One More from the Gipper

Right around the time the nation was commemorating the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth came a story out of Allentown, Pennsylvania that had the makings of great comedy – if it weren’t true.  It had to do with a judge who apparently pocketed $2.8 million in bribes in exchange for sending kids to a privately operated detention center run by a friend.  Now, the late president was never mentioned in the reporting of these events because, of course, he’s long dead and obviously had no direct involvement in them, but he really should be remembered because without Dutch Reagan the story would probably never have happened.

The Honorable Mark Ciavarella, it seems, was a seriously committed privatizer.  According to prosecutors, the former judge (he and a co-defendant left the bench after charges were filed), engineered the closure of a county-operated juvenile detention center and helped steer an eight figure contract to a private facility called Pennsylvania Child Care, operated by a friend of his.  What could be wrong with a place called Pennsylvania Child Care?  Well, it seems that in order to fill his friend’s facility – and justify the awarding of the state contract – the judge pretty much started acting the role of the boogeyman some parents used to threaten their kids with:  Play with fire and you know what’ll happen to you?  You’ll go to jail for arson. And indeed Ciavarella sent a 10 year old girl to “Child Care” when she accidentally set her room on fire.  Along with the one who gave a cop the finger.  And the one who made fun of the assistant principal on MySpace.

For the most part, the judge doesn’t actually dispute that the money passed into his hands.  Says he considered it a “finder’s fee.”  Says, “I was told it was legal money. I was told it was something that I was entitled to.”  Most likely he got that opinion from another judge, I’d guess.

So what’s all this got to do with the Great Communicator?  Well, if you’re old enough to remember his presidency, you may also remember that when he took office this story couldn’t have happened because private prisons were something out of history.  To the extent that Americans knew anything about them it was from movies about the Confederacy and the Reconstruction Era South.  Again, Reagan himself had nothing personally to do with the first modern private prison takeover in Hamilton County, Tennessee in 1984, but it’s no accident that it happened on his watch.

First off, Reagan was also a seriously committed privatizer, although in his case the commitment was based on ideology rather than personal profit.  Taking the lead from his friend, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Reagan established the first White House Office of Privatization.  He also set up a Commission on Privatization whose list of 78 recommendations included contracting out the management of prisons, jails and detention centers.

Probably of equal importance to our current story, however, was the boost Reagan gave the War on Drugs.  He may not have been the one to first declare it (Richard Nixon did that) but it was he who established the Office of National Drug Control Policy and his White House rallied the troops in that “War” on a level not seen in any other administration.  Remember Nancy Reagan and “Just say no”?

Predictably, the escalation of the War on Drugs brought an increase in the number of prisoners taken.  There were about half a million total in the correctional system when Reagan took office.  But the Anti-Drug Abuse Act that he signed in 1986 brought on mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession and soon the number jailed would start to exceed the capacity of the nation’s existing criminal justice system.  And since the Reagan Administration railed against government spending in general, when prison capacity was exceeded, rather than engage in raising the money required to build new facilities, some governmental entities started turning to the private sector to build them – just as the Reagan’s people said they should.  Today private corporations manage about 200,000 prisoners, nearly ten percent of the total prison and jail populations that are now four times what they were when he took office.

As we have seen, Judge Ciavarella’s continuing legal education seems not to have been up to snuff, so he may well not be up on his history either and may not have been grateful to the Gipper for the “finder’s fees” he was pocketing – but he should have been.

An Obama Primary Challenge?

The last thing I want to see happen in the 2012 election is a Republican take the White House.  But the next-to-last thing is pretty important to me, too: I don’t want to see the President’s military policies go unchallenged.  Barack Obama is, after all, authorizing illegal military drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen on top of running a war in Afghanistan that, among other things, even he has to know can’t succeed.  In real world terms these are not trivial matters – even if they go unmentioned in most assessments of how the President’s doing.  We – liberals, progressives, the left – can choose to ignore this if we want – that is, if we wish to be irrelevant in the next election.

