time of its persuasive power. We won’t accomplish that by patting down the pantaloons of 170 million Nigerians, much less by allowing our politicians to fan the flames of xenophobia while praising the virtues of American vigilance.

“In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” by Michael Pollan

by Patrick Baker

What is food? It’s kind of like asking, ‘what is fire?’ The answer seems obvious until you are forced to think about it. So what is fire? From antiquity to the early modern period the answer was easy. Fire was one of the four basic elements, along with earth, air, and water. But the situation became problematic once scientists discovered that these supposedly elementary substances were composed of smaller units: water a compound of oxygen and hydrogen, air a mixture of several gases, and earth a composite of various minerals. But what about fire? Was it solid, liquid, or gas? Animal, vegetable, or mineral? Composite or elementary? As it turned out, fire is none of these. It is a process of combustion, a release of energy in the form of heat and light. Okay, so what is food?

    As becomes clear in Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, this is as difficult a question as the one about fire. For it, like the other, is a question mal posée. Fire defied human understanding as long as it was treated as a substance whose essence was to be sought in component parts; only once this assumption was abandoned could fire be accepted for what it actually is, a form of energy. Food has been misunderstand for over a century, ever since it became an object of scientific inquiry. Until then it had been a beloved but uncontroversial aspect of culture. Enter the science of nutritionism, which decided to search for the secret of food in component parts called nutrients, including everything from vitamin A to what we now call omega-3 fatty acids, and beyond. The idea was to make food better, but nothing short of catastrophe ensued. For although we have been blessed with the convenience of prepackaged foods (some of which could outlast cockroaches), we are also saddled with proneness to fatal illnesses like heart disease and type-2 diabetes, an obsession with ever-changing diet fads, and an iron-clad uncertainty about what we should eat. Oh yeah, and we don’t know what food is anymore either.

    Through about two hundred pages of prose that are at least as enlightening as they are entertaining (and among the best that journalism has to offer), Pollan argues that food is more than the sum of its parts. It is not, as nutritionists think, a delivery device for a collection of nutrients. No, it is a vital, synergistic phenomenon that has its greatest effect through culture and in social situations. Food is something to be enjoyed, not analyzed, grown, not developed in a laboratory. It must be composed of recognizable organic substances. And it must be recognizable to your great-grandmother as food. Thus, one of the rules of thumb set out in Pollan’s third and final section, “Getting Over the Western Diet,” recommends: “Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup.”

    Other tips include: “Avoid food products that make health claims,” “get out of the supermarket whenever possible,” “buy a freezer,” “eat more like the French,” “have a glass of wine with dinner,” “pay more, eat less,” “eat meals,” and, perhaps best of all, “consult your gut.” All of these pieces of advice seem either childishly obvious or hopelessly counterintuitive. And that, for Pollan, is one of the major problems with the way we Americans now approach food. When it comes to thinking about health, we disregard criteria that should be obvious, such as taste, satiety, enjoyment, common sense, and keeping a stock of truly good food on hand. Instead, we give in to the pseudo-scientific claims of the “food industry,” which is far more devoted to making money than to nourishing us. It would have us buy food as far removed from the earth as possible, i.e. in packaged form from a supermarket. It wants us to eat food in a way cut off from culture, i.e. on the move or on the side, and as preprepared as possible. And it fills so-called “food” with a bunch of stuff that, whatever it might be, is simply not food. Real food seldom has eight syllables.

    But In Defense of Food is far more than a compendium of tips on eating. Following on the heels of Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, and delightfully not covering any of the same ground, it is a hard-headed investigation of how we Americans approach food and why. Before getting to his advice, Pollan offers two sections devoted to the origin and development of modern thought about nutrition and to the ill effects of the Western diet, respectively. In the former he exposes the shaky scientific basis of the original health fad, nutritionism, and the reasons for which its proponents can’t get their heads around what food really is. In the latter he addresses the elephant in the room, namely the undeniable fact that the Western diet simply makes everyone who adopts it sick, including us Westerners. It’s the modern smallpox, except it kills the settlers too.

But the good news, according to Pollan, is that the outlook is far from bleak. Once we abandon the viewpoint of nutritionism, namely that what is important about food is some magic-bullet combination of nutrients, and focus on making moderate, good-tasting whole meals out of fresh food, it is actually quite hard to go wrong. And if that’s too hard, we can at least start with the advice on the book’s cover: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

The Federalist Project 7

“The Concept of Ratification” and The Federalist 37 – 40

In the continuation of his discussion of the ratification debate, Rakove reveals Madison’s astute political judgment in restricting the state conventions to “their prescribed single decision” instead of allowing a more wide-ranging evaluation of the document under review. This calculated move to circumscribe state influence was a crucial factor in making progress toward ratification, especially in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York, where the pressure to tack on additional amendments was strongest. Rakove reviews the particulars of key state-level debates, focusing on the above three battleground venues, placing special emphasis on the difference between offering “recommendatory amendments” (i.e. comments) and “conditions to be met” before ratification. Madison had wisely chosen to anticipate and centralize fielding the latter type so that the document – which had already achieved an unprecedented level of consensus among delegates to the Convention – could move forward without undue encumbrances. On the other hand, some states were quite happy to offer the former variety of critique. Madison knew that, as in so many cases in national politics, it’s often more important to provide a channel for feedback rather than an actual vehicle for influence. One surprise for modern readers who grew up with the name Patrick Henry on their lips as the prime mover of revolutionary sentiment and republican spirit is to discover that the man who uttered “give me liberty or give me death” emerged as a prominent anti-Federalist in Virginia. Rakove notes that Henry’s resistance was largely confined to powerful oratory, however. His main concern was “whether Virginia could entrust its vital interests to a more powerful national government dominated by the northern states,” which reeks of a proslavery orientation fundamentally at odds with the phrase that all school American children memorize in splendid isolation.

    Madison returns in Federalist 37–40 to undertake an exhaustive, necessary, and yet somewhat tedious recapitulation of the “defects of the existing Confederation.” In doing so, he remarks on the overriding difficulty of the very premise of creating orderly and stable human institutions. As if in holy admiration of the Herculean task before him in crafting the future government of the United States, Madison waxes oddly pious: “When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated” (229). Madison is quite clever here. On the one hand, the metaphor suggests that God speaks to his creatures in a perfectly intelligible, pure idiom, but our own limitations as interpreters, our own clumsy language, obscure the message and confuse its outcome. Likewise, the political elite, the founders of the union, among whom Madison was a key player, were speaking in the clear tones available to men of education, understanding, and good judgment. Their message, their gospel, however lucid and well-reasoned on its own, threatened to become muddled among the state-level mediocrities and general public to whom it was submitted for final approval.

    On the other hand, Madison here invites a broader criticism of spirit versus letter in written language. Scripture was God’s word translated for popular consumption. Its syntax and vocabulary are necessarily as imperfect as its readers. Its comprehension is accordingly as variable as its audience. Madison apparently felt the same way about what would become the Constitution. He knew that its essential purity might get lost in translation. All the same, Madison was a political realist at heart. He knew that he was asking the states (and their constituencies) to trust in his interpretation of the Constitution’s lofty and ambitious agenda: “Solon, who seems to have indulged a more temporizing policy, confessed that he had not given to his countrymen the government best suited to their happiness, but most tolerant to their prejudices” (233). Madison and Hamilton were offering no more or less than that to their countrymen.

POTUS Reads History, But Which One?

by Joshua H. Liberatore

Long wars require long reviews, and POTUS conducted his marathon review of U.S. policy in Afghanistan with all the academic patience and deliberative rigor befitting his Hyde Park resume. In his address from West Point, NY, this past Tuesday, he was at pains to discourage what he called a “false reading of history,” whereby many Americans worry that our obsession with national security has us wading hip-deep into another viscous and putrid quagmire.

Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action. Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency. And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border. To abandon this area now and to rely only on efforts against Al Qaida from a distance would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on Al Qaida and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies. (December 1, 2009)

I’ve written at length in previous columns about the tragic folly of our efforts in Afghanistan, so here I’ll limit myself to a different kind of historical reading. In his adherence to the Vietnam-Afghanistan analogy, POTUS was succumbing to that quintessential American brand of solipsism that leaves us unable to imagine anything outside of our direct historical and cultural experience. In POTUS’s case, this tendency to view the war in Afghanistan principally as an American moment may well truncate his tenure as surely as it did for Johnson. In short, we may forgive ourselves our general amnesia and myopia in matters of foreign policy, but we tend to go hard on Democratic Presidents for crafting schemes that lead to more dead Americans. Liberals are notoriously bad at ending wars. Here it’s useful to go back to the words of one of POTUS’s fellow single-termers. On January 4, 1980, Jimmy Carter addressed the American people on the recent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the somber tones required for Cold War themes.

This invasion is an extremely serious threat to peace because of the threat of further Soviet expansion into neighboring countries in Southwest Asia and also because such an aggressive military policy is unsettling to other peoples throughout the world. This is a callous violation of international law and the United Nations Charter. It is a deliberate effort of a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people. We must recognize the strategic importance of Afghanistan to stability and peace. A Soviet-occupied Afghanistan threatens both Iran and Pakistan and is a steppingstone to possible control over much of the world’s oil supplies. (January 4, 1980)

Carter’s address is full of period charms: the Soviet government is described as “atheistic”, the remarks appear in an actual three-ring binder, and the White House even provided a helpful map to TV audiences in need of a geographic refresher. Fully appreciating the salient differences in style and context, we can nevertheless find a lot of comparable material within POTUS’s prime-time announcement of the coming escalation in Central Asia. A brief digest in parallel:

A “surge” of troops acting in perceived national interest:

Massive Soviet military forces have invaded the small, nonaligned, sovereign nation of Afghanistan., which had hitherto not been an occupied satellite of the Soviet Union. Fifty thousand heavily armed Soviet troops have crossed the border and are now dispersed throughout Afghanistan, attempting to conquer the fiercely independent Muslim people of that country. (January 4, 2008)

And as Commander in Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home. These are the resources that we need to seize the initiative, while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan. (December 1, 2009)

The pledge to work with Congress:

Neither our allies nor our potential adversaries should have the slightest doubt about our willingness, our determination, and our capacity to take the measures I have outlined tonight. I have consulted with leaders of the Congress, and I am confident they will support legislation that may be required to carry out these measures. (January 4, 1980)

All told, by the time I took office, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan approached a trillion dollars. And going forward, I am committed to addressing these costs openly and honestly. Our new approach in Afghanistan is likely to cost us roughly $30 billion for the military this year, and I’ll work closely with Congress to address these costs as we work to bring down our deficit. (December 1, 2009)

American responsibility compels action:

History teaches, perhaps, very few clear lessons. But surely one such lesson learned by the world at great cost is that aggression, unopposed, becomes a contagious disease. The response of the international community to the Soviet attempt to crush Afghanistan must match the gravity of the Soviet action. With the support of the American people and working with other nations, we will deter aggression, we will protect our Nation’s security, and we will preserve the peace. The United States will meet its responsibilities. (January 4, 1980)

This is no idle danger, no hypothetical threat. In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror. And this danger will only grow if the region slides backwards and Al Qaida can operate with impunity. We must keep the pressure on Al Qaida, and to do that, we must increase the stability and capacity of our partners in the region. (December 1, 2009)

International consensus:

Therefore, the world simply cannot stand by and permit the Soviet Union to commit this act with impunity. Fifty nations have petitioned the United Nations Security Council to condemn the Soviet Union and to demand the immediate withdrawal of all Soviet troops from Afghanistan. We realize that under the United Nations Charter the Soviet Union and other permanent members may veto action of the Security Council. If the will of the Security Council should be thwarted in this manner, then immediate action would be appropriate in the General Assembly of the United Nations, where no Soviet veto exists. (January 4, 1980)

For the first time in its history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked Article 5, the commitment that says an attack on one member nation is an attack on all. And the United Nations Security Council endorsed the use of all necessary steps to respond to the 9/11 attacks. America, our allies, and the world were acting as one to destroy Al Qaida’s terrorist network and to protect our common security. . . . At a conference convened by the U.N., a Provisional Government was established under President Hamid Karzai, and an International Security Assistance Force was established to help bring a lasting peace to a war-torn country. (December 1, 2009)

The call for sacrifice:

These actions will require some sacrifice on the part of all Americans, but there is absolutely no doubt that these actions are in the interest of world peace and in the interest of the security of our own Nation, and they are also compatible with actions being taken by our own major trading partners and others who share our deep concern about this new Soviet threat to world stability. (January 4, 2008)

We have been at war now for 8 years, at enormous cost in lives and resources. Years of debate over Iraq and terrorism have left our unity on national security issues in tatters and created a highly polarized and partisan backdrop for this effort. And having just experienced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the American people are understandably focused on rebuilding our economy and putting people to work here at home. Most of all, I know that this decision asks even more of you, a military that, along with your families, has already borne the heaviest of all burdens. . . . If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow. (December 1, 2009)

Unlike Carter, who delivered his grave announcement while seated at the Resolute Desk, POTUS chose a military venue, a detail which one commentator read as a figurative bow of submission to the generals. Even if dubbing POTUS “the Commanded in Chief” seems a bit too harsh, we can objectively recognize the ominous mood of acceptance evident throughout the speech. It’s been remarked that POTUS didn’t make anyone happy in this speech. He offered fewer troops than the commanders wanted but decidedly more than a majority of voters wanted. He placated India’s concerns about an unstable Pakistan but worried Pakistanis about an influx of armed Pashtuns fleeing American marines across the border. What’s more, he even quoted the direct cost of his “surge”: exactly 1 million dollars per annum for each additional soldier sent. (In two years, that’s the entire budget of the Department of Education.) But I believe POTUS wasn’t trying to make anyone happy. What he’s doing, what we’re doing, shouldn’t make anyone happy. And POTUS knows it.

“Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets” by Sudhir Venkatesh

by Patrick Baker

Whoever has problems with the word “nigger” might very well have problems with Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. The N-word appears on nearly every page and begins to ring in the ears after a while. Yet (or perhaps, “for”) the word and its use are emblematic of the larger problem at issue in the book: the everyday life of poor blacks in America’s cities and the way it is studied and approached by academics and government alike.

    Early in the book, Venkatesh recounts how, as a young sociology PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, he finds out the hard way that his subjects are not, as he thinks, “black” or “African American” (N.B. the sociologist being trained today would use euphemisms like “urban” or “inner-city”). Having entered a gang-controlled building in the Lake Park projects to ask its inhabitants, among other things – “How does it feel to be black and poor?: (a) very bad, (b) somewhat bad, (c) neither bad nor good, (d) somewhat good, or (e) very good” (14) – Venkatesh receives from a young gang leader, J.T., the answer that sets the tone for the rest of the book, not to mention for his career as a sociologist: “I’m not black. . . . I’m not African American either. I’m a nigger.” J.T. explains, “Niggers are the ones who live in this building. African Americans live in the suburbs. African Americans wear ties to work. Niggers can’t find no work.” And finally – and here is the point for academics, politicians, and the American public – “You ain’t going to learn shit with this thing [i.e. the sociology survey]. . . . How’d you get to do this if you don’t even know who we are, what we’re about?” (16). Indeed, one wonders how the findings of sociology keep from stinking if the field does not recognize the basic identity of its subjects.

    Venkatesh gained renown for his description of the economics of crack dealing in Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics. Venkatesh’s research on drug dealing came from his attempt to answer J.T.’s challenge. For the next several years after their first encounter, Venkatesh followed J.T. around the Chicago projects, especially the infamous Robert Taylor Homes on the city’s South Side. Here are just a few of the fascinating things he learned about and reports on: the inner workings of gangs and their hierarchy; gangs’ symbiotic relationship with supposedly legitimate entities, like building managers, the housing authority, social workers, and even local government and the police; the unreported, underground economy in which residents, nearly all of them officially unemployed, participate; the absence of medical care, ambulance service, and law enforcement, and what residents do to compensate; the fear instilled by rogue criminals (i.e. those without gang affiliation) and the rare yet dependable drive-by shooting; the community-oriented outlook of drug dealers; the true sense of community that reigns in a place considered inhuman and unlivable by outsiders. In short, Venkatesh learns what it means to be a “nigger,” which turns out to be much worse, much better, and much more interesting than the rest of us imagine.

    Gang Leader for a Day provides the layman with an education in ghetto life. For the scholar, and more specifically for the social scientist or sociologist, it raises important questions – and challenges sacred assumptions – about the validity of statistically-based quantitative research. A predominant belief in social science is that statistics are the only way to measure salient features of economy, social life, psychology, and well-being. Only by sifting through large quantities of data can patterns be identified. Furthermore, according to this line of thought, qualitative studies, such as the one Venkatesh used for his book, tend to be too anecdotal or case-specific, and thus they cannot be used to formulate broad conclusions. But as long as statistics are based on questions as self-delusional as “how does it feel to be black and poor” – self-delusional, in this specific case, because for J.T. and his gang, blacks and African Americans are by definition not poor; so-called “niggers” are – how could their analysis lead to accurate generalizations? Social scientists have long been wary of the veracity of surveys, and they have long held their own prejudices and presuppositions suspect. What Venkatesh shows, though, is that their quantitative methods are haunted by a more basic problem: lack of experience, the experience that comes from daring to do extensive field research in places considered dangerous. It is this experience that is necessary for data to be meaningfully collected and intelligently interpreted. And thus it is experience that is necessary in order to reach informed policy decisions. It cannot be substituted by asking how it feels to be “black and poor.” According to Venkatesh, it can only be answered by going to see for oneself.

“Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert

by Patrick Baker

What results from a reading of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is first and foremost that the reading of novels is dangerous business. Well, certain novels. Romantic novels. Stories of love – not merely its consummation but more importantly its indulgence, its feeling on the bone, its transfiguration of the soul. What is different about the novel in question? Despite its (for the time) breathtaking depiction of the physical act of love and the ceremonies of courting, it would in no way inspire anyone to infidelity, much less to the foolish notion that love leads to happiness. Flaubert’s novel is an antidote to the Romantic novel. It explodes the commonplaces about Cupid’s gift, or, as it were, affliction, revealing it as the insistent self-delusion of the distressed mind. Passion is not the release or realization of the self; it is the self’s will to power manifested in a sick, perhaps the only, kind of possession open to the middle classes: the possession of another’s body, thoughts, and time, the conquest of another self.

    Flaubert explodes not only the myth of love but also that of pastoral bliss or simplicity. An obvious appreciator of nature and the pastoral setting, he is disarmingly honest about its ugliness. Romanticism’s Caravaggio, he describes oil floating atop rivers, broken-down dwellings, crumbling chateaus, the precise anatomy of cows, and a ubiquitous shabbiness. Of humans, only two content characters appear in the book, and only one of them might incite emulation. The first, whom no man could ever desire to imitate, is Madame Bovary’s indolent husband, Charles, content because oblivious to the point of solipsism. The other is her father, Père Rouard, content because he has what he needs, knows what he has, and respects what he has had in the past. He is simple but no fool, calculating but not deceptive, caring without limit. Yet for all his fine traits he is destroyed by the self-immolation of his daughter, whom he could lead to nothing better than a bourgeois existence.

    As for the French bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century, which might just be Flaubert’s true protagonist, it appears as an utterly execrable collection of nobodies: enlightened, self-important apothecaries, tavern-keepers unwilling and cantankerous, lascivious administrators, distracted vicars, busy-body homemakers, incorruptible lathe-operators, and earnestly incompetent medical officers pleased to masquerade as full-fledged physicians. And let us not forget the desperate housewife played by the title character. The poor below them fare even worse – only a filthy blind man enters the scene. As for the aristocracy, they are party-goers, horse-chargers, broke diamond-bearers, but above all corrupters. No one would err in calling them nobles.

    The only escape for a woman who has had visions of ecstasy – in this case the direct result of a juvenile flirtation with the Church, the reading of Romantic novels, and a single attendance at a ball – is to take comfort in the arms of illicit love. She will naturally fall prey to the aristocracy, although an up-and-coming specimen of the professional class, so long as he is thoughtful and sighs in all the right places, can equally claim the lien on her heart. What she yearns for is a fantasy of kings and princes, mistresses and ladies, being swept off her feet and waltzed around a room until dizziness overcomes her. Her heart has been penetrated by the ancien régime, whose twin pillars of greatness – Church and nobility – were emasculated by the Revolution, Napoleon, Voltaire, and decades of Restoration. Her tragedy is that her heart can never realize its desires, for modernity has rendered them illusions. The noble, the gallant, the beautiful, the majestic, the austere, the unapproachably foreboding – they have all vanished in a puff of semi-democratic nullity. The import of Madame Bovary is not that a lustful woman will not be satisfied by an affair, but that modern man would do best to forget his longing for a grand existence. That beautiful possibility has been obliterated by the benighted boringness of science, embodied perfectly in the doltish medical officer Charles Bovary. For we are all married to him, and we are all quietly desperate. But who among us has the strength of will to autodestruct in the name of transcendence? Or is that, too, worthless Romanticism? There is no way out, except perhaps to follow Flaubert’s example and write about it.

“The Great Books” by David Denby

by Joshua H. Liberatore

I’ve read a handful of books on the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, but none surpasses the lay critic David Denby’s The Great Books. Although I admire Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and tolerate portions of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, I find that such books are only interesting as philosophical or literary arguments; they don’t actually make me want to the read the precious books that form their core concern. Furthermore, straight-up polemics like William A. Henry’s In Defense of Elitism or E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy or William Bennett’s Book of Virtues, or any other politically motivated investigation of the curriculum debates that have wracked (and continue to smolder in) American universities over the past two decades, are limited in their practical impact for the same reason. Too often these ardent culture warriors, from both within and without the university and from both sides of the political spectrum, are so obsessed with looking at particular books and whole fields of study through the lens of “values” – liberal and conservative – that they ignore the most basic and crucial function of the reading experience: edifying the self.

    Denby’s perspective is not ideological but rather admirably selfish yet supremely earnest. He wants to reread the books for himself and find out what they have to say to him. A well-known film critic and journalist (now with the New Yorker), Denby decided “to go back to school” in 1991, attending core curriculum classes at Columbia University for a whole year, 30 years after he’d studied there as an undergraduate. He had two simple goals. His first goal was to see what the big fuss was all about. In 1991, Columbia was a lonely holdout, maintaining two required, year-long humanities seminars in the great books tradition under heavy fire from liberal critics. Many universities had already given up the fight, if they fought at all. Some had gone even farther and dismantled or at least reduced liberal arts requirements of any scope, including basic competency in a foreign language. In the face of all this ripe controversy and hand-wringing, Denby wanted to see whether the courses he took in 1961 were worth battling for a generation later.

    His second goal, inextricably linked with the first, was simply to feed his soul. He describes having felt intellectually depleted by his years in journalism and critiquing movies. He worries about the decline of his own reading skills. He’s stopped doing “serious reading” and become just another daily consumer of the New York Times. Also, as a denizen of New York, he sees crime and deterioration blighting a great city (and in one instance, experiences it directly) and wonders whether literacy or education might have anything to do with what is happening on the streets. But most principally, as an adult and a father, Denby wants to restore something basic and sacred in his cultural and mental machinery, something that the great books (he hopes) might exercise as nothing else could.

    These two goals are linked because, by the end of the book (and after the year of reading), Denby illustrates exactly what was missing in the ink spilled by renowned professors and intellectuals over “political correctness” at the university: the joys and sorrows of a direct reading experience. He puts himself into an actual laboratory, a functioning classroom of talented and diverse students at an elite Ivy League university, under the guidance of capable teachers, and well, just reads. And as he reads, he listens to the conversation, occasionally contributes a remark himself, and interweaves his own memoir into a thorough inspection of the role books play in his life. He lives the great books, not in any cliché sense, mind you – some of the books he finds boring and oppressive – but in the best, genuine significance of a reading life: explore, listen, discover, reflect, and apply.

    He fully admits that his “adventures with the indestructible writers,” as he calls them in his subtitle, are not always easy or pleasant excursions. Aristotle turns out to be quite tedious. Kant is insufferably convoluted and dense. Dante is flat in translation. Who in the Ivory Tower possesses the courage to confess such sentiments in writing, sentiments which nevertheless many devoted readers like Denby have felt and agreed with? On the other hand, to witness Denby’s passionate rediscovery of Homer, Montaigne, and Virginia Wolf – writers he’s sampled before but whose impact was minimal – rings with the triumph of awakening. Great writers speak in different tones to different people at different stages of life – that is why the books remain on reading lists and bookshelves after hundreds, even thousands of years. Their endurance has nothing to do with a white-wing cabal hell bent on enshrining the cultural values of European civilization in the face of diversity’s assault. It’s not to exclude the voices of those who have been left out of or have suffered under that grand narrative. And it’s not about shaping democracy or freedom or any other abstraction. These books keep getting taught because they simply refuse to stop speaking. And now, if you will excuse me, I need to reread The Brothers Karamazov.