“How to Be Alone” by Jonathan Franzen

by Joshua H. Liberatore

In this age of media-sponsored super-bestsellers, Jonathan Franzen’s name is familiar even to those who read neither The Corrections nor his previous two novels. His famous dismissal by that lovable Queen Bee of correct opinion, Oprah Winfrey, made him something of a household name. As The Corrections gathered success after success, Franzen was courted by the Winfrey production team, who even cajoled him into making a short documentary about a staged “homecoming” to his native St. Louis before his scheduled appearance on her popular daytime show, to which he was later “disinvited” for appearing “conflicted” about the dubious honor he had been granted. This controversy earned him well-publicized disdain and ignominy, some of it voiced in the lowest kind of language, but the author himself survived intact, and continued to write – with confidence – about his wish to preserve those tiny corners of privacy and intellectual purity that remain despite our heavily televised and highly disposable culture; he even displayed the good sportsmanship to offer an articulate and thoughtful defense of what so many had criticized as raw elitism. In fact, the very themes of the Oprah controversy – privacy, individual dignity, and, yes, noble elitism – form the intricate fabric of Franzen’s first-rate collection of essays, How to Be Alone (2002), which may serve as both antidote to and apologia for whatever residual bad blood he incurred in the Oprah debacle.

    As the broad sweep of The Corrections suggests, Franzen’s interests are refreshingly varied; he writes with remarkable skill on subjects as diverse as Alzheimer’s disease, the plight of cities, postal bureaucracies in Chicago, a “futuristic” prison complex in Colorado, and his most intimate preoccupation, the fate of the modern novel. In elegant, deliberate prose and drawing on sensibilities that seem to be of another era, Franzen integrates his concerns for the individual, the artist, and the community into a topical landscape that should rightly dispel whatever “snobbishness” his narrow-minded detractors accused him of airing in interviews. One simply has to read him and think about what he says, which is more than many Oprah loyalists appeared to have done before they targeted him as l’enfant terrible of serious literature. In an insightful critique of what he calls a spate of “pop-sex books” released in the mid-1990s, Franzen writes, on point: “Aesthetic elitism, sexual snobbery: these are not the reprehensible attitudes that our culture makes them out to be. They’re the efforts of the individual to secure a small space of privacy within the prevailing din. All people should be elitists – and keep it to themselves” (255). Given that his bestselling novel left me intrigued but underwhelmed, reading Franzen’s superb essays allowed me to make a correction of my own. Now I see that behind the maligned novelist lurks an intelligent, witty critic of rare gifts, and one whose fiction I feel compelled to give a second chance. Perhaps Oprah’s people will learn to forgive him too; writing of this caliber just cannot permit itself to be ignored.

“Palestine Peace Not Apartheid” by Jimmy Carter

by Joshua H. Liberatore

It may be that the most provocative feature of Jimmy Carter’s Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (2006) is the title, but if this aspect alone incites more Americans to read it with fresh enthusiasm for the issues it explores, the book loses no value. The obvious strengths of this latest effort are found in the former president’s sincere personal convictions about the necessity for a novel resolution, the depth of his direct involvement during and since his official tenure, and the bold realities he uses to illustrate the absurdity of the status quo, which leaves a good twenty percent of Israel’s citizens living a second- or third-class existence. His argument is simple and straightforward and flies in the face of the commonplace defeatism that leaves most casual observers either complacent or indifferent to the fate of the Palestinians: peace is possible. Not only is it possible, it is precedented. The original Camp David accords of September 1978, which Carter himself facilitated, demonstrate that Israel and at least one of its neighbors – at the time Egypt was enemy number one – can come to an agreement and forge a lasting peace. It may seem selfish or convenient for Carter to issue this reminder, but one can find no better and no more recent example of a lasting accord, so who can blame him for quoting his own resume?

    At the very least, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid provides a readable and comprehensive review – for all those who have forgotten or choose to ignore – of the complexity of the problems in the Arab-Israeli conflict and the compelling morality of facing those problems. Carter also has the requisite courage and the hard-earned clout to call the current set up what it is in fact: apartheid. If drawing an implicit analogy between contemporary Israel and the egregious, corrupt South African regime that earned the rebuke of the world over sparks some ire, it should. Let us hope that readers of the New York Times and other corporate media outlets form their own opinion of Carter’s important book and do not brush it aside under the usual facile rubric that rates most critics of Israel. Apparently, in the bipolar world in which we are constantly encouraged to live, any sympathy shown for the plight of the Palestinians is viewed necessarily as both “anti-Semitic” and “cynical.” Is it always so simple? Carter’s book, and the long experience behind it, may argue otherwise.

“High Noon” by J. F. Rischard

by Joshua H. Liberatore

If you’re looking for a no-nonsense, plainly written, and superbly functional primer for the top global issues facing our planet’s stewards, J. F. Rischard’s High Noon (2003) is obligatory reading. For anyone who cares about the proximate future of humanity, that is. We rejoice that climate change and renewable energy have finally made it into the “national conversation” (i.e. the presidential campaigns), but High Noon reminds us that these hot topics cannot be separated from the thornier matrix of interconnected phenomena in which we all have a stake, like it or not, as both certain cause and potential victim. Rischard draws on his experience as a vice president at the World Bank to great benefit, but offers an analysis that is rational without being technocratic, informed without overwhelming the reader with statistics and jargon, and serious without inviting instant depression. Best of all, in addition to providing a succinct summary of the world’s most pressing concerns – familiar blockbusters like global warming and poverty, of course, but also more frequently ignored problems like the deterioration of global fish stocks – the general thrust of the book is both optimistic and pragmatic.

    High Noon starts from the simple premise that given the “two big forces” of a population explosion on the one hand and “the new world economy” on the other, honest and sober problem-solvers face “unprecedented challenges” but also “unprecedented opportunities.” The latter claim deserves special emphasis; Rischard has obviously taken pains to ensure that his book does not contribute to a mere pile-on of strident complaints without offering plausible remedies. On the contrary, his analysis is armed with a specific and rational strategy for achieving novel and near-term solutions to the crisis points he identifies. And as a career public servant, Rischard is candid enough to recognize that government alone cannot solve these problems, but must form meaningful partnerships with private enterprises and nongovernmental organizations. His tripartite scheme of integrated, horizontally-structured Global Issues Networks tailored to meet each problem with expertise, broad representation, and imagination, is the most innovative approach on record. And if you have a chance to hear him speak, as I was lucky enough to do at an education conference in Bangkok, March 2007, you will find that Rischard is also an excellent presenter, who enjoys answering questions and engaging in high-level debate. In his book, he gives welcome credence to the input he has received from readers and audiences alike, a posture we are not accustomed to observing in every expert of his stature.

Democracy in the Age of Television

Al Gore’s “Assault on Reason” and the Fate of the Liberal Tradition in America

by Patrick Baker

One of the greatest testaments to the character of modern democracy is Alexis de Tocqueville’s mammoth rumination on the great American experiment. Yet if the author of Democracy in America were to return to the same country today, he would clearly recognize neither the landscape nor the cities, neither the language nor the customs. Least of all, however, would he recognize the people and its particular kind of democracy. At least, such is the impression given by Al Gore’s most recent book, The Assault on Reason (Penguin, 2007). On the one hand, this work has a place among the litany of attacks on the current Bush regime that have issued from all sides of the political spectrum since his disputed presidential victory in the year 2000. On the other hand, it is a thoughtful assessment of the current state of American democracy. According to Gore, the situation is critical: “democracy [is] in the balance” (215).

    The former American vice president never mentions the French aristocratic witness to his country’s democratic system and soul. Nor need he do so, for his object is not necessarily to compare the democracy of today to its form in the 1830s but rather to assess it in the light of the general framework that any democracy must always have in order to be both genuine and successful. To this purpose he makes pointed and continual reference to the classical liberal thinkers of the Anglo-American tradition, especially the authors of the Federalist, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke, and John Stuart Mill. Through this comparison, Gore finds that the American people of the twenty-first century does not participate meaningfully in politics and is thus enervated. In its stead a disproportionately small, wealthy, and influential set of corporate interests has risen to direct the affairs of the republic, using massive wealth to corrupt the proper mechanisms of government. Worst of all, the American constitution is on the verge of losing its basic sense of separation of powers and checks and balances: a predatory executive is busy usurping the power of the legislature and the judiciary.

    But all this is secondary to, or resultant of, a fundamental failure of American democracy: the disappearance of the public sphere and its replacement by the unidirectional, closed medium of television. For Gore, the essence and simultaneously the safeguard of democracy is a relatively open public sphere in which citizens use reason to deliberate upon and decide political issues. The vast restriction, if not the destruction, both of the public sphere and of the place of reason in our time therefore threatens the proper functioning of democracy as a liberal regime.

    Gore puts great emphasis on the public sphere, which he alternatively calls the “public forum” and, quoting Mill, the “marketplace of ideas.” He constantly elaborates the concept throughout his book, but the sketch he gives of it in his introduction will suffice for a basic understanding of its contours. Specifically, the public sphere has three defining qualities. (1) It must be open to all literate citizens. Participants must be literate in order to ensure that they can both receive and contribute information. For its part, two-way communication is equally necessary for the governed to converse amongst themselves and for them to maintain dialogue with their governors. (2) Ideas contributed to the public sphere must be judged on their merit, “regardless of the wealth or class of the individual responsible for them” (13). (3) The object of discourse in the public sphere is to reach agreement on political problems.

    According to Gore, the lifeblood of the (functioning) public sphere had traditionally been the medium of print. In the form of newspapers, journals, letters, broadsides, and handbills, print allowed ideas to circulate freely to a wide audience. Newspapers were of especial importance, as they hosted a forum for public debate in the form of editorials and letters to the editor. The education necessary for reading guaranteed a minimum standard of intelligence, and even the very act of reading promoted brain activities conducive to critical thought (through the necessary mental reconstruction of concepts out of abstract symbols).

    All this changed decisively in America in 1963, when the majority of citizens started getting their news from television instead of newspapers. Television, as we shall see later in greater detail, offers none of the advantages of print. On the contrary, it is restrictive, mind-numbing, and mind-altering. Even worse for democracy, it is geared to the selling of products as opposed to the diffusion of information. Deliberation upon political issues has accordingly declined. The trend has been for authentic discourse to disappear and for prepared “sound bites” – short, formal, meaningless platitudes – to take its place. Any statement longer than thirty seconds is deemed too long for the attention span of a television audience and is thus excluded. Since nothing meaningful can be said in thirty seconds, nothing meaningful can be said on television. True political debate has disappeared from the public sphere.

    The culture of the sound bite is only one side of the coin. The other is that politicians now rely on advertising campaigns to “communicate” with their constituents. They still appear in public, of course, but the main channel for contact with voters has become thirty-second television commercials. As with sound bites, these advertisements are devoid of meaningful content. On the contrary – and just like every other kind of advertising – they rely on appeals to emotion and suppress rational discourse. Moreover, and also in the best tradition of mass advertising, campaign commercials are based not on addressing valid needs but on creating superfluous desires or unfounded fears. In the same way that Americans are induced to buy material products that they do not need (and which might even be contrary to their true needs), they are manipulated into supporting candidates and policies that do not represent their true interests (and which might even be harmful to those interests). Finally, television is an expensive medium, and we will have to wonder who pays for these ads. Those with the requisite money, of course: wealthy individuals and corporate interests. Through this mechanism, the “buying of votes through advertising” is possible, and “money will continue in one way or another to dominate American politics…. At least to some degree, the ‘consent of the governed’ [becomes] a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder” (8-9). Unbiased elections, which are essential to an authentic democracy, are impossible under such conditions. Elections end up instead resembling staged performances whose outcomes have been scripted by shades hiding behind a screen.

    The pernicious effects of television, however, are not the lone threat to the public sphere. They are joined, says Gore, by a concerted assault on reason at the hands of the current administration. How can reason itself be attacked? One of Bush’s strategies is to use the politics of fear and the rhetoric of religion to serve the interests of a coalition of “economic royalists” (63), “foreign policy hawks” (64), and “extreme religious conservatives and fundamentalists” (68). Violent television imagery and the elaboration of illusory threats of terrorism helped push the country into an unjustified war in Iraq. Claims of divine guidance and a holy mission, in Bush’s words, to “rid the world of evil,” then shaped prosecution of the war – which Bush called an “epic struggle between good and evil” – and post-war policy (54). They were also used to justify atrocities like those at Abu Ghraib and the torturing of captured combatants. Gore notes that humans have evolved to respond immediately to fear, with the brain bypassing reason and executing a knee-jerk reaction. Once a lasting fear has set in, then the mind is more apt to heed appeals to religion; its authority carries greater weight than that of reason in a situation that is perceived to be an emergency.

    Another strategy in Bush’s assault on reason has been simply to withhold information from the public sphere, thus crippling it. One aspect of this is a constant policy of lying and deception in official statements made to the American people. Another, and perhaps more sinister, is the intimidation of journalists and the production of fake journalism for the purpose of avoiding revelations of the truth. The former is attested to by CBS’s Dan Rather, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, and Paul Krugman of the New York Times (125-126). The latter includes the use of actors posing as journalists to deflect attention away from serious questions at press conferences and to fabricate press releases; it amounts to nothing short of a full-time propaganda machine. But journalists have not been the only ones muzzled. Members of Bush’s own cabinet and staff have been prevented from publicizing inconvenient truths, and sometimes even from reporting them to the president himself.

    This brings us to the last front of Bush’s assault on reason, what we might even call the home front. According to Gore, throughout his presidency Bush has consistently eschewed the advice of experts in favor of the flattery of cronies and the opinion of unqualified partisans of special interests. Whether it has been the war in Iraq, economic and health care policy in America, foreign and domestic terrorism, or the dangers of climate change, he has pursued the interests of his ultra-conservative, super-minority coalition as opposed to those of the American people.

    This manipulation of emotion and hijacking of information is not only harmful to the immediate interests of most Americans. More importantly, it erodes their ability – in terms of both innate capacity and bare opportunity – to reason in the public forum about issues of the greatest political importance. Thus Americans have been deaf, dumb, and blind to the very thing that earns Gore’s most severe criticism of Bush: the president’s assault on the very structures safeguarding republican democracy. If Gore is right, this presidency might have lasting consequences both for the constitution of American democracy and for America’s democratic Constitution.

    Gore argues that from the very beginning Bush’s only consistent policy was to widen the powers of the executive at the expense of the judiciary and the legislature – all in the interest of his faction of greedy corporations, war hawks, and religious conservatives. The judicial branch has been reshaped by bench and prosecutorial appointments based solely on ideological, and not professional, criteria. Even worse, the federal judiciary has been intimidated by attacks and even threats from a cabal of reactionary television and radio pundits and Republicans in Congress, what Gore calls the “Limbaugh-Hannity-Drudge Axis” (66). Gore also specifically mentions rabble-rousing by Ann Coulter and Edwin Vieira, and he even quotes former House Republican leader Tom DeLay – in connection with the Terry Schiavo affair – as saying that “judges need to be intimidated. . . . We’re going to go after them in a big way” (67).

    The legislature is in worse shape, as it seems to have lost its independence entirely. Gore describes two disturbing trends. One is for Democrats, during the six years of Republican hegemony, to have been excluded from the process of writing laws. Their place was then taken by lobbyists and other representatives of special interests, sent by the president, who even took over the very function of drafting legislation for the Republican congressmen; the latter sat in committee like dummies and waited for the president’s men to finish doing their job for them. Another trend is the drastic increase in executive signing statements. This is a mechanism that allows the president to sidestep his traditional role of mere ratifier or vetoer of laws. Instead of making a clear, absolute decision, he signs the law and then appends a statement, in which he describes which parts of the law he will follow or not. Thus Bush has managed to obviate the check on his power through the people’s elected representatives in Congress. If he doesn’t like a law – like those limiting his abilities to spy on citizens, torture enemy combatants, or suspend habeas corpus – he simply disobeys it with impunity.

    That the executive is the branch of government most prone and most able to usurp power was recognized in classical liberal theory from the outset. It should thus come as no surprise that a significant portion of American history records such attempts. Gore himself mentions Franklin Roosevelt’s scheme to pack the Supreme Court, Harry Truman’s nationalization of steel mills during the Korean War, and Nixon’s nefarious wiretapping. In this sense, Bush is no aberration. And yet there is a difference. Previous attempts at grabbing tyrannical power, dissolving the separation of powers, or hijacking the checks and balances that ensure that separation were foiled by Congress or the courts, which blocked or revoked the president’s actions. During Bush’s administration, however, the other branches have lost so much of their independence that they seem to be rather arms of the executive’s will.

    There seems to be no limit to the power of the executive desired by the current president. Bush has claimed the right to bring his war powers as commander in chief home with him to his own people. Thus he claims the right to torture enemy soldiers, to deprive anyone of due process whom he personally deems an enemy combatant (foreigner or citizen), to prosecute a mass program of spying on his own countrymen by means of illegal wiretaps, the reading of personal mail and email, and the unwarranted seizure of the personal information of the clients of both public and private institutions. The modern American executive threatens to devolve into a classic tyrant.

    Bush’s grab for power is not for the sake of power alone. According to Gore, its aim is to line the pockets of the super wealthy and corporations, to let the hawks prosecute an unjustified and unnecessary war, and to carve out a disproportionate place in politics and culture for a retrograde religious sect. This conflation of wealth, factional interests, religious sects, and power, was one of the greatest fears of both the American Founders and the creators of the liberal tradition. Its effects are exactly what they predicted: the interests of the nation are not served, and therefore the people that make up that nation feel disenfranchised and participate less in the political process. When the people’s participation decreases, that of the special interests increases. It is a vicious circle that ultimately destroys the soul of any democracy: the participation of the governed to ensure that the governors operate by their consent.

    For all of the responsibility that Gore puts on Bush’s shoulders for the decline of American democracy – and it is a great deal of responsibility – he ultimately portrays the president as a symptom of a much deeper problem, one that precedes his term in office and is endemic to modern society itself. The real problem is the communications media made available by modern technology; in a word, television. All by itself, the medium of television has the ability to destroy the public sphere necessary for the proper functioning of a democratic government and society. It wages the greatest assault on reason.

    Gore explains many ways that television is lethal for the pubic sphere. (1) It requires a massive amount of capital to operate a television station, an amount now available only to the richest of the rich or to corporations. Participation in and access to the medium thus require either one’s own money or the consent of those who have it. As a result, (2) opinions contrary to these moneyed interests will simply not be aired. Television is restricted not only to the money but also to the ideas of the super wealthy. (3) Communication on television, as with its predecessor, radio, is only one-way. Thus it is not actually communication but, as it is called, “programming.” Viewers receive but cannot send. They are programmed and cannot participate. (4) News has become a source of profit instead of a public service. Like all entertainment, it tends to the lowest level of discourse and mass simplification of complex issues; otherwise, it risks losing the audience that pays for television’s raison d’etre: the advertising of products. Finally, (5) as an electronic medium dealing in moving pictures, television shuts down the reasoning function of the brain and activates instinctive responses. It is simply too “real” a medium and thus appeals to emotion, which is the way humans generally respond to real situations.

    All these aspects of television make it the perfect vehicle for manufacturing the consent of the governed, which in its pure state is the lifeblood of democracy. Gore notes that “the manufacture of consent” is a phrase coined by Walter Lippmann. Realizing early the possibilities of radio for propaganda, the journalist and political advisor decided that the future of liberalism lay in using that medium to brainwash an otherwise boorish and disinterested American people to accept the policies decided upon by an enlightened governing class. Radio was then used to manufacture Americans’ consent for all sorts of government policies, from entering World War I to embracing the New Deal.

    Since the 1960s, television has overtaken both radio and print as the main source of Americans’ news and entertainment. And it has far greater power than both, for while radio and print rely on rhetoric, the former uses images, which have an infinitely greater effect on the brain. Combined with the equally great restriction in access, television ends up being a tool for the wealthy to “dominate the semblance of public discourse” by which voters make decisions (76). They do so by financing the television advertising campaigns of politicians, who, once they are elected, are expected to give – and do give – quid pro quo. As Gore describes it, the open debate hosted by newspapers has been replaced by the thirty-second television commercial. Ultimately, the true interests of voters can be ignored because they can be manipulated by mass advertising campaigns. This is a sham democracy.

    Such a damning critique of contemporary democracy can come as nothing but a shock from the scion of one of America’s oldest and most entrenched political clans, not to mention someone who has himself enjoyed a great deal of success in politics. And although it will be tempting to disregard Gore’s analysis as the biased complaint of a sore loser, it is clear that his central task is not to scourge his former rival, but to provide a reasoned and sincere meditation on the contemporary state and future of American democracy.

    When evaluating that meditation we must remember that The Assault on Reason is not a work of dispassionate political science written in the language of experts. It is a popular book – albeit one written at a surprisingly high level and discussing several ideas of extreme complexity – and one meant primarily not to analyze problems but to urge solutions to them. Its historical scope and range of argument are thus partially limited by the audience it is trying to reach; accordingly, the former can sometimes seem naive, the latter a tad too facile.

    Let us begin with Gore’s proposed solution. According to him, only the new medium of the Internet might be able offer a remedy to this ill of the body politic. It at least has the potential to combine the best of both print and television: it reaches the maximum number of people; it is a forum for both the reception and contribution of ideas; it is open to anyone capable of reading and writing; and, at least for the time being, it is not dominated by wealthy elites. As such, it is perhaps the best setting ever for the marketplace of ideas, in which the best rise and the worst fall based on merit alone.

    Gore’s vision of the Internet is, however, too rosy. Although there is little doubt that the Internet provides a freer forum for a more interactive exchange of ideas than television, its disadvantages are not highlighted: that it is filled with nearly unverifiable mistakes and misinformation posing as truth; that it requires a certain amount of wealth (to gain access to a computer) and expertise (to use a computer) that makes it far more restrictive than the cheap and user-friendly media of print, radio, and television; that most users treat it like television, in that they almost always receive rather than contribute information; that looking at a computer screen for hours can be just as mind-numbing and hypnotizing as television. But the greatest disadvantage of the internet, as a solution to the shrinking public sphere and the assault on reason, is that it has no unified audience. Unlike newspapers and most television networks, which at least try to appeal to a broad spectrum, Internet blogs and websites are usually directed to a partisan audience. Moreover, it is impossible to have an overview of the Internet’s offerings. Therefore, it presents too much choice with too little information about that choice. So there is doubtlessly more independent news, for example, to be found on the Internet, but a restricted number of people will find it. Furthermore, different people will use different websites for that news, so it will be difficult if not impossible to sponsor debate among a truly broad audience. Can we be so confident that the Internet can restore America’s public sphere?

    Gore seems to approach print journalism and the history of American democracy with a similarly careless naiveté. Although he alludes to the era of yellow journalism, he never underscores William Randolph Hearst’s hijacking of the public sphere, or the deplorably low quality of nearly every single newspaper or magazine printed in America today. Nor does he mention the machine politics of Tammany Hall, the cronyism of the Grant administration and the entire post-Reconstruction period, the spoils-system of Andrew Jackson, or any other of the myriad episodes of American history that might undermine the myth of a smoothly-functioning participatory democracy. In fact, Gore radically overstates the extent to which Americans have historically participated in their own government, at the federal level anyway. He neglects to mention the constitutional changes and political reforms that allowed for the direct election of senators and the system of primaries to determine presidential candidates. Perhaps the greatest historical failing of Gore’s book is his apparent ignorance of the exceedingly local nature of politics until quite recently. At the inception of American democracy, voters took interest mostly in issues of concern to their locality, town, city, or maybe state. This is partly because many of the duties of the Federal government today – taxation, infrastructure, welfare programs, the administration of a standing army, currency, public debt – either did not exist at all or were in the purview of state and local governments. It is also because American democracy was designed to distance voters from decision-making; such is the whole point of the republican form of representative, as opposed to direct, democracy. In a nutshell, it is the very technology that Gore decries that made a more participatory democracy possible.

    The weakest part of Gore’s analysis, however, is what we will have to call his faith in the power of reason. He talks about reason as if he were himself a luminary of the Enlightenment, as if the last several hundred years of history and the most recent developments of science and philosophy had not made us keenly aware of its limitations. We are no longer living in the Age of Kant. That having been said, however, one cannot take issue – within the liberal tradition, at any rate – with Gore’s insistence on reasoned debate, on the communication among citizens and between the governed and their governors, as the cornerstone to an authentic, functioning democracy. In this respect, we must heed his warning about the public sphere.

    In many ways, The Assault on Reason highlights problems inherent in democracy, threats to its well-being that were identified by the very thinkers who first shaped its structures: the greater likelihood of the executive than the other two branches of government to usurp power; the executive’s tendency towards militarism and despotism; the corruption of government through the conflation of wealth and power; the danger of economic and political factions, and of religious sects; the apathy or enervation of the citizenry. And yet, Gore identifies two related threats to democracy that could not have been foreseen by its first theorizers: the medium of television, and the manipulative, mass advertising campaigns enabled by that medium. It remains to be seen whether new technological developments – like the Internet – will manage to save democracy, or whether they will continue to debilitate it. And it remains to be seen whether Gore’s book, or any other, can do anything to stop the assault on reason.

Beer: America’s Sacred Necessity

by Joshua H. Liberatore

In Beer in America: The Early Years, 1587-1840, Gregg Smith delights historians and beer enthusiasts alike with a compelling account of beer’s critical function in the early life of the United States. Through nearly two hundred and fifty years of American history – from early voyages to the New World, through colonization, the tumultuous years of revolution, and on into nineteenth century industrial American society – beer becomes a metaphor for a special American destiny. Backed by exhaustive research, wit, and imagination, Smith paints a rich portrait of early American life, which places the tavern at the center of social, political, and cultural activity.

    Smith’s nonspecialist readers may be pleasantly surprised to discover just how important beer was for early settlers to what became the United States, and by the extent to which beer’s unique history intersects with the major personalities of American cultural heritage, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, all fervent patriots and avid beer-drinkers. Beer seems to be part of every important event and decision that eventually set those men on the path to overthrowing a world imperial power and creating one of the modern world’s first great democratic republics. And although Beer in America reveals a number of little-known beer facts (such as the propensity for Constitutional Convention delegates to discuss the finer points of the still-infant constitution over pints of stout in the barrooms of Philadelphia), Smith’s story never devolves into a mere collection of beer trivia. On the contrary, beer becomes a thread with which Smith weaves a colorful fabric of an emerging American character.

    Inherent in that emerging distinctiveness was a survival impulse that spurred early settlers to endure countless hardships and work to forge a workable life in an uncharted and often harsh frontier. As Smith notes, beer figures into a discussion of bare survival for the simple reason that beer provided early New Englanders with a safe source of drinking water. Although the wooded hills of the Massachusetts Bay area were abundantly endowed with fresh water streams, widespread distrust of contamination kept settlers from drinking local water directly. Instead they used it to brew beer, which was a time-honored way of converting suspect water into a viable beverage. Beer also became a reliable and nutritious source of caloric sustenance as colonists were adjusting to a dramatically new diet and negotiating the hardships of developing a native agriculture.

    Smith does well to point out that the history of beer in America, like the history of the nation itself, is a story of diversity and cultural blending. Through tracing beer’s introduction into a developing American culture, we notice that a wide variety of peoples and cultures are responsible for beer’s rich legacy. Just as the English, Dutch, German, Irish, and Bohemian immigrants who settled in America in various periods brought with them skills and knowledge that gave American industry and development a particular competitive edge, each group also brought a different appreciation and tradition of beer drinking. As a functional nation of immigrants, the United States developed its traditions and tastes from Old World influences and customs, combining many different cultures to form an original blend. Beer production was one of the main beneficiaries of this cultural melting pot, and the distinctly American recipes that resulted were something at once original and packed with tradition.

    Interestingly, beer also figures into the religious climate of early America, dominated as it was by Puritanical values and strict codes of behavior. Smith points out that many local leaders in colonial America viewed beer as a “temperance drink,” and it therefore constituted a respectable alternative to hard alcohol varieties like whiskey and rum, which brought out the devil in men and hindered productivity. Beer, on the other hand, was mild in its effects and could be enjoyed even during work hours without debilitating those seeking refreshment. Beer would continually reemerge in this diplomatic capacity: as a way of soothing the regular tension between institutional (religious or government) authority and the rights of the individual, which quickly became a familiar trope in American history and remains so today. In this way, the promotion of beer as an alternative to spirits became an early example of the flexibility and spirit of compromise that would later contribute greatly to the success of the American republican experiment.

    Beer also helps to tell the story of an inventive, entrepreneurial spirit that came to characterize the budding American character. Smith draws on several accounts of creativity and resourcefulness among beer brewers. Due to shortages of hops and other key ingredients, beer brewers were often forced to come up with creative, indigenous substitutes, such as pine needles or Indian corn. These innovations not only gave their product a distinctive flavor, but also asserted a sense of economic independence from the mother country, well before political independence was a flicker in the light bulbs of revolutionary leaders. And when revolution finally did envelop the colonial consciousness and indeed seemed a political necessity, resourcefulness of this kind helped to strengthen the resolve of Americans in defying their English masters. Various agreements that involved some degree of nonconsumption or outright boycott of British imports required the American imagination to develop alternative modes of livelihood, often encouraging the use of local substitutes for the familiar, basic items on which the colonists relied. The same truculence that beer brewers showed in using local produce to weather temporary shortages of necessary ingredients became a motif of wider significance in the American Revolution and all subsequent periods of instability in American history.

    Smith’s account of beer’s role in American history thus taps into the core matter of the American character: a character based on the necessity of survival, a melting pot of cultures and traditions, the powerful tool of compromise, and an innovative spirit that transcends what is best about American culture. Embedded in the history of beer in the United States is the stalwart belief that order comes from within and cannot be imposed from without. Smith sums up this quintessential American attribute splendidly in his discussion of the government’s occasional temptation to tax beer consumption due to the beverage’s nearly universal appeal:

Administrators in the colonies were in a position identical to that of everyone who has ever placed a tax on beer. They were completely out of touch with public sentiments. Resistance, protest, and ultimately rebellion resulted because the taxes were exceedingly regressive. Taxes on beer struck people where it hurt most. It hit them with a fee on what they viewed as a necessity, never as a luxury (192).

It was a basic lesson that would profoundly influence all aspects of American political culture: the drafting of the Constitution, the federalist structure of the national government, and the introduction of new laws for the next two hundred and fifty years. When something deemed a necessity was unfairly taxed, there was outrage and often violence.

    In Smith’s account of beer’s unique place in the American conscience, we see that beer, just as any of the conventional list of “unalienable rights,” becomes much more than a refreshing beverage, but is fundamentally intertwined with the destiny of the fledgling democratic enterprise. Beer in America, then, ultimately becomes a testament to the values of freedom and self-determination that we hold most dear as a body politic.

A Letter from the Provinces: On Hate Speech in the Presidential Campaign

by Patrick Baker                                                                 October 11, 2008

The news has reached us in the provinces that hate speech is creeping into the presidential campaign. The press and the pundits are salivating over recent incidents of stump-speech frenzied zealots screaming out “kill him” and “terrorist” when Sarah Palin asks them about Barack Obama; and they are oozing self-righteousness that neither of the Republican candidates has condemned these episodes. While it is nice to see people making an issue out of this, one wonders why it took death threats for hate speech to make prime time.

    I should be fair to the media though. After all, a big deal was made of Obama’s infelicitous observation that hard times make poor people cling to the irrational idols of religion and guns. And everyone was sure to report on the controversy over whether Obama had indeed classified Palin as a new kind of rosette-smeared swine, or had just used a figure of speech unfamiliar to cosmopolitan Americans. Yes, that was responsible journalism, and as enlightened as David Howard’s demise for correctly using the word “niggardly.”

    Then again, an orgy of unrepentant bigotry is coming out of the self-avowed liberal media, and self-righteousness itself seems to be getting in on the action. There is no other way to describe Bill Maher’s characterization of the G.O.P. ticket as “the Maverick and the MILF.” Let’s be clear that a MILF is a lusty, middle-aged mother with whom younger men hope to have a close encounter of the Mrs. Robinson kind. I’ll agree that Palin is ignorant and has no qualifications for any higher office, but that does not mean she is fit only for the set of a pornographic movie. Is our national discourse really this impoverished?

    Apparently so, since much more cynical and embedded forms of hate speech have abounded in the Republican campaign since their convention, and no one seems to have found them worthy of mention. We heard a lot from Minneapolis about “hockey moms,” “Joe Six-Packs,” and “small-town values.” All have a quaint ring to them, but let’s be clear about what they mean. Hockey is the only major sport in the nation which is not yet dominated by non-white athletes. Small towns, as opposed to cities and even the suburbs, have few if any minorities. It was no accident that Palin and her flatterers focused on cultural contexts in which white people need not fear for the supremacy they are on the verge of losing in America, a supremacy whose fate the election of a black man would seem to seal. Hockey and small towns are the country clubs – to revert to traditional Republican imagery for a moment – of white middle America: homogeneous contexts of belonging, unthreatened by otherness, and impervious to the presence of Jamaal-40, Joe Six-Pack’s substance-abusing relative who the whole white family wishes would never visit from his ghetto on the other side of the color line.

    The danger of this Republican rhetoric is its apparent inoffensiveness. Who could find fault with upright small towns, or with devoted mothers taking their children to sports practices, or with a factory worker blowing off the day’s steam with a sextet of Schlitz? The implication, however, is that this is the real America, and that those who do not fit into its frame are not real Americans. While it appears to praise what might be America’s roots, it actually demonizes the contemporary state of the nation: heterogeneous, urban and suburban, economically stratified, complicated, and in need of farsighted leadership. This is the same operation that is at work in the Republicans’ insistence that anyone who wants to change America doesn’t love it, and that anyone who criticizes it cannot be a patriot. It is camouflaged hate speech.

    The more overt and shameful forms of hate speech we have witnessed in the last week are not necessarily worse, although they are more disturbing for the actual – and historical – political violence they evoke. Should it really surprise anyone, though, that Sarah Palin didn’t bat an eye when a member of her audience screamed “kill him”? From my upbringing in Michigan, I recall that it was the hockey moms themselves who yelled just that before their sons were escorted to the penalty box. But what do I know? We don’t have hockey in the provinces.

A Letter from the Provinces: On the Ownership Society

by Patrick Baker                                                                 October 6, 2008

The recent economic meltdown has made us in the provinces familiar with a phrase we had never actually heard before: the ownership society. After years of assuming that George Bush had as little an agenda for the American people as he had an idea about anything else of importance, we were shocked to find out that he indeed did have a vision for the country, a vision in which all Americans owned things, especially homes.

    Here in Europe, where socialism and communism are still valid ideals (although no longer in the discredited Soviet form, of course), many people were wondering if Bush had switched teams. After all, the system in which everyone owns is socialism, not capitalism. So I did some research and found out that the things Americans were supposed to own were stock options, cars, homes, small businesses, and health care. That is, they were supposed to own everything except the means of production. So I guess socialism is out. Someone should actually tell Bush about this, though, seeing as how he has just proposed and seen passed the largest piece of socialist legislation ever in the history of the empire.

    So if the ownership society isn’t socialism, what is it? The kind answer is that it is a society in which ownership of important goods is available to most people. The true answer is that it is a society addicted to debt. The root of the entire economic crisis is not that we tried to get most people to own something, but that we tried to get most people to control the use of something without owning it at all. This used to be called “renting,” but now apparently it goes under the name “buying.” Well, there’s no helping changes in the meaning of plain English words. After all, owning no longer really means “believing” – as in the phrase, “I own he did it” – so why should it still mean “owning,” as in the phrase, “I own it because I paid for it with actual money”? Can’t we just all agree that “owning” now means, “I get to use this good because I have promised a credit institution that I will pay it in the future an amount that I know now I will never actually have”?

    Having come from the land of outrageous financing, lax mortgages, and easy credit, I was astounded to find out that German friends of mine had actually laid out hundreds of thousands of deutschmarks in cash when they bought their house in the late nineties. Elasticity of meaning aside, now that is what I call owning. And come to think of it, I can’t think of any American I know who has ever paid for a large-price item in that way – unless he was trying to evade taxes. And come to think of it, I can’t think of any American I know who pays for anything in cash. It’s all credit, from the last gallon of milk to the next cup of coffee. But let’s be serious. If you have a $300,000 mortgage on your house home, even if you paid $50,000 down (which in itself is unheard of), you don’t own it. The bank owns it, and what you own is debt. And if you sell that house, you are not selling a house. You are selling debt. The whole financial crisis comes down to this: for too long Americans have bought and sold not things, but debt. They have not owned; they have been owned.

    Let’s go back to Main Street’s bailout of Wall Street, or whatever quaint name they’re giving it today. What did the American people buy with their soon-to-be-printed 840 billion dollars? Debt. Whose debt? The debt of the private sector. Maybe this is a new kind of socialism, in which the masses own the debts of the few, rather than seizing control of their capital. See, it’s an ownership society after all. If we think about it a bit, though, it becomes obvious that the American people, rather than doing the owning, are just plain being owned. That’s how it looks, at any rate, from my rented apartment in the provinces.

Biden vs. Palin: An Exercise in Self-Restraint

by Joshua H. Liberatore

The vice-presidential debate of last Thursday evening between veteran Senator Joe Biden and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin served a few simple purposes. First and foremost, it satisfied anxious Republican pundits and campaigners that the PBS-supplied moderator, Gwen Ifill, would not bias her questions or her adjudication in favor of Obama, the subject of her forthcoming book. In fact, Ifill’s approach was notably light-handed; she was strict and disciplined only when it came to timekeeping. She did little to challenge the content and sway of either opponent’s responses or the expected repartee. She neither pushed nor prodded the way she might have done, had not recent criticisms and a brief media frenzy chastened her toward a consciously bland umpireship.

    Governor Palin burnished her “average American” credentials and made a grand show of appealing directly to voters, which in the medium of television meant staring directly into the camera without cease, smiling broadly, and even winking flirtatiously at times. She peppered her comments with folksy expressions such as “gosh darn it” and “well, you know . . . up there in Alaska.” For the most part, she successfully avoided the awkward pauses and lexical monstrosities that characterized her unequivocally bad performances in recent network interviews with Charles Gibson and Katie Couric. She offered a few policy “details” to shore up her appearance of preparedness, confidently deploying Ahmadinejad’s name whenever she had the chance, whether the Iranian president was immediately relevant to the discussion or not.

    Biden, for his part, was calm, jovial, and exceedingly warm. He watched his tongue carefully, resisting opportunities to attack, and hardly ever engaged his direct counterpart; every policy jab was directed at the absent father, McCain, who in turn became a proxy for the loathsome George W. Bush – safe choices on both accounts. Thus, Biden’s sharpest barbs were often a full two steps removed from the juicy target to his left (stage right), who simply smiled and embraced the event as another opportunity to get to know people: Biden, whom she had just met for the first time but called Joe, and the American people, through the picture tubes and plasma flatscreens of 50 million plus American households. As expected, Senator Biden presented more in the way of details, and leveled a few fresh criticisms of McCain platforms, but overall, he visibly downplayed his expertise and wide knowledge of foreign policy in the favor of a gentlemanly conversation in which “fundamentally different philosophies” were blithely accepted without either the fierce clobbering that many Democrats craved or the gaffe-ridden tirades that his campaign handlers feared. Early in the debate, he shyly pointed out to Ifill that Governor Palin had not answered her question, much as the polite student in the first row reminds an impassioned teacher that the bell has already rung. Even though he might have profited from pressing the issue, Biden seemed to understand that such limits must be tolerated without complaint, and did what he could to balance Palin’s “human narrative” appeals with his own authentic storytelling, blue-collar roots and all. In the end, like that well-meaning but essentially powerless student, he earned credit among his peers for issuing the notice without being able to restore full confidence in the system designed to obviate such reminders.

    Although arguably more interesting and lively than the first showdown between their principals Obama and McCain, the Biden-Palin debate was effectively a neutralizer in terms of campaign advancement. Nobody was humiliated, nobody did much damage. Highlights in the colloquy were subtle. Biden took the opportunity to teach viewers an important fact about Iran: the Ayatollahs, not the president, control “the security apparatus” (i.e. the Revolutionary Guard and the non-existent nukes). Ahmadinejad’s spicy rhetoric, which tends to be both deliberately inflammatory and viciously anti-Semitic, as Palin reminded us several times (true to her intensive coaching at the McCain compound), elicits a lot of media attention and U.N. consternation, but has all the real-life force of our own Secretary of Interior’s pronouncements. This minor structural detail holds, of course, immeasurable significance for actual diplomacy and foreign policy, but as many Americans were meant merely to be impressed by Palin’s frequent use of a difficult foreign name and a few tidbits from translated speeches, Biden’s gentle correction of a widespread public misconception went largely unnoticed.

    Also subtle but vitally significant was Palin’s early warning to viewers that she might not answer the questions in the way expected by her opponent or her moderator, a bizarre if revealing strategy, which nevertheless went unchallenged. Our leniency in this matter was merely assumed. The substantive link between question and answer is apparently the province of the conformist mainstream, to which Biden and Ifill were instantly condemned by this outrageous disclaimer. Only self-appointed “mavericks,” on the other hand, deal in that “straight talk,” which “the American people are craving.” Lessons in straight talk notwithstanding, Palin twice invoked the name of the commanding general of NATO forces in Afghanistan as McClellan (a former White House Press Secretary perhaps?). Biden visibly registered this error but, per the reigning formula, did not call attention to it; certainly he knows that David McKiernan is the commanding general in question, because, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, it’s his job to know such details not just drop names in televised speeches. It was a minor, forgivable blunder perhaps, and one Palin’s defenders are all too ready to overlook, even as it reveals the shallowness of her competency and preparedness for a role in which mistakes of this variety would embarrass her personally, her would-be boss, and the nation at large. Frankly, we’ve had enough of that kind of thing.

    Probably the most sinister subtlety of the conversation emerged from Palin’s response to Ifill’s question about each candidate’s understanding of the vice president’s responsibilities. Without ado, and clearly riding high on the leverage her vast executive experience gives her, the Alaska governor mused – rather too casually for my taste – about a potentially expanded legislative function of the vice president’s office. Apparently, Palin harbors a vague fantasy of basking in Cheney’s legacy of aggrandizement, manipulation, and behind-the-curtains ambition, a prospect that Biden, a career senator with an intimate knowledge of the constitutional separation of powers, was wise to eschew on national TV. This confession, fleeting and brushed aside as it was, too became a pregnant detail of the evening’s faceoff. But subtlety doesn’t play well on television, and in the end what was missing from the debate – sustained argument and precise responses to well-prepared questions – disappeared into the ether of a tightly managed public relations skit, in which all three actors capably acted their assigned roles. And a little over two thirds of the way into this ninety-minute docudrama, one looked at the clock and sighed, grateful merely for the harmless neutrality of the performance but far from enlightened.