It does look like there will be at least one candidate in next year’s presidential primaries opposing these policies – Republican Texas Congressman Ron Paul.  Paul, however, does not support the federal government taking a significant role in environmental protection, health care, reducing economic inequality and a lot of other things.  But unless antiwar Democrats do something, Paul’s libertarian campaign will represent the only significant 2012 primary season challenge to what he calls “America’s delusional foreign policy.”

It’s a year now since Harper’s Magazine publisher John R. MacArthur first publicly called for a challenge to Obama from the left.  And for a while the idea did gain a little traction, but it seemed to disappear when the President won a few legislative victories in the lame duck Congress.  Still, even those who hold fast to the Clinton-era “It’s the economy stupid” take on presidential politics can’t avoid asking to what better use the Afghanistan War’s $119 billion annual budget might be put in the midst of the greatest recession in seventy years.

The reason for the reluctance is, of course, to a great extent a legacy of Ted Kennedy’s 1980 primary challenge to Jimmy Carter followed by Ronald Reagan’s election.  Err in a hasty primary challenge and repent for a leisurely four years, the thinking goes.  Bill Clinton got a primary-free re-election in 1996 in some large part because of that take.  Longtime San Francisco community organizer Mike Miller sums up the current fear:

A perilous course being proposed by “progressives” that, if successful, will contribute to a Republican government—both houses of Congress and the White House—in 2012. That course is to nominate a ‘progressive’ to run against Obama in the primaries and, implicitly, sit out the election if Obama is the nominee.

If A, then B?  Is it impossible then to challenge the Administration in the way that really matters – electorally – without helping to usher in a President we’d find worse – both in domestic and foreign affairs?  Not an unreasonable fear, I’d say, yet not one that should prevent us from taking a broader look at the situation.

For one thing, while Clinton’s foreign policy may itself have left something to be desired (the U.S. did bomb Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Yugoslavia on his watch), nothing he did remotely approached the insanity of the current $1,000,000-a-year per soldier war with no perceptible goal other than to negotiate in the future with the Taliban enemy that we fight today.   So, in this case it’s not just nameless/faceless foreigners euphemistically referred to as “collateral damage”– there are Americans being asked to die.

As for the political dangers inherent in the enterprise, well Joe Biden ran against Barack Obama in 2008 and that seemed to work out all right.  To be sure, we would want a level-headed challenge, rather than one primarily fueled by personal anger at Obama.  Disappointment, sure, but even MacArthur’s initial appeal to those who “feel betrayed by Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan and mercenary forces in Iraq” seems slightly off.  Those feeling betrayed by Obama’s expansion of the Afghanistan War really have only themselves to blame, in that he told us that this was precisely his intent.  But he also managed to accomplish what all successful presidential candidates do – he convinced a lot of voters that he really believed what they did, even when he said he didn’t.  People rationalized that he just said all that stuff about Afghanistan because he had to if he wanted to get elected.

Robert Naiman, Policy Director of the organization Just Foreign Policy, goes so far as to say that:

A key organizing principle of a progressive primary has to be something that many may find at first counterintuitive: it must not be directed against President Obama.

What it should be is directed at some of his policies and aimed at building and demonstrating a political base for a series of alternatives.

Over the last two years, many of us have heard more than one variation on the story of FDR telling those to his left that if they wanted him to do something, they had to go out and “make me do it.”  And surely there is something to that – you’ve got to somehow demonstrate a motivated constituency to be a political player.  This is precisely why we should be seriously thinking about what we can do during the upcoming primary season which seems, realistically, to be about the only time we’re going to have much chance of exerting pressure on Obama to rethink his wars.  What would be the goal of a primary challenge?  Several hundred delegates pledged to making the President do something different than he has been.

But, by the way, none of this is meant to suggest that foreign policy constitute the entire basis of a primary challenge, or even necessarily be its central element.  There seems little doubt that the basis for an antiwar candidacy exists – a December ABC News/Washington Post Poll found people answering “No” to the question “Do you think the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting?” by a 60-34 percent margin (with only 25 percent of Democrats saying “Yes”) –  and this is with a minuscule amount of mainstream political opposition to the war.  Still, the cynical view that the domestic casualty rate – 500 U.S. military deaths and 4,500 wounded last year – is simply not high enough to turn this war into a mass issue may well be correct.

Either way, though, an ideal primary challenge would also take on the bank bailout, offer a broad government investment strategy and argue for improving the health care reform law as well.  And, of course, today’s wars represent only the tip of the iceberg: The U.S. currently maintains anywhere from seven hundred to a thousand foreign military bases and spends nearly as much as on its military apparatus as the entire rest of the world combined – because it is locked in a Cold War mindset in which Al Qaeda has replaced the Soviet Union.

In arguing that “Lefty focusing on Obama distracts us from the work we need to do,” New Left veteran Richard Flacks says:

Progressive organizations need to reinvest in college campus organizing.

And as far as focusing on Obama – the man goes, I think his critique is correct, but so far as certain of the President’s policies go, they seem to be precisely the thing that a progressive organization would organize against on a college campus.

As the man once said, “The times, they are a changing” and it seems a shame to let the libertarians be the only ones saying anything about that next year.

My Trip to the City Formerly Known As Frunze

Now that the Parliament of the Kyrgyz Republic has approved a new coalition government, I figure it might be time to finally get something to print about my election observation there last October.  Of course, there may be no real cause for hurry – they formed a government in November and that lasted only a few weeks.  But what the heck – waiting for the final outcome to shake out has really had little to do with my delay in writing anyhow.

My real problem is that when I’ve written about past elections – in Bosnia and East Timor – I’d stayed in those countries long enough to feel that I really knew something about them, plus what was going on in those places was considered worldwide news at the time.  However, Kyrgyzstan, as the Kyrgyz Republic is more commonly known, remains obscure, its politics fairly impenetrable to the outsider.  What I can really describe with any authority is mostly limited to the experience of being an electoral observer.  Still, it seems somehow disrespectful not to at least first say something of the specifics of the election I observed.

Before being selected for the mission, I could not even have told you the name of Kyrgyzstan’s capital city – Bishkek.  My first glimmer of recognition, really, came when I saw the airport code letters on my baggage claim – FRU.  Ah, this was the city that used to be called Frunze!  Although I don’t know much about central Asia, I do know something about the history of the Soviet Union, so this meant something to me.

Mikhail Frunze was a military hero of the Russian Revolution who later succeeded Trotsky as leader of the entire Soviet military apparatus.  Some even considered him a possible successor to Lenin.  Frunze had a medical problem involving ulcers. He apparently did not consider the situation all that serious, but Comrade Stalin – always greatly concerned over the well being of possible successors to Lenin – did.  In 1925, he convinced Frunze to undergo an operation for his condition, an operation he did not survive.  Frunze was given a hero’s funeral in Moscow; people named their sons after him; the authorities named a military academy in his honor; the city of his birth also took his name.  And Stalin had one less rival.  (Strangely, the four doctors involved in the operation are said to have all died in 1934.)

THE SWITZERLAND OF CENTRAL ASIA

All of that, of course, is part of the history of another era.  Today, the former Soviet republic has a population of about 5.2 million – 69% Kyrgyz, a Turkic people; 15% Uzbeks, mostly living in the south; and 9% Russians, mostly in the north.  The country is sometimes called “the Switzerland of Central Asia.”  Its similarities with that wealthy European nation are entirely topographic – 80% of the country lies in the Tina Shan mountainous region, and not economic – it was the second poorest of Soviet republics and is now the second poorest country in Central Asia.  It is rich in mineral resources, but has negligible petroleum and natural gas reserves and must import these products.  Some believe as much as 40% of its GDP derives from the up to 800,000 Kyrgyz migrants currently working in Russia.

Kyrgyzstan enjoys the unusual distinction of hosting both Russian and American military airbases on its soil.  The Russian government is there because it aims to dominate the area that used to be the Soviet Union; the U.S. is there because it aims to dominate the world.  The American Manas Air Base opened in 2001 to support U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.  In February 2009, then-President Kurmanbek Bakiyev announced plans to close it, a decision supported by a 78–1 vote in Parliament.  The decision was reversed in June, however, and the base remains under a new contract with annual rent increased from $17.4 million to $60 million.

This past April, Bakiyev, the country’s second president since independence, was ousted  in an uprising that took about 85 lives. Two months later, 90% of voters approved a referendum creating a new 120-member parliament.  We – the 200 short term and 40 long term observers from 23 member nations of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) – would be observing the first elections to that body.

This was my eighth OSCE mission, but the first where I can recall the existence of an emergency evacuation plan being so prominently discussed in our briefings. Group visas for Kazakhstan were secured for those of us deployed in the north and for Tajikstan for the observers in the south.  The impetus for the heightened security concerns was less the April events than the June clashes between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz.  Centered in Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s second largest city located in the southern part of the country, that conflict left more than 200 dead, perhaps 2,000 injured, 400,000 people internally displaced and about 110,000 seeking refuge in Uzbekistan (almost all since returned.)  The evacuation plans weren’t needed, though, as no serious incidents occurred on what turned out to be a quiet election day.  So, although I was far enough north to see Kazakhstan for a good part of that day, we never had the occasion to go there.

With 29 parties in the running, none received more than 16% of the vote; five parties exceeded the threshold required for representation in the new parliament.  In my own, obviously limited, election day experience, voting seemed rather normal.  And if the counting we observed at day’s end seemed somewhat raggedy, it did not appear to be with intent.  Recommendations were made for improvements, as is the norm, but as one mission coordinator said, “I have observed many elections in Central Asia over the years, but this is the first election where I could not predict the outcome.”

As was the case with the earlier short-lived one, the new government will be led by the Social Democratic Party which finished second overall.  Sometimes described as a party of entrepreneurs, it counts the country’s acting president Roza Otunbayeva among its members.  The coalition also includes the Ata Zhurt, or Fatherland Party, the largest party in parliament, which supports past president Bakiyev; and Respublika, a new party founded and led by Omurbek Babanov, said to be one of the richest people in Kyrgyzstan. Parties in Parliament but not in the coalition are Ar-Namys (Dignity), considered conservative and pro-Russian party, and Ata-Meken (Motherland) which is considered liberal and pro-Western. All of the above descriptions of the government parties should be taken with a grain of salt and I do not pretend to have any real sense of the dynamics involved in the creation of the coalition. From here on I will confine myself to describing what the observation mission was like.

Like most OSCE missions, this one began with a centralized training in the capital, after which most observers were deployed elsewhere in the country. Some will always stay put, however, and this time I was one of that group. Although I would not get to see any other part of the country, there was an upside to staying put – I would not be among the group flying on a domestic airplane.  Not that I have anything against such things generally, but Kyrgyzstan appears on a list of countries whose airlines may not operate services of any kind within the European Union, due to their inadequate safety standards, a distinction not generally considered reassuring by the group that did have to fly.

DID YOU HOUSE THEM IN A BROTHEL?

My Bishkek-area assignment also meant that I stayed put in the quite comfortable but more expensive businessman’s hotel where we had trained.  We had been advised to bring sleeping bags, but I wound up not having to deal with any iffy accommodations – and had wireless Internet in my room. My friend Nancy, whom I’ve known since Sarajevo in 1997 and was my housemate there the next summer, was not so fortunate.  She called about 9 PM the night before the election.  Said she needed to vent – she’d been put up in a brothel.

First she’d noted all the cars parked outside. And then there was the fact that her room had only neon lighting – she’d complained to the management that she couldn’t read by it. (She showed us a picture later and, yup, it’d have been pretty hard to study your election manual in her room, I think.) Finally the doors opening and closing through the night got her out of her room and downstairs where she came upon a group of customers mingling with the service providers – a bunch of young naked men eating meat with the prostitutes, as she described it.  Our LTOs (Long Term Observers) had somehow missed this aspect when they were sizing up potential accommodations. Nancy won “Best story of the 2010 Kyrgyzstan mission” hands down, I’d say. And  I couldn’t help but imagine mission review forms containing the question:

Did Long Term Observers house Short Term Observers in a brothel?   Yes __ No __

My encounters with the, uh, night life were much tamer. My only accomplishment of any note was getting to what I understood to be both of Bishkek’s brewery pubs. Our LTOs took care of one of them for me by organizing the local group get together at the Blonder Pub.  (The beer seemed pretty much entry-level brewery pub fare – distinct from the bottled Russian Sibirskoe Koronna back at the hotel, but in itself nothing special.)  The evening’s highlight – which I missed due to having an internal clock sufficiently grounded to deliver me to the event my customary a-little-bit-late, even though thirteen time zones ahead – was being wanded for weapons at the door. The word on this was that it probably was less the likelihood of people actually carrying weapons that accounted for this than the fact that wanding was all the rage in the major clubs in Moscow, so that any place in Bishkek with aspirations of being a serious destination needed to wand.

The Steinbrau brewpub was another matter. First off, they had a beer garden, built by the Volga Germans who settled here after World War II, having been removed from the Volga region during the war. I understand that they pretty much all cleared out of Kyrgyzstan during Perestroika when they were finally able to exercise their right to return to Germany, from their ancestors had come in the days of the Tsars.  But you could still see signs of them in towns with names written in Latin rather than Cyrillic letters, like Luxemburg (named not for the country, but after Rosa, the World War I era German/Polish socialist leader), and places like Steinbrau. No one on the premises looked remotely German the day I was there, but they had clearly left the recipes behind because the place served a very creditable line of German style beers.

There’s a certain summer camp atmosphere to these missions – a bunch of people thrown together for a short time grappling with sorting out the personalities and backgrounds (and accents) that present themselves – that can make them habit forming. You might meet Social Democrats from Berlin, Republicans from Colorado, Left Party members from Sweden, naturalized Russians living in Marin.  The most interesting part for me is trying to root out any potential foreign soul mates who might be there – say, Europeans who consider being socialist a matter of common sense.

When I met Jan from Germany and learned he was active in the Social Democratic Party (SDP), I immediately told him I was an admirer of Oscar Lafontaine and received a mock scowl in reply. Of course, if I had thought about it for a moment beforehand, I’d have no reason to be surprised – LaFontaine, after all,  represents the party’s most prominent defection in decades. Once the SDP chairman and lead candidate, in 1999 he resigned his position as Finance Minister in the SDP-led government and subsequently took up leadership of the upstart Left Party. Jan did concede, though, that Lafontaine does give the best speeches. (I’ll admit that although it hadn’t been my goal, I kind of enjoyed out-lefting a German leftist – I don’t think they expect that from an American, you know.)

In 2005, the parties of the (lower case) left actually won the German election, and yet the Social Democrats dropped from senior party in a coalition with the Green Party to junior partner in a “grand coalition” with the conservative Christian Democrats, their principal opponents.  The problem was that the SDP and Greens wouldn’t consider a coalition with the Left Party, even though it received more votes than the Greens.  They considered its democratic credentials tainted by its partial roots in the Socialist Unity Party that governed the former East German Democratic Republic. And, for its part, the Left Party professed antipathy to a coalition with the “reformist” parties.

Jan explained that, as a member of the left wing of the SDP, he would personally prefer to have the Left Party in a coalition because he thought that making them do what you have to do to actually be in government (as opposed to criticizing it from the outside) would diminish their appeal, along with their vote, as has already happened in Berlin.  But for now, he says, talk of an all-left coalition has subsided since current polls show that a simple red-green (SDP-Green) coalition could defeat Angela Merkel’s government. Well, this was a certainly a discussion not to be had back home.

WHY DO YOU SPEAK SUCH GOOD ENGLISH?

Observers on these missions have to work in English: all briefings are in English and local translators are hired for their ability to speak English. You will hear some interesting accents. A Scandinavian sitting next to me at our local Bishkek-group debriefing asked, “Do you understand the Frenchman?” referring to one of our two LTOs. In my experience, you can expect Scandinavians you meet on these occasions to speak pretty darn good English and this fellow was no exception, but I suppose he still wondered if somehow a native speaker might be able to hear through the accent better than he. But no, while our other LTO from Belarus spoke good international English, the French LTO’s accent was about as difficult as any I’ve run into on one of these missions – among anyone who was said to actually speak English, that is. I suspect he encountered a lot of nodding assent.

Still, he probably went home thinking that at least I understood him better than my Swiss German observing partner Cristoph did, anyhow. At one point on election day Cristoph’s phone rang just as he had started asking a local poll worker the standard list of questions on how the election was going, so he handed it off to me.  It was the French LTO. Well, he and I were having a very difficult time of it, things not made easier by there being some type of music broadcasting out front of the polling station. I told him to hold on while I looked for a better place.  He hung up and called back but it was no better, so he hung up again. Five minutes later my own phone rang and it was he. He explained that he had called my partner but couldn’t understand him so he thought he’d try me. And, in fact, now that we’d practiced a little (and I suppressed my laughter), he and I managed to communicate significantly better than when he had called Cristoph!

That conversation certainly gave me my biggest laugh of the day (second best was observing the drunken wedding guest reduced to crawling across the floor of a restaurant we stopped in), but Cristoph and I generally amused each other through the long observing day and night.  In fact, our foursome – including Ashkat, our ethnic-Kyrgyz translator, and Evgeniy, our ethnic-Russian driver – got on quite well, I thought, through our entire assignment that included pre-election reconnoitering of the assigned area, election day visits to maybe eleven polling places, observing closing and counting at one of them, and then several hours at a regional tallying center. We did not, however, have any kind of post election lunch where people promise to name their children after each other and that sort of thing, which will sometimes occur at these affairs.  No women in our group, you know.

Of course, so far as language goes, not everyone might say that all of us Americans necessarily spoke the best English, either.  After a few evenings’ conversations, Jan (from Germany, as you may recall)  asked, “As an American why do you speak such good English?”  I laughed.  He said, “No, I’m serious,” and motioning toward a woman from Seattle said, “I can’t understand her at all.”

I’ll have you know this was not the first time I have been complimented on my English. I explained that what he heard from me was a conscious effort to speak slowly, clearly, loud and without unnecessarily complicated construction. I suppose I had the advantage over a lot of the Americans in that the first mission I went on was long – nine weeks registering voters in Sarajevo following the Bosnian civil war – so I’d had time to absorb the fact that an effort to speak like that would go a long way. On these short, week or so missions it may just never occur to some of the Americans that they’re frequently being understood only with difficulty – and that there’s something they might do about it.

On one occasion, also in Bosnia, the overall observation group was so large that the U.S. delegation alone filled an entire charter flight (on an airline, by the way, that no one had heard of before, with on-flight films subtitled in Hebrew and Arabic, which prompted much speculation as to the company’s “normal” business.)  With numbers like this, the usual effort to mix the nationalities was dispensed with and observers simply deployed en masse as they arrived. This resulted in a hotel in the town of Bugojno chock full of American observers most of whom had not done this sort of thing before.  This meant there was even less awareness than usual that someone might have difficulty understanding you if you spoke as if you were in a supermarket in New York or Kansas. Our trainer from the Netherlands who, by any reasonable measure, spoke excellent English, found himself periodically flummoxed by a rapid fire paragraph delivered in American. Jan probably would have encountered an entire hotel bar full of people he didn’t understand.

Since I knew the entire country of Kyrgyzstan has only five million people or so, and the capital was, to my reckoning, way out there in the middle of nowhere – 6750 miles from either San Francisco or New York City, 2150 miles from Beijing and 1850 miles from Moscow – I figured it for a population of maybe 50-100,000.  So I was quite surprised when our LTOs said that it was upwards of a million.  Elsewhere I see the figure put at 800,000 and it’s always hard to know whether people are speaking of a city proper or its metropolitan area, but you get the idea.  The place was no doubt quite a bit more sophisticated than I’d figured.

I had the good fortune of seeing the national history museum in the company of an American colleague who was a Russian native.  Naturally she could read all the material about the Russian Revolution and seemed a bit taken aback by my knowledge of and interest in the subject. Someone once said that you could define the entire American left by the point at which they thought the Russian Revolution went bad, but that’s some time ago and I don’t really think I was ever able to satisfactorily explain my interest to her. The museum had a couple of shops with Kyrgyz artifacts, including a large piece of locally made tapestry that greatly interested the very conservative Republican Colorado state legislator in our group (whose his presence at a foreign election not a month before his own apparently stemmed from his representing the fifth most Republican district in the state and perceiving little real challenge.) Unfortunately the tapestry turned out to have the image of V.I. Lenin sewn into it. I suggested he might just have it replaced with Ronald Reagan when he got back home, but he decided against.

I made two unsuccessful tries at the art museum – the second time it was closed for a party, but I did make it to the most unusual of the city’s museums: the Frunze Museum opened in 1974 and built over the actual house in which Frunze grew up, with upper floors devoted to photos and clippings of his life and the Revolution. It was as spare a museum as I’ve ever visited. There was not a brochure, postcard, or memento of any kind in sight. Even the admission tickets seemed to be the sort of generic item you’d buy at a discount store to use for a raffle.  I suppose they weren’t beating down the doors to reminisce about Frunze these days.

TAXI TO THE SNOW LEOPARDS?

Of course, you wouldn’t generally travel to Bishkek for the museums.  On the other hand, it did have a feature that I haven’t seen the like of in any other large city: You could get a taxi at your hotel that would take you to a national park that purported to have snow leopards.  Try that in Manhattan.  And, no, the Central Park Zoo doesn’t count – there were no cages here, or anything. Of course we didn’t actually see any snow leopards, but that was probably just as well, and we were definitely farther out there than at Far Rockaway, or even Walden Pond.  I’d probably have seen a lot more national parks if you could take cabs to them – or if they were on subway stops or something.  And, as a bonus, on the way back, we happened onto what I’d call a monument park, for lack of knowing any better way to describe it, dedicated to Manas, the hero of the Kyrgyz national epic poem, done in the most wonderful colors.  The significance of the place was simply beyond the comprehension of us westerners not familiar with the poem – which is said to run 500,000 lines.

You learn a pretty random collection of things about a city or a country in eight days. You’ll probably pick up something about their bars and their money changing: I discovered that they made quite good cognac in the country and that their currency exchange offices refuse to take any currency (or at least any American currency, anyhow) with any kind of stray ink or other mark on it.  I later hear that they will accept it at a discount, though – they’ll offer you, say, $40 for a $50 dollar bill.  And Evgeniy tells us that they’ll then sell it back to you if you trade for dollars – at full value, of course.

Perhaps my favorite part of any mission is that last night in the hotel lobby when the observers are all there drinking away their remaining local currency.  This one was particularly leisurely because most flights to and from Bishkek happen at three or four in the morning in order to fit into flight schedules of the more mainstream parts of the world. The last night is a time when you can turn to chat with the person sitting next to you whom you haven’t previously met, find that he’s a member of the Left Party (another “reformed Communist party,” but in this case one free of the stigma of having run a dictatorship), and have one final conversation like you won’t be able to have back home.

And you might even get one final shot at tourism. My college friend Joe (who’s also been on a number of these missions but never before with me) and I made use of about three and a half available hours in Istanbul to grab visas, take the subway down to the Blue Mosque, look at several famous places that there wasn’t time to enter due to prohibitive lines – even on a drizzly midweek morning – and drink Turkish coffee overlooking the walls of the Topkapi Palace.

The next morning I will be trying to explain to American fifth graders where these places are.

Why Are We In Afghanistan – Still?

You have to wonder what it might take to get the man in the White House to acknowledge just how absurd the current U.S. military effort in Afghanistan has become. Would the president of Afghanistan himself telling us to start getting our troops out do it?  Nah.  How about the leader of the last country to send its army there telling us “Victory is impossible in Afghanistan”?  Nope.  Finding out that some of the guards who protect NATO bases were Taliban – but the top Taliban guy we’d been negotiating with actually wasn’t?  Neither.  A Hollywood agent might push this story as farce.  But it’s real life and that qualifies it as tragedy.

Given that candidate Obama was so widely seen as a man of “new thinking,” one to deliver the country from tired old debates and morasses, one hoped President Obama would listen hard to what Mikhail Gorbachev had to say about the damage that a fruitless nine-years-plus war in Afghanistan can do to a country.  But if so, no evidence yet.

It probably didn’t help that the former President of the former Soviet Union was also impolitic enough to add that “We had hoped America would abide by the agreement that we reached that Afghanistan should be a neutral, democratic country, that would have good relations with its neighbors and with both the US and the USSR.  The Americans always said they supported this, but at the same time they were training militants – the same ones who today are terrorizing Afghanistan and more and more of Pakistan.”

Well, you know how policymakers in Washington hate being lectured on history — when you’re in the White House, you don’t read history, you make it.  Besides, by now we’ve been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviets were anyhow – so why should we listen to them?

So far as Hamid Karzai’s statement goes, the most remarkable aspect might not be the Afghan President actually telling the U.S. “the time has come to reduce military operations,” but just how little attention his remarks drew.  This is, after all, a man who owes his very political existence to the U.S. invasion.  At the very least it seems fair to say that the American news media would have given a lot more play to remarks like his had they come from the head of the Afghan “puppet” regime back in the days when the Soviet Union was the occupying power.  Of course, you could argue they are being nothing but realistic in giving Karzai short shrift since everybody knows the president of Afghanistan does not call the shots (literally) in his own country.

Karzai’s problem might be that he’s taking American intelligence reports too seriously: When CIA director Leon Panetta was asked earlier this year to assess Al Qaeda’s strength in Afghanistan – the prime justification for sending 97,000 U.S. and 48,800 other foreign troops there – he put it at “maybe 50 to 100, maybe less.”  You can see then how Karzai might get to saying that the U.S. was still in his country because “they like to conduct this thing that they call the war on terror, which we don’t call that anymore in Afghanistan. Because in my opinion and in the opinion of the absolute majority of the Afghan people, the war on terror cannot be conducted in Afghanistan because that isn’t here. It is somewhere else. We are only reaping the consequences of it here.”

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

And then besides the troops, there’s the additional 26,000 private security employees there, 90 percent of whom work for the U.S., directly or indirectly.  Some of them even provide security for the U.S. military.  And some of them also appear to work directly or indirectly for the Taliban as well.

By now we’re mostly past the initial surprise of learning that someone else besides the American military would be providing its security – it used to be considered pretty much what they did, after all.  So the nation appeared to pretty much take it in stride when it learned that in one case our leaner, meaner, partly privatized military had contracted with two Afghans it knew only as Mr. White and Mr. Pink – monikers taken from characters in the Quentin Tarantino movie Reservoir Dogs – to provide security for an American military base.

The real life Mr. White and Mr. Pink had a falling out, though, and Mr. Pink killed Mr. White, at which point he lined up with the Taliban for protection against Mr. White’s outraged relatives.  The U.S. military decided to keep him on, however, notwithstanding his new alliance with the principal force fighting the U.S. and its allies.

But while Mr. Pink unfortunately turned out to have Taliban connections, Mullah Mansour unfortunately did not – or at least the guy who said he was Mullah Mansour didn’t have quite the connections our side thought he did.
Talks involving the U.S., the Karzai government and the Taliban were officially secret, although U.S. General David Petraeus had actually publicly proclaimed their existence as evidence of the pressure the Taliban was feeling due to his forces’ recent increased military success.  After all, the talks were going particularly well in that the three-man Taliban delegation was demanding neither withdrawal of foreign forces nor a share of government power – things the Taliban had always insisted on in the past.  The White House even prevailed upon the New York Times to withhold the identity of the man leading the delegation – Mansour, widely assumed to be the Taliban’s number two man –  so as not to jeopardize them – until it was discovered that it wasn’t