by Joshua H. Liberatore

Interrupting his prepared remarks for the closing session of the American Indian Tribal Nations Conference last week Thursday, POTUS spoke up on the breaking news that was blazing like an untamed wildfire across wire reports and Internet headlines by late afternoon:

My immediate thoughts and prayers are with the wounded and with the families of the fallen, and with those who live and serve at Fort Hood. And these are men and women who have made the selfless and courageous decision to risk and at times give their lives to protect the rest of us on a daily basis. It’s difficult enough when we lose these brave Americans in battles overseas. It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an Army base on American soil. (November 5, 2009)

POTUS chose his words carefully, measuring sadness and regret, gratitude and admiration, but wisely avoiding the anger and belligerence that were already surfacing in many media reactions from both sides of the political spectrum. The shooter, an American citizen from Roanoke, VA, was a Muslim. Murmurs of “terrorism” and “suicide mission” were already lurking on the lips of even NPR’s commentators. For his part, POTUS sought solace in general themes and trusted rituals, ordering flags to fly at half-mast through Veterans Day.

And it’s also recognition of the men and women who put their lives on the line every day to protect our safety and uphold our values. We honor their service, we stand in awe of their sacrifice, and we pray for the safety of those who fight and for the families of those who have fallen. (November 6, 2009)

What transpired at the Fort Hood Army base was surely a tragedy, a massacre of most ugly proportions (13 dead, 30 wounded). What makes it worse is the saddening alacrity with which justified alarm spills over into unthinking panic and brazen speculation. In the reduction process, crucial subtexts inevitably get ignored. If suspect Nidal Malik Hasan had been a Christian white man from Omaha, would we know within hours of the shooting what church he worshipped at? Would reporters already have interviewed his pastor? Would his family’s citizenship and ethnic heritage have come under immediate scrutiny? Thankfully, POTUS has been delicate. In his Saturday morning video address, he chose not to name Hassan, nor did he mention either the 39-year-old doctor’s self-proclaimed Palestinian identity or his Muslim faith.

This past Thursday, on a clear Texas afternoon, an Army psychiatrist walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center and began shooting his fellow soldiers. It is an act of violence that would have been heartbreaking had it occurred anyplace in America. It is a crime that would have horrified us had its victims been Americans of any background. But it’s all the more heartbreaking and all the more despicable because of the place where it occurred and the patriots who were its victims. (November 7, 2009)

The subtext of the incident is more complicated and painful than the mainstream media prefer to countenance, although the Washington Post did have the guts to run a fairly lengthy story on Hasan’s unhappiness in the Army, his intensive efforts to be relieved from service, his immigrant family’s secular and patriotic background. Hasan’s job both at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and at Fort Hood was to counsel wounded soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, many of whom suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder, what in Freud’s day was more candidly titled “shell shock.” Hasan routinely complained of the harassment and ridicule he often received for being a Muslim after September 11. He argued with colleagues about the injustice of the wars that were breaking his patients’ nerves. According to relatives, he did everything he could to be discharged from the military, even offering to repay his medical school expenses.

The SRP is where our men and women in uniform go before getting deployed. It’s where they get their teeth checked and their medical records updated and make sure everything is in order before getting shipped out. It was in this place, on a base where our soldiers ought to feel most safe, where those brave Americans who are preparing to risk their lives in defense of our Nation, lost their lives in a crime against our Nation. Soldiers stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world called and emailed loved ones at Ft. Hood, all expressing the same stunned reaction: I’m supposed to be the one in harm’s way, not you. (November 7, 2009)

One of those soldiers about to be deployed was Hasan himself, a prospect that deeply upset him, and in the words of his aunt “he must have snapped.” Apparently, Hasan is not alone in his despair. In October alone, 16 U.S. soldiers committed suicide; the suicide rate among Army personnel is up 37% from 2008 and is now well above the rate for civilian Americans.

Thursday’s shooting was one of the most devastating ever committed on an American military base. And yet even as we saw the worst of human nature on full display, we also saw the best of America. We saw soldiers and civilians alike rushing to the aid of fallen comrades, tearing off bullet-riddled clothes to treat the injured, using blouses as tourniquets, taking down the shooter even as they bore wounds themselves. (November 7, 2009)

Though it received very little media attention, and only a brief, perfunctory statement from the White House, an eerily similar shooting took place last May at a psychiatric clinic at the dubiously named “Camp Victory” in Baghdad, in which Sgt. John M. Russell opened fire and killed five other soldiers. This bloody episode, all but ignored by the Iraq-weary American media, was nevertheless duly noted by the military, which commissioned a wider-ranging report that concluded: “There is no clear procedure or established training guidelines in any of the references for managing soldiers identified as ‘at risk’ for suicide or the proper way to conduct suicide watch.” A journalist who has looked into the conditions and procedures for psychiatric cases in the military discovered that soldiers who suffer from PTSD are often marginalized and punished; in some cases a profoundly bizarre and paradoxical bribe is offered: a troubled soldier lobbying for release from duty can purchase his freedom by agreeing to deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq.

We saw soldiers bringing to bear on our own soil the skills they had been trained to use abroad, skills that had been honed through years of determined effort for one purpose and one purpose only: to protect and defend the United States of America. We saw the valor, selflessness, and unity of purpose that makes our service men and women the finest fighting force on Earth, that make the United States military the best the world has ever known, and that make all of us proud to be Americans. (November 7, 2009)

Despite these bleak reminders of the deteriorating mental health of our military personnel, it’s no surprise that incidents like that of Fort Hood engender renewed praise for the heroism and dedication of our soldiers. Base commander Lt. Gen. Robert Cone summed up his assessment of the tragedy by applauding the first responders who shot Hasan and rushed to attend the wounded: “Suffice it to say . . . the American Soldier did a great job.” POTUS cautiously emphasized that comforting narrative as well, reminding us of the debt of gratitude we owe those whose job it is “to protect and defend the United States of America.” Is anyone asking whether that job has become altogether too onerous?

by Joshua H. Liberatore

America is a funny place, let’s be honest. And there’s no better writer to remind us of exactly why and how it is a funny place than the inimitable Bill Bryson. I’d read his Made in America last year and learned a great deal about the peculiarities of American English. Even in that more scholarly exploration, I’d enjoyed his wit, intelligence, and likable prose. So when I picked up I’m a Stranger Here Myself, his charming collection of short essays, I was ready for a reading experience that would juxtapose pleasantly with the heavy, sober themes that make up the lion’s share of my reading. More than ready for something both smart and light, I think I even needed Bryson’s kindly reprieve. I’m a Stranger is the type of book you pick up in a bookstore and read the first 10–15 pages of without trying, which you enjoy immensely, even laughing out loud at spots, but you hesitate to buy it in deference to your backlog of “serious” reading. Or perhaps you buy it as a Father’s Day gift for your dad and sneak in a few more chapters before wrapping it up and signing the card. And then, without planning or calculation, you return to it years later on a lark. At least, that has been my experience with Bryson, and he always rewards my odd loyalty.

    I’m a Stranger has an excellent premise, relevant to anyone who has traveled or lived overseas for more than a few months: the resplendent joy and sorrow of rediscovering America after a sizable absence. Originally from Des Moines, Bryson lived, married, and raised four children in England for over 20 years before relocating to Hannover, New Hampshire. His short articles – initially written for a British audience – read as postcards from the visitor we see in ourselves at those precise moments when we feel our own strangeness in the most familiar and intimate settings, the paradox of self-aware belonging. His topics of interest are as varied as America is broad: the national obsession with statistics, the reliable friendliness of service staff, the incompetence of our postal system, our propensity for absurd waste, the special feel of a true classic diner, our consummate hatred of walking even the shortest distances, the immensity of New Hampshire’s forests, the bedazzling abundance of junk food in our grocery stores, the fundamental illegibility of all owner’s manuals, the endless silliness of new gadgetry.

    The list goes on and on. Bryson’s range is impressive, and though his main purpose seems bent toward making us laugh, he also leverages keen observations on more serious fare. Some of the pieces in I’m a Stranger focus on the idiosyncrasies of living in a small, New England town, but even these avoid becoming parochial. Writing in an era just before the dawn of personal blogging, Bryson reminds us – and we do need reminding – that making daily analysis of one’s surroundings and milieu need not be banal or exclusionary. This is “occasional” writing, in the sense carried by genre paintings in an earlier age, the stuff of everyday life brought to a level of insight and scrutiny that is neither so specific that it alienates nor so general that it bores. And Bryson is a master at the craft. Not every piece is first-rate, of course, but all have something unusual to offer. Bryson feels a curious mixture of affection, bemusement, and disdain toward American life and culture that is, for this fellow stranger anyway, nothing short of irresistible reading.

by Joshua H. Liberatore

I’ve been reading the Federalist Papers recently on the subject of taxation, and an interesting convergence with a contemporary issue has surfaced quite suddenly: the nagging disconnect between fee and service. A lot of penetrating articles have accompanied the health care debate on the faulty linkage between cost and quality in the health care industry. In particular, the employer-based insurance model that characterizes (and often circumscribes) most Americans’ health care choices and consumption has handicapped them as smart and rational purchasers of theoretically competitive services. Since insurance companies foot 60–80 percent of most health care purchases, and employers pay 50–75 percent of insurance premiums, we as consumers don’t develop the savvy shopping skills we might exercise for the myriad other spending choices we make every day. Furthermore, we don’t hold providers immediately accountable for quality of service, and we don’t enjoy any good mechanism by which to do so. And when we do have complaints about billing, we tend to blame the insurance companies or the gap in our employer’s coverage.

    Isn’t the same true of the bulk of our tax burden? Where does it go? What does it pay for? How efficient is the government in allocating the money that gets shaved off our paychecks? Unless we are really paying attention, we simply don’t know. Even if we are interested in these questions and decide to look into a particular area of government spending such as education or farm subsidies, the answers aren’t readily forthcoming. Indeed, the search itself quickly becomes overwhelming. But what if we knew exactly what sort of government programs we were subsidizing with every consumer choice we made in the so-called free market. What if our taxes carried an inherent connection – thematic, associative, or in some cases, palliative – to our consumption patterns, a connection we could observe everyday? A romantic fantasy on that order seems worth pursuing.

    Since the earliest days of our republic, taxation has been the issue par excellence of our national (and perhaps local) politics. Almost everything we argue about politically comes down to the raising and spending of tax revenues, a recognition which ranks the moral and social dimensions of political questions as categorically useful but functionally secondary concerns. Let’s face it: It’s all about the money and for what purpose it is spent in our name. It’s a simple point perhaps, but in reading Hamilton discuss taxation in a more theoretical vein in his Federalist essays, several bright lights ignited for me. The principal observation is to recognize how much, for example, we take taxation – income and sales taxes, in particular, less so property taxes – for granted. Considering only the first two types of taxes for now, the possible virtues of a completely different arrangement in raising the necessary capital for the good of society, often called consumption taxation, capture my fancy. When we explore the range of benefits offered by consumption-based taxation, we cannot help but be compelled by its rational and ethical soundness.

    Let me start with a crucial disclaimer. My views on this subject, I grant, are very un-American, principally because consumption taxes tend to penalize consumer choices and might be seen to impinge on the free market, which though nonexistent in practical terms, inspires our faith and awe at every turn. But income taxes have their own ethical and practical shortcomings. Liberals don’t like to complain about taxation being heavier on the rich by percentage, if not in absolute terms. Many liberals even tend to favor a more sliding, redistributionist tax scheme whereby middle class folks see tax cuts proffered them while wealthy people fund continued government expansion. This is certainly the case with the current health care debate. These notions play well with most voters, the vast majority of whom find themselves, somewhat sadly, not among the most wealthy, even though politicians often talk as if we are the most important people in the world, the very bedrock of American prosperity.

    But intellectually, I’m not sure how progressive taxation favoring the middle class can be honestly defended as fair, unless one champions the argument that rich people have more to gain from government programs, which has the advantage of being true, in the sense of overall social influence and political clout. The paradox is not overly subtle: although politicians address their remarks to middle class audiences, they direct their policies toward the economic elite who fund campaigns and peddle power. Income-based taxation only conceals the basic injustice of that scenario, however. We don’t say, for example, that rich people should, by virtue of being rich, pay more for food, manufactured goods, property, or services. It just so happens that rich people make these choices on their own. Under no compulsion, wealthy folks tend to eat in fancy restaurants, shop at Whole Foods, buy expensive electronics and cars, avail themselves of pricier travel, financial, and health care services, and live in more affluent neighborhoods in bigger, costlier dwellings. Nothing wrong with that, is there?

    Here’s where consumption taxation comes in. If people were taxed based on what they spend rather than what they earn, not only would it be ethically superior and intellectually defensible, we could also bring some interesting connections to bear on government services, linkages which are much more politically useful and meaningful than the distance inherent in progressive income taxes. I begin with my pet concerns as examples: pollution and the environment. If gas taxes applied directly to fund a whole suite of environmental and ecological mitigation measures – everything from national parks, the Department of Interior’s operating budget, wetlands and forestry preservation, water and air cleanup efforts, carbon offset purchases, just to name a few, the fuel we love to burn would contain within its very combustion the money needed to palliate against the damages automobiles cause. Similarly, a flat, fixed-rate tax (or one levied in proportion to price, weight, efficiency) could be paid on each automobile or vehicle purchased that could be used to pay for the car’s lifecycle waste management, material recycling and reclamation, highway and bridge maintenance and repair, public transportation infrastructure, Department of Transportation programs, and the like.

    Now, understand, to be effective, these taxes would have to be high and somewhat onerous, but they’d be functionally off set by the refreshing and novel absence of income tax. We’d get to keep our entire paychecks, and any raises and bonuses we happen to receive would fully translate into new income rather than getting lost in tax adjustments and deductions. Instead, our consumer choices would carry all the burden of their eventual cost to society, both realized and invisible. Many economists are already talking about the advantages of true pricing for our energy costs, adjustments that would reflect the genuine cost of our energy use not just the base retail price, what economists call accounting for externalities. Politically, it’s a difficult sell, but the need for true pricing is slowly gaining traction now that some sort of fledgling carbon legislation seems imminent. True pricing is, of course, a “free-market” alternative to government regulation, no less insidious than your average airline government subsidy. Consumption taxation combines these strategies and applies them to all purchases, not just energy use.

    In a consumption-based tax scheme, of course, each consumer category carries a different tax rate, a little like states levying different sales tax rates for groceries, liquor, cigarettes, hotels, airplane tickets. And certain things we purchase, like gasoline at the pump, already have targeted taxes that presumably go to good use. So the idea is not entirely foreign, but the taxes are by and large too low, especially in the case of the gasoline tax, and we have no idea or don’t care what the beneficiaries do with the money. But if these categories had thematically-connected and thus logical links to government services and programs, we’d begin to notice powerful adjustments in consumer behavior, adjustments that signify meaningful solutions to real problems. A Democratic Congress already attempted to achieve something like this back in 2006 when they suggested funding a renewal of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program with a new cigarette tax, arguing that higher taxes would discourage smoking. President Bush threatened to veto the measure, and not until the Obama Administration took power in 2009 did SCHIP, which provides health insurance to 11 million children, finally get a new lease on life.

    Take food as another example. Our groceries are already taxed at a different level than our cars and computers, but groceries as a category are already quite broad and problematic. On one level, we’d want to see the grocery tax go directly to things that we already pay for (farm subsidies, international food aid, agricultural land management programs, rural poverty mitigation, the Food and Drug Administration). In the cases of USDA farm subsidies (current loyalty: agribusiness lobbies) and the FDA (current loyalty: pharmaceutical companies), a consumption tax might have quite an educational effect on the American consumer, who would begin to comprehend and scrutinize the program he was paying for each time he purchased produce, canned corn, pork chops, or Tylenol. Smart consumption taxation could provoke some healthy debate about the value and efficiency of these programs because we’d be directly investing in their continued operation on a daily basis.

    On another level, we’d also want to see some disaggregation in the taxes we pay on food, and this is where the potentially frightening, fascistic component of my proposal begins to send red flags up to libertarians. A large and broadly mandated Federal agency like Health and Human Services (responsible for Head Start programs and disease research at the CDC) would see a cut of the grocery and restaurant taxes, but certain divisions could carry different tax burdens. Food purchases outside of a small grouping of fresh produce, staple grains, meat, and dairy – your sugar cereals, cookies and chips, all beverages other than water, coffee, and tea – would carry a premium tax to cover the costs of heart disease research and obesity reduction programs, as well as Title I free lunch programs in public schools. It sounds a bit totalitarian, and perhaps it is, but its advantage is the enormous potential to outweigh any ideological discomfort when, again, we consider that we wouldn’t be paying any income tax. Most middle class people’s incomes would rise by almost 20 percent, real money by any standard.

    I’ve mentioned only Federal programs and expenditures so far, but some kind of local taxes would still be necessary, perhaps based on property or rent taxes, to pay for law enforcement, municipal waste disposal, and all basic local-level services. But we’d do away with state income tax: state government budgets would all have to come from property consumption, toll fees on state roads and bridges, business taxes, and perhaps a per capita slice from the Federal levy on general consumption. Again, consumption would be directly linked to service quality and availability. We’d know exactly where our money was going and why.

    Obviously, I’m not an economist, and I have no mathematical notion of how specific numbers and category breakdowns would have to look in order to imitate the current revenue stream from income taxes. My guess is that you could gradually scale back overhead budgets for most of the Federal agencies, as the consumption taxes started to settle into their mitigation role. Gas taxes would be made high to encourage less driving, for example, so roads become cheaper and fewer to maintain; meanwhile, public transportation revenues steadily increase, and their additional funding from gasoline and car purchases allows them to expand and serve more areas, meeting the needs of more consumers who are responding rationally to the new incentive scheme and driving increased demand.

    As drivers begin to understand that they are directly subsidizing subway riders (and they already are, just through income taxes), they will take a good look at their consumption levels. A consumption-based tax scheme necessarily involves what seem like moral choices made by the government on behalf of consumers, a nanny state telling people what’s good and bad for them, penalizing the bad and rewarding the good. If that seems outrageous and draconian, let’s remember that our current taxation scheme already makes those same choices, but the connections to services are opaque to consumers, since the apparent neutrality of income taxes being skimmed from our pay checks merely conceals the destination of funds by dumping them into a huge pot. Hence, any perceived moral neutrality in the current scheme is illusory.

    Now, you may wonder how national defense fits into this. My answer is simple and will undoubtedly appear naive: when “national defense” returns to the more modest and truthful meaning it enjoyed for Hamilton and Madison, we will find that it costs infinitely less. Currently, we spend more on so-called defense than the rest of the world combined, more than nine times what our nearest rival China spends on “defending” a population of 1.3 billion people. Just let those numbers sink in a bit. How good is the defense we get for such an absurdly high cost? Was our Pentagon able to defend the passengers on United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001? No, but the passengers organized and defended themselves, at least to the effect of preventing the plane that carried them from becoming a weapon of mass destruction. Since Elaine Scarry has already illustrated the profound ironies of that case study in her fine essay “Citizenship in Emergency,” I will limit my discussion to a few simple points. Under a consumption-based tax scheme, we’d be looking at cutting the military budget by at least two-thirds and much-reduced armed forces. (If you examine the corresponding numbers before World War II – only two generations ago – you will see that a small standing army is not historically impossible to achieve.)

    Perhaps a basic per capita annual head tax could be levied to fund the armed forces, called up only during real national emergencies (not the dozens of “national emergencies” currently in force with respect to places like Zimbabwe and Burma). This head tax would be returned as a full rebate to anyone willing to serve in the military, whether as an active duty soldier or in a civilian support capacity. Just imagine how different our debates would be about what constitutes “national security” interests, by far the fattest, juiciest lemon the American public has been swallowing year after year since 1948. Imagine the reticence we would intimately feel in making the choice to go to war. With only a small standing army, taxes would naturally have to be increased to pay for mobilization, so we would think carefully about when and why to do it. We would never reelect a President who sent our soldiers on a colossally expensive fool’s errand in Iraq, as we did in 2004 (if by a tiny margin), a blunder which are still paying for in lives and treasure. We would never maintain bases in advanced industrialized countries like Japan, Italy, South Korea, and Germany, all with their own armies, financially and technologically equipped to defend themselves. One thing is clear: If we paid for war more directly, a lot would change.

    An important caveat remains the unemployed and indigent. How would we design the system to accommodate for the underprivileged? In a pure consumption-based taxation model, the bag of chips a bank teller buys costs the same as the one bought by the pensioner, the widow, and the public housing resident. To avoid punishing poor people with a system that makes basic items and services quite a bit more expensive, appropriate vouchers and government benefits would have to be arranged. Food stamps, unemployment insurance, and public housing could all still exist, but their funding would have to come through subsidies provided by other consumer products.

    What about government programs that have no tangible connection to average consumers, agencies like NASA and the Peace Corps? One option is to cut them, which in the case of moon exploration and expensive space toys for scientists to play with, I for one would shed nary a tear. The Peace Corps is relatively cheap to run (compared to NASA at least), however, and if we wanted to keep it and other small humanitarian agencies, we might have to designate a special tax or find a logical connection to a related consumer product. We’d probably start having to pay for the Smithsonian museums too.

    Romantic idealism at its most ambitious? Merely as an intellectual exercise, this flight of fancy can teach us a lot though. At least it helps clarify the powerful disconnect we necessarily feel under the current scheme with the way our income-based tax revenues are spent on our behalf. After all, our employers take care of the hassle of paying taxes for us. Most of us don’t even look at the numbers until February or March. What would it be like if we noticed several times a day, observing different taxes levied on all the consumer choices we make all the time. We’d start paying attention. We’d start holding specific government programs more accountable; otherwise, we’d vote with our feet in our consumption patterns. Would it be such a bad thing? Of course, not everyone would pay attention to these new taxes and some people frankly wouldn’t care. But at least their negligence would be paid for, and the SUV-driving, chain-smoking, junk-food eating, trash-tossing warmongers would subsidize the consequences of their choices instead of leaving it to others to clean up the messes their habits make. Now that’s my idea of freedom.

by Joshua H. Liberatore

If there’s one book on public affairs and foreign policy that every American should read as soon as possible, it is Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World. Cole’s name will be familiar to anyone who has been listening to or reading responsible reporting on the Middle East since September 11, 2001. An established professor of history at the University of Michigan, Cole also maintains a daily weblog on Middle East issues called “Informed Comment,” offers a regular column on Salon.com, and appears often as a guest commentator on NPR, PBS, and even some mainstream radio and television networks. “Informed Comment” is probably the most literally titled news source on the Internet; it offers nothing less than an essential education on Middle East affairs, not just for Americans who blithely assume all Arabs are Muslim or all Muslims are Arab, but for serious consumers craving direct, unvarnished news from those sore spots in our imperial adventures. Often relying on his own translations from Arabic-language media, Cole provides insightful glosses on what’s happening in the Middle East and what people on the ground are saying about it.

    That same breadth and energy characterize his latest book-length meditation, which constitutes an erudite and clear-sighted handbook for how the West, but in particular the U.S., should “deal” with the Muslim world, not as a monolithic, medieval, irrational society but as a nuanced and reasonable culture that we cannot afford to trifle with paternalistically. Cole examines the most critical areas where U.S. foreign policy has blundered, where America has failed to be the engaged leader it must and could be in securing a more peaceful and prosperous dialogue with Muslim-majority nations: Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan. In each chapter, he debunks the prevailing myths and stumbling blocks that keep American lawmakers and the public at large from first understanding and then actually achieving a better way forward. But there is not only educated complaint in these pages. Professor Cole also offers actionable suggestions for improved relations with the Muslim world and basically spells out a step-by-step program by which the Obama administration can make real progress there.

    Any brief summary of Cole’s explications and solutions would likely trivialize the complexity and gravity of the concerns he undertakes, but a few examples will suffice in demonstrating the compelling logic and intelligence of Engaging the Muslim World. In the case of Iraq, President Obama has inherited a most unholy albatross, a conflagration which has nevertheless empowered and legitimized its Shiite neighbor Iran. The sooner the U.S. withdraws its forces from Iraq and allows the elected government to work out its own problems, the better for all concerned, but most of all the Iraqis. As long as U.S. military might provides both political cover and security backup for Nuri al-Maliki’s sectarian policies, risky short-term governing serves mainly to alienate minority Sunnis and prevents real compromise and power-sharing. Similarly, as Israel’s chief enabler, the U.S. government is serving neither ordinary Israelis nor the long-suffering Palestinians by continuing its reactionary and knee-jerk support for the Zionist project, often under considerable pressure from right-wing lobbies such as AIPAC. The quicker U.S. “diplomacy” is able to encourage Israel – cutting off loan guarantees and military aid to a country with $14,000 per capita income – peace with its Arab neighbors, and a one-state solution for its non-Jewish population, will become an existential necessity.

    Similarly, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Obama administration too often clings to old – and according to Cole, discredited – scripts of surging troops and leveraging military aid as the best way to prop up feeble civilian governments. Here too there are practical solutions. Cole’s review of polling data from Pakistan is particularly illuminating: bolstering schools and medical facilities would be a more cost-effective and humane way of winning hearts and minds than Predator drone attacks on Pushtun warlords. How do we know this? The Pakistanis themselves are saying it. In Afghanistan, overzealous counternarcotic raids that scorch poppy fields without brokering profitable and sustainable agricultural alternatives only embitters the already desperate rural poor. Cole is not naive, however. Solutions to these foreign policy disasters are complicated and require considerable patience and political will. Recognizing the errors of received wisdom and cultural prejudice within U.S. foreign policy is the first step toward forging a more responsible future.

“The Concept of Ratification” and The Federalist 29 – 36

In the first half of Rakove’s treatment of “The Concept of Ratification,” we undertake a legalistic and theoretical discussion of just what it meant to seek “ratification” of the recently drafted constitution, the product of an ad hoc working group of brilliant delegates drawing from what would become the first states of the Union. Many intriguing and vexing questions quickly surfaced, enough to find Madison bristling with anxiety over the fate of his beloved document, which already represented a tour de force in calculated compromise and delicate negotiation. What type of body should convene to ratify the constitution? Would Congress – the early prototype created under the Articles – play a role, and if so, how extensive would it be? Would the existing state legislatures or special state-level conventions be assembled to vote on approval? And most significantly, what role would revisions and amendments play in the “ratification” process, the operative word of which – at least to Madison’s understanding – meant “approval” and “affirmation,” in the legal sense of enactment?

    As we’ve already seen, Madison highly distrusted the state-level political minds who might preside over such conventions, and he had reason to worry that the constitution would die “in committee” if each state were permitted to attach specific amendments. Madison was a self-conscious, if well-deserved, elitist in this regard; he was very wary to delegate revision authority to parochial mediocrities. Further concerns surrounded whether or not ratification required unanimity and what kind of voting procedure would be employed. For example, could state-level conventions vote on individual articles, on the model of the “line-item veto” of contemporary presidential fantasy? Madison feared these and other factors, Rakove notes, “as ill advised initiatives that would transform an orderly process of reform into a chaotic cacophony of immeasurable acts” (107). The very alliteration of that presentiment brings chills to the spine.

    Hamilton begins in Federalist 29–36 a lengthy disquisition on the nature and types of taxation. With his usual systematic rigor, a variety of tax schemes and their degrees of justice come under evaluation. Reading these essays, one is easily (and profitably) reminded of taxation as the theme par excellence in American politics, and Hamilton’s educated sensitivity to the revolutionary spirit toward too onerous or disproportionate taxation reigns acute in this section. In a way, our entire political tradition hinges on questions of who, what, and how much to tax? To what use is a secondary if necessary concomitant to these basic pivot points. The rest of policy is just details, of little concern to average citizens, then as well as now. Our disagreements about concrete policy items, whatever the moral or ethical dimensions we care to assign to them, in most cases boil down to disagreements over the way tax dollars are collected and spent. We want national defense, but how much do we want to spend on it? We want access to cheap oil and manufactures, but how badly? We want universal health care or better schools, but is it our job to pay for them?

    Add to that the complexity of a farmer in Ohio paying for a new airport runway in Arizona or a bank teller in Arkansas paying for fishery subsidies in Maine and you have a dizzying array of taxation quandaries, and none of them is entirely new. In appreciation of that dilemma, Hamilton delivers himself of a remarkable utterance in Federalist 36: “Happy it is when the interest which the government has in the preservation of its own power coincides with a proper distribution of the public burdens and tends to guard the least wealthy part of the community from oppression” (222). Do we see this same candor, or anything akin to it, in our policymakers today? One certainly doesn’t envy Hamilton’s task: the source of the revolution had been the cumulative festering of oppressive taxes paid to a distant and unforgiving overlord. The framers now had to convince the states that the “preservation” of a national seat of “power” – seemingly distant and unforgiving to many at its outer fringes – was necessary to a “proper distribution of the public burdens,” burdens which themselves needed both explanation and justification. I can’t think of a more essential and concise phrase with which to describe the basic business of government.

by Joshua H. Liberatore

Watching POTUS express his surprise this morning at the Nobel Committee’s decision to award him with this year’s high honor for peace, one could almost sense the acute discomfort. As we are continually reminded in the phrases of politicians – varied in tone and style, but unanimous in theme – we are “a nation at war.” His personal decency and tolerant language aside, POTUS formally leads the armies of that nation, and thus, is directly associated with their actions, good and bad. And POTUS knows it. But now he has to trot to Oslo next month to accept the biggest – though not necessarily the most respected – peace prize in the world, whose last sitting U.S. president recipient was Woodrow Wilson, celebrated architect of the Allied victory in World War I and creator of the League of Nations, the failed but generative prototype of the United Nations. Big shoes to fill, POTUS’s star power notwithstanding?

And even as we strive to seek a world in which conflicts are resolved peacefully and prosperity is widely shared, we have to confront the world as we know it today. I am the Commander in Chief of a country that’s responsible for ending a war and working in another theater to confront a ruthless adversary that directly threatens the American people and our allies. I’m also aware that we are dealing with the impact of a global economic crisis that has left millions of Americans looking for work. These are concerns that I confront every day on behalf of the American people. (October 9, 2009)

Much noise has already been made today about the appropriateness of POTUS’s receiving the award, whether or not his achievements warrant it, whether or not he deserves such a formal accolade this early in his presidency, and I’m loath to add more than a few simple reactions. One particularly silly op-ed in Time claimed that “many Americans are longing for a President who is more bully, less pulpit.” On the contrary, from the results of recent polls, concerning America’s continued entanglement in Afghanistan, for example, many Americans – 60-plus percent of them – appear to be longing for an America that is less bully. Period. The status of the pulpit is beside the point.

Though the war in Iraq is all but absent from our daily headlines and talking points, its stepsister in the craggy nooks of Central Asia, officially eight years old this week, is bristling anew with every fresh attack from “insurgents” (insurgents in their own country?) and every new response from the U.S.-led NATO coalition. POTUS has spent the last two weeks bunkering down with his top advisers in the Situation Room in a series of three-hour closed-press jam sessions riffing on the theme betokened by Lenin’s old propaganda tract “What is to be Done?” The much-awaited answer may be anything from a new “surge” of troops dispatched to Afghanistan (the top U.S. commander on the ground, Stanley McChrystal, wants as many as 40,000) or a graduated repositioning of resources away from conventional search-and-destroy sorties toward a more multidisciplinary counterterrorism strategy. Peace, however, does not appear imminent.

Lucky for POTUS, candor and humility guide him to interpret the award in context, as a clear indicator (and not-so-subtle injunction) from the civilized nations of what is expected of his leadership in the broad strokes. POTUS articulated the symbolism thus:

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize, men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace. But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women, and all Americans, want to build, a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement, it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century. (October 9, 2009)

If peace is interpreted as a vague aspiration and not a measurable fact, we’re in for a continued rough ride in Afghanistan. Good intentions go out the window, quite literally, when American-made bombs are dropping from the skies. And they don’t even have to be bombs. In late June, a girl in Helmand province was killed by a defective canister distributing NATO-effort propaganda routinely dropped by helicopter into dangerous regions. How safe must Americans feel to justify this long and deadly adventure?

We went into Afghanistan not because we were interested in entering that country or positioning ourselves regionally, but because Al Qaida killed 3,000-plus Americans and vowed to continue trying to kill Americans. And so my overriding goal is to dismantle the Al Qaida network, to destroy their capacity to inflict harm, not just on us, but people of all faiths and all nationalities all around the world, and that is our overriding focus. (September 25, 2009).

Reputedly, POTUS’s top advisers are pretty well divided on how best to meet that noble goal. Our chief diplomat, the warlike Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, agrees with McChrystal and is happy to surge the number of American boots on the ground, even if that means increased casualties. Vice President Joe Biden advocates for less troop involvement, more reliance on the Predator drones that target militants in rugged borderlands and often kill civilians in the process. Looking toward his second quick trip to Scandinavia this fall, POTUS must consider all his options in Afghanistan and hope against hope that whatever strategy he arrives at doesn’t make a mockery out of the award he will receive (in fairness, one that Henry Kissinger also received) on December 10th. And perhaps he should donate the one-million-dollar prize money to Doctors without Borders (1999 recipient), or Amnesty International (1977), or better yet, the International Committee of the Red Cross (1917, 1944, 1963), and channel some of those good intentions and hopeful rhetoric about the world that “all Americans want to build” directly to the people and places suffering under the weight of American idealism.

POTUS in a Pickle. Watching POTUS express his surprise this morning at the Nobel Committee’s decision to award him with this year’s high honor for peace, one could almost sense the acute discomfort. As we are continually reminded in the phrases of politicians – varied in tone and style, but unanimous in theme – we are “a nation at war.” His personal decency and tolerant language aside, POTUS formally leads the armies of that nation, and thus, is directly associated with their actions, good and bad. And POTUS knows it. But now he has to trot to Oslo next month to accept the biggest – though not necessarily the most respected – peace prize in the world, whose last sitting U.S. president recipient was Woodrow Wilson, celebrated architect of the Allied victory in World War I and creator of the League of Nations, the failed but generative prototype of the United Nations. Big shoes to fill, POTUS’s star power notwithstanding?

And even as we strive to seek a world in which conflicts are resolved peacefully and prosperity is widely shared, we have to confront the world as we know it today. I am the Commander in Chief of a country that’s responsible for ending a war and working in another theater to confront a ruthless adversary that directly threatens the American people and our allies. I’m also aware that we are dealing with the impact of a global economic crisis that has left millions of Americans looking for work. These are concerns that I confront every day on behalf of the American people. (October 9, 2009)

Much noise has already been made today about the appropriateness of POTUS’s receiving the award, whether or not his achievements warrant it, whether or not he deserves such a formal accolade this early in his presidency, and I’m loathe to add more than a few simple reactions. One particularly silly op-ed in Time claimed that “many Americans are longing for a President who is more bully, less pulpit.” On the contrary, from the results of recent polls, concerning America’s continued entanglement in Afghanistan, for example, many Americans – 60-plus percent of them – appear to be longing for an America that is less bully. Period. The status of the pulpit is beside the point.

Though the war in Iraq is all but absent from our daily headlines and talking points, its stepsister in the craggy nooks of Central Asia, officially eight years old this week, is bristling anew with every fresh attack from “insurgents” (insurgents in their own country?) and every new response from the U.S.-led NATO coalition. POTUS has spent the last two weeks bunkering down with his top advisers in the Situation Room in a series of three-hour closed-press jam sessions riffing on the theme betokened by Lenin’s old propaganda tract “What is to be Done?” The much-awaited answer may be anything from a new “surge” of troops dispatched to Afghanistan (the top U.S. commander on the ground, Stanley McChrystal, wants as many as 40,000) or a graduated repositioning of resources away from conventional search-and-destroy sorties toward a more multidisciplinary counterterrorism strategy. Peace, however, does not appear imminent.

Lucky for POTUS, candor and humility guide him to interpret the award in context, as a clear indicator (and not-so-subtle injunction) from the civilized nations of what is expected of his leadership in the broad strokes. POTUS articulated the symbolism thus:

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize, men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.

But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women, and all Americans, want to build, a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement, it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century. (October 9, 2009)

If peace is interpreted as a vague aspiration and not a measurable fact, we’re in for a continued rough ride in Afghanistan. Good intentions go out the window, quite literally, when American-made bombs are dropping from the skies. And they don’t even have to be bombs. In late June, a girl in Helmand province was killed by a defective canister distributing NATO-effort propaganda routinely dropped by helicopter into dangerous regions. How safe must Americans feel to justify this long and deadly adventure?

We went into Afghanistan not because we were interested in entering that country or positioning ourselves regionally, but because Al Qaida killed 3,000-plus Americans and vowed to continue trying to kill Americans. And so my overriding goal is to dismantle the Al Qaida network, to destroy their capacity to inflict harm, not just on us, but people of all faiths and all nationalities all around the world, and that is our overriding focus. (September 25, 2009).

Reputedly, POTUS’s top advisers are pretty well divided on how best to meet that noble goal. Our chief diplomat, the warlike Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, agrees with McChrystal and is happy to surge the number of American boots on the ground, even if that means increased casualties. Vice President Joe Biden advocates for less troop involvement, more reliance on the Predator drones that target militants in rugged borderlands and often kill civilians in the process. Looking toward his second quick trip to Scandinavia this fall, POTUS must consider all his options in Afghanistan and hope against hope that whatever strategy he arrives at doesn’t make a mockery out of the award he will receive (in fairness, one that Henry Kissinger also received) on December 10th. And perhaps he should donate the one-million-dollar prize money to Doctors without Borders (1999 recipient), or Amnesty International (1977), or better yet, the International Committee of the Red Cross (1917, 1944, 1963), and channel some of those good intentions and hopeful rhetoric about the world that “all Americans want to build” directly to the people and places suffering under the weight of American idealism.

by Joshua H. Liberatore

In the old days, when they still taught rhetoric in the schools, people learned to be sensitive to the variety of modes of discourse available in our language. Any public speaker worth his salt should be able to manipulate syntax, word choice, tone, pace, and inflection to get the most out of a particular occasion, context, and audience. Apparently, POTUS’s time at Columbia—one of the few universities in the land still insisting on a core liberal arts curriculum—was not squandered. He’s a regular Aristotelian when it comes to tailoring his delivery to the situation and topic at hand. Refreshed from nearly two weeks of reprieve at Martha’s Vineyard and Camp David, POTUS has been busy working a full range of modes this week. It began with a rowdy Labor Day commemoration hosted by the AFL-CIO in Cincinnati:

Now, on Friday, we learned that the economy lost another 216,000 jobs in August. And whenever Americans are losing jobs, that’s simply unacceptable. But for the second straight month, we lost fewer jobs than the month before, and it was the fewest jobs that we had lost in a year. So make no mistake, we’re moving in the right direction. We’re on the road to recovery, Ohio. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

Audience members. Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!

The President. Yes we will. Yes we are.

Audience members. Yes we will! Yes we will! Yes we will!

The President. But, my friends, we still have got a long way to go. We’re not going to rest; we’re not going to let up. Not until workers looking for jobs can find them—good jobs that sustain families and sustain dreams. Not until responsible mortgage owners can stay in their homes. Not until we’ve got a full economic recovery and all Americans have their shot at the American Dream. (September 7, 2009)

Call-and-response aside, anytime POTUS begins speaking directly to an entire state personified, in the standard campaign rally format, we know we’re in for a rambunctious affair, editorially and otherwise. And on Monday, POTUS was clearly enjoying himself, respinning old campaign yarns, raising his voice a little, working the very heartbeat of the unionist crowd, not exactly the Brookings Institution set.

But let me just say a few things about this health care issue. We’ve been fighting for quality, affordable health care for every American for nearly a century, since Teddy Roosevelt. Think about that.

Audience member. Long time.

The President. Long time. [Laughter] The Congress and the country have now been vigorously debating the issue for many months. The debate’s been good, and that’s important because we’ve got to get this right. But every debate at some point comes to an end. At some point, it’s time to decide. At some point, it’s time to act. Ohio, it’s time to act and get this thing done.

The following day, using a different mode, POTUS addressed America’s schoolchildren, an event that caused heaps of reckless speculation and paranoid worry from the usual amnesiacs, ignoring the historical propriety of a platform that both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush used to convey their respective schoolmarmish exhortations (only the technology differed). Sadly, our current Oval Officer thoroughly disappointed both his critics and their hyperactive disciples; POTUS’s message was distinctly uncontroversial and simple: school is important, school is sometimes hard, but school is important, even necessary.

And no matter what you want to do with your life, I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor or a teacher or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You cannot drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to train for it and work for it and learn for it. And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. The future of America depends on you. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future. (September 8, 2009)

For the thousands of fearful parents who yanked their children from classrooms that day, wary of the ripe opportunity POTUS might take to channel liberal propaganda into our nations’ very shrines of critical thinking, there was little to react to in the end. A few Arlington, VA, demonstrators even carried signs reminding POTUS that: “Our children serve God, not the President.” In fact, POTUS wasn’t asking his audience at Wakefield High School, or any other school for that matter, to serve either him or God; he was asking them to serve their country.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents and your skills and your intellect so you can help us old folks solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that, if you quit on school, you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

Education as a patriotic duty is an oddly abstract message of a different sort, comprehensible perhaps to already educated adults, but persuasive to scarcely few teenagers or elementary-school age pupils, I’m afraid. But POTUS persisted with his theme:

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged and you feel like other people have given up on you, don’t ever give up on yourself, because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country. The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

In an age when people and especially the youth have become arguably more self-centered and self-gratifying, since the passing of Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation” anyway, an easier message to sell would have been: Education will help you get more money and security. Or even: Education will help fulfill you, make you happier. None of these promises is necessarily true, of course, but rhetorically, they are more likely to find sympathy among the iPod and Twitter generation. POTUS, alas, does not go in for the easy sell.

Now, your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books and the equipment and the computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect all of you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down. Don’t let your family down or your country down. Most of all, don’t let yourself down. Make us all proud.

POTUS himself got serious the following night, when he changed modes again in order to address a joint session of Congress. By necessity, his remarks involved a little colorful scolding:

But what we’ve also seen in these last months is the same partisan spectacle that only hardens the disdain many Americans have towards their own government. Instead of honest debate, we’ve seen scare tactics. Some have dug into unyielding ideological camps that offer no hope of compromise. Too many have used this as an opportunity to score short-term political points, even if it robs the country of our opportunity to solve a long-term challenge. And out of this blizzard of charges and countercharges, confusion has reigned. (September 9, 2009)

Frequent use of parallelism:

Well, the time for bickering is over. The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action. Now is when we must bring the best ideas of both parties together and show the American people that we can still do what we were sent here to do. Now is the time to deliver on health care. Now is the time to deliver on health care.

An invitation for continued input and collaboration:

Now, this is the plan I’m proposing. It’s a plan that incorporates ideas from many of the people in this room tonight, Democrats and Republicans. And I will continue to seek common ground in the weeks ahead. If you come to me with a serious set of proposals, I will be there to listen. My door is always open.

Some more scolding:

But know this: I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it’s better politics to kill this plan than to improve it. I won’t stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. If you misrepresent what’s in this plan, we will call you out. And I will not accept the status quo as a solution. Not this time. Not now.

An emotional appeal:

And [Ted Kennedy] expressed confidence that this would be the year that health care reform, “that great unfinished business of our society,” he called it, would finally pass. He repeated the truth that health care is decisive for our future prosperity, but he also reminded me that “it concerns more than material things.” “What we face,” he wrote, “is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.” I’ve thought about that phrase quite a bit in recent days: the character of our country. One of the unique and wonderful things about America has always been our self-reliance, our rugged individualism, our fierce defense of freedom, and our healthy skepticism of government. And figuring out the appropriate size and role of government has always been a source of rigorous and, yes, sometimes angry debate. That’s our history.

And, finally, a healthy dose of moral philosophy:

You see, our predecessors understood that government could not, and should not, solve every problem. They understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom. But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little, that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, the vulnerable can be exploited. And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn, when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American, when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter, that at that point we don’t merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.

Much has been made of the uncivil behavior POTUS’s message provoked in the House Chamber that night: the occasional murmurs and boos ( “the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years, less than we have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars” ); the cynical laughter ( “And while there remain some significant details to be ironed out . . .” ); Rep. Joe Wilson’s now infamous shout of “You Lie!” ( “The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” ); and at times the raucous applause ( “many in this Chamber, particularly on the Republican side of the aisle, have long insisted that reforming our medical malpractice laws . . .” ). Confronting all the boisterous noise and embarrassing breaches of decorum, POTUS was characteristically sober and unruffled. Still, one is moved to reflect that the hormone-addled suburban adolescents at Wakefield High comprised an altogether better comported and more civilized audience than a massive theater full of elected leaders. But it wasn’t all mindless deference in Arlington either:

Q. Hi, my name is Sean. And my question is, currently 36 countries have universal health coverage, including Iraq and Afghanistan, which have it paid for by the United States. Why can’t the United States have universal health coverage?

The President. Well, I think that’s the question I’ve been asking Congress, because I think we need it. I think we can do it. And I’m going to be making a speech tomorrow night talking about my plan to make sure that everybody has access to affordable health care. Part of what happened is that back in the 1940s and ’50s . . . (September 8, 2009)

It was perhaps the single best, most pointed and frank question POTUS has received on health care all summer, and though the sweeping narrative response was less direct than what young Sean likely wanted, the spark of appreciation in POTUS’s reception was not lost on anyone in the room. POTUS grinned and knew he was back to work.

by Daniel Liberatore

A boy sits with dried tears
Like dollar signs wiped into his sweaty shirt.
His wet pants make dirt stains
On the broken park bench with rusty nails sticking out underneath

They are cleaning the fountain today
The water got so brown that you couldn’t see the bottom anymore.
There was a turtle that used to live here.
But not anymore.
He’s gone now.
The boy wipes his shirt up to his face and bows his chin as his lazy smile disappears
Two gringos walk by with ice cream dripping off their noses
“Un peso, un peso,” the boy says
They keep walking and pretend not to hear.
If the boy had a rock, he would throw it.

A shoeshiner walks by
He is a mustached old man with a crook to his step
There’s medicine in the box that he carries
Enough glue to sniff
To make you smile for days
“Un peso, un peso,” the boy calls out to the people passing by
A can of glue costs five.

An old woman walks by with her grandchild
The little girl starts crying, and the woman picks her up
The boy on the bench turns his face into the fading sun
And takes a breath.

Another boy walks up, talking loudly and whipping a ball on a string
Around in the air
The boy on the bench nods, and they touch hands as he passes
Where did he get that ball?

Tonight it will be breezy
The boy knows it
Loud and crowded in the park
He learned how to say “one dollar”
A while back
Sometimes it helps with the gringos.
Some will give him money
Others, food from their table
But not always
Mostly, they just look away
“Un peso, un peso . . .”

The boy wet his pants earlier
When he was messing around with the others in the trees.
There was a clown walking around then, and the people were wobbling.
That was earlier
Now it’s near night.

“Un peso, un peso.”
The boy turns and looks down at his feet
Where did that turtle go?
He looks up and sees a man snapping a photo of a woman,
Standing by the fountain
There is music playing loud from a car
And a man on a microphone selling shoes
The boy’s head throbs in rhythm with the speaker’s voices.

He saw his father earlier today
He was in front of the bus station lying in the street mumbling
The boy had walked by him without a word
The man did not notice him.

Now, in the park, the lights sputter on
The night is here, and the breeze blows
The boy finally stands and rubs his face
He shuffles over to the fountain, now holding its clean water
He peers down low and glares into the pool
After a moment passes
He turns around and slowly moves back to his bench and sits down
A woman walks by
“Un peso, un peso . . .”
She looks away and passes
The boy closes his eyes for a moment as the breeze touches his face
He opens them again and looks back at the fountain.

Nicaragua, 2009

“The Politics of Constitution-Making” and The Federalist 21 – 28

Rakove’s fourth chapter takes up the critical issues surrounding the power and scope of the executive branch, primarily its method of election. The idea of allowing the national legislature to choose the executive – on the model of some contemporary parliamentary systems – was quickly rejected, indeed denounced, as a recipe for making such an election “the work of intrigue, of cabal, and of faction” (82). We are reminded of the Founders categorical distrust of factions (evidenced by their shared love of the word “cabal”) and deep reverence for the separation of powers, not to mention their keen desire to distinguish the republican system they were designing from its flawed European precedents.

    Of course, our modern political parties serve to intertwine Congressional politics and presidential elections in ways the framers could not have envisioned and by which they would likely be appalled. We regularly see our presidents hitting the campaign trail on behalf of the party they represent, endorsing particular candidates not only for House and Senate races, but also gubernatorial contests. Even when specific candidates and elections are not at stake, the nearly constant fundraising that the executive spearheads in the course of a typical four-year term renders the early suspicion of collusion and cabal at the highest levels of national politics one of the framers soundest insights. It remains arguable whether the popular election – the electoral college is another matter – of the chief executive, given the party system the Founders tried to avoid but could not ultimately prevent from taking hold, is more or less successful in avoiding the pitfalls of “intrigue” and influence that the rejected, more aristocratic, model of legislative selection suggested in 1787.

    Rakove properly notes the scant attention that a crucial August 17 revision to the clause in the draft constitution authorizing Congress to “declare” (and not “make”) war received – a very significant and loaded edit, whose implications we have lived with intimately in the 20th century and 21st centuries. Though even the tradition of Congress “declaring” war has since become quaint and old-fashioned (not employed since World War II), the modern executive’s nearly unchecked monopoly on warmaking powers is hardly questioned as right and proper. Given this contemporary context, the Founders delicate swapping of two active verbs for what became a very passive Congressional role in practice is fraught with both historical irony and imminent tragedy.

    As was evident to all who suffered under the arbitrary and whimsical rule of European monarchs (and the framers had George III as their exemplar), grounding the country’s warmaking authority in republican representation allowed for the prevalence of caution, conservatism, and restraint in the deployment of military forces, necessitating a slow and deliberative process that would not be subject to the jealousies and fantasies of a single, all-powerful personality. Imagine if our wars were treated with the same kind of legislative scrutiny and technocratic debate that health care reform and carbon regulation are currently receiving. The image is not perfect, of course, but it’s certainly preferable to the cult of the commander in chief we seem to be stuck with since Eisenhower, the legalistic and informal trust we place in the president alone to make decisions about war and peace.

As a correction (or perhaps caveat) to our last posting, the framers did in fact show concern for the “moral dimensions” of slavery, and in fact, in ways we can relate to quite readily. Northern delegates to the Convention worried over the notion that slavery – as a debasing cultural force – inflicted harm on the free population but also constituted a crime against “the most sacred laws of humanity,” of infinite peril to all citizens of the republic (86). Nevertheless, there seemed to be agreement that these nuanced ethical and philosophical quandaries were not a Federal matter, that “the morality and wisdom of slavery are considerations belonging to the states themselves” (89). It’s not difficult to find comparable logic in the contemporary debates over issues such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage laws. Clearly, the option of deferring to state-level resolutions has always been an acceptable evasive tactic employed by national policymakers when it comes to the thorniest moral questions of the day.

In Federalist 24–28, Hamilton delivers a formal critique of standing armies in the republican system of government. He starts by rehearsing all the key arguments against the maintenance of a standing army (primarily, the opportunities it gives to executive corruption and demagoguery), then systematically destroys them all. For example, he roundly dismisses the prevailing notion that the states or local militias should bear the responsibility, and possess the requisite organization, efficiency, and might, for what we now call “national security”. The second amendment that later emerged granting citizens the right to bear arms as a political compromise and necessary appeasement to proponents of local defense leaves us with a very mixed legacy of wisdom.

    But even Hamilton knew that he was on shaky ground, for the same reason many framers distrusted a strong executive, and concedes that the provision of a standing army should be “freshly” debated every two years. Again, a well-funded and increasingly adventurous standing army is such an integral component of the American status quo as to leave this debate hardly more than academic, something we gripe about in conversation from time to time but do little to change in practice. But as some excellent recent books on the subject, such as Eugene Jarecki’s The American Way of War and Andrew Bacevich’s The Limits of Power and The New American Militarism, make clear, we should all be taking a closer look at exactly what our defense establishment has done to the character of our civil society in the past few decades. The findings are not pretty, nor does the trajectory seem easy to alter.

by Tatchai Ruangrattanatavorn

It is now the 21st century, and we’re living in the Age of Technology. Progress has been very rapid, and within a few decades, many advanced machines and tools have been created, followed by new forms of entertainment that meet society’s needs. There’s no doubt that almost everyone, regardless of race, gender, or age, knows what television, movies, videogames, and the Internet are. These things, along with many other forces, make up modern American popular culture. Then come the consequences. Many people say that popular culture has been deteriorating our intellectual abilities and that it also has negative influences on our society as well. How do we know that this is true? Are videogames, television shows, movies, and the Internet actually making us stupid?

    Steven Johnson wrote Everything Bad is Good for You in response to public antagonism against modern popular culture, arguing that these forces are, in fact, nutritious after all. Given the generational aspect of these suspicions, however, we’ve only been hearing a one-sided perspective and negative criticisms of the video-based culture. In order to make wise decisions about whether to embrace or combat the consequences of rapid technological change, we should at least hear what the other side has to say first.

    Johnson definitely demonstrates the credibility and authority to argue his position effectively. According to Leigh Bureau, Johnson as both social critic and technologist, is no futurist, but rather is able to see emerging trends that are relevant to our lives and explain them before anyone else. He lectures widely on technological, scientific, and cultural issues, has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and co-founded FEED, Plastic.com, and outside.in. His earlier books reveal a diversity of interest and expertise. The Ghost Map explains the emergence of modern public health. The Invention of Air explains how innovative ideas emerge and spread, shaping our modern world. The Interface Culture explains how technology transforms society, predicting the rise of the blogosphere correctly. Mind Wide Open explains how brain science is yielding new understandings of the human personality. No wonder that Everything Bad is Good for You follows the same style and trend, as the first major book to argue in favor of modern popular culture.

    As the world continues to berate popular culture as the good-for-nothing, principal contributor to the decline in our intelligence, Johnson counters that “popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years” in order to clarify public misconceptions and to present the subject in a different light (xv). Throughout the book, the tone is that of a friend, a proponent, speaking to us in casual occasions, trying to share his ideas and thoughts on certain issues, unlike the didactic tone of an authority figure or lecturer demonstrating his knowledge to the uninformed. The core position is that video games are becoming more complex and thus making us smarter because they force us to exercise our intellectual labor as we make decisions in the virtual world.

    In order to illustrate his point, Johnson uses famous and common games such as SimCity as examples. As complex videogames force us to think in new ways, we become smarter: “It’s not what you’re thinking about when you’re playing a game, it’s the way you’re thinking that matters” (40). Therefore, the content of the game does not matter as long as it challenges you to think. The beliefs attack the simplistic assumption that only reading is good, and in order to qualify his argument and gain credibility, he acknowledges the counterargument that reading is of absolute importance and adds that “nonliterary popular culture is honing different mental skills that are just as important as the ones exercised by reading books” (23).

    As for television, Johnson claims that it is also getting more intricate than ever but still not as much as videogames because of the degree of passivity associated with TV watching (63). The components of complexity that have risen in television programs in the past few decades are multiple threading, flashing arrows, and social networks (65). Johnson uses a graphic visual to compare between television programs of different times, demonstrating a clear contrast between the complexities of plotlines. As usual, he centers the examples on common programs, such as The Sopranos, The Simpsons, South Park, Scrubs, and Lost to engage contemporary readers. Such programs require the audience to “fill in” the missing pieces (83), and as audiences get used to doing that, “flashing arrows” are no longer needed to explain what is going on (73), whereas previous generations of television programming included more internal plot cues. Reality shows, Johnson claims, require audiences to probe the environment and solve problems as puzzles do (94) and develop “split second intelligence,” as viewers recognize the facial expressions of characters, a facility which can be measured as AQ or autism quotient (98), a concept related to emotional intelligence borrowed from the field of psychology (98).

    The Internet, according to Johnson, challenges our mind “by virtue of being participatory, by forcing users to learn new interfaces, and by creating new channels for social interaction” (117–18). Johnson illustrates the concepts of participation and social interaction by using examples such as email, IM, and blogging, citing the statistic that approximately 270,000 blog entries are published each day (119), and concluding with the claim that the Internet allows us to connect in different ways, instead of more antisocial technologies such as television (124).

    Everything usually comes in pairs, good and bad, agreement and opposition, and there is no exception in the debate on the effects of videogames on our society. David E. Newton’s Violence and the Media cites many studies on the effects of televised violence and aggressive behavior. In one longitudinal study in Columbia County, New York, from the 1960s to the 1990s, researchers studied whether or not children who watched more violent television would grow up and engage in aggressive behavior as adults, with a sample size of 875 third-graders (29). The conclusion was startling. The accumulated research clearly demonstrates a correlation between viewing violence and aggressive behavior—that is, heavy viewers behave more aggressively than light viewers. Children and adults who watch a large number of aggressive programs also tend to hold attitudes and values that favor the use of aggression to resolve conflicts. Their correlations are solid. They remain even when many other potential influences on viewing and aggression are controlled, including education level, social class, aggressive attitudes, parental behavior, and sex-role identity (30).

    On the other hand, three of the four television network studies found that there was no evidence that violence on television causes aggressive behavior by viewers. Two of these studies were later reexamined because of methodological flaws (36).

    Two more studies confirm the conclusion that violent media make people numb to the pain and sufferings of others. In the first study, when asked to fill a questionnaire while hearing a fight that involved an injured person, participants who played violent a video game for 20 minutes took longer to help the victim, rated the fight as less serious, and were less likely to hear the fight. In the second study, when witnessing an injured person, participants who just watched a violent movie also took longer to help, corroborating conclusion mentioned above. A political cartoon drawn by J.D. Crowe implies the same theory, but somewhat differently. The cartoon argues that violence in television, movies, and videogames contribute to violence in reality, but not as the source of violence itself since there are also other more significant contributing factors that initiate the violence. These factors that lead to violence in real life, as suggested in the cartoon by the order of chain events, are the availability of guns, lax gun laws, permissive parenting, anger, and then violence in television, movies, and videogames. Without these crucial, tangible factors, violence in real life would not occur in equal magnitude, but arguably, the same claim can be made if there were no violence in the media.

    From another point of view, videogames could be viewed as an art form. As Judith Galas put it, “Computer games are art—a popular art, an emerging art, a largely unrecognized art, but art nevertheless.” This perspective is still controversial, of course, but videogames have demanded vivid graphics, rapid processing, greater memory, and better sound. In The Seven Lively Arts, Gilbert Seldes, a leading literary and arts critic, argues that popular forms such as jazz, the Broadway musical, Hollywood cinema, and the comic strip have gained cultural respectability over the past 75 years, implying that videogames should have the same privilege before they can be judged objectively.

    On the other hand, videogames, together with computers and the Internet, could have other social consequences. As people immerse themselves into cyberspace, indicators find them increasingly difficult to separate real life from virtual existence. As Processor Timothy Ferris of Berkeley puts it, “[They] will be able to watch grandmothers be shot by snipers in Sarajevo from six camera angles without leaving [their] couches . . .” Another problem that the Internet might cause is social isolation, and in short, as Norman Nie, a political scientist at Stanford University, says, “The more hours people use the Internet, the less time they spend with real human beings.” Some critics have disputed these claims as biased.

    So does popular culture really make us smarter? In a way, it does. Even though videogames, television shows, computers, and the Internet are just virtual reality, they still offer us a different prospective to our physical reality. For example, the world in Grand Theft Auto might just be a simulation, but it gives us an experience from a different angle. On the other hand, it is nothing like real life for most people. Playing basketball on Xbox won’t make you become an NBA star one day. But there are so many experiences in the world that shape who we are and what we will become, and these new experiences are what making us smarter and adept at adjusting to our complex society. And because there are different kinds of intelligences, there are other significant aspects for us to consider. Certainly, being smart is a great thing, but we must realize that conventional intelligence is not everything needed for a successful, fulfilling life. The most important thing, it could be argued, is to be aware that we’re human beings. We’ve transcended the limitations of other living creatures not only because of our brains, but also because of our moral conscience. We can choose to play and watch as many violent videogames and movies as we want, but we must be conscious of our morals and constantly avoid doing harm to others. Only in this way will we not degrade our own species and hope to prosper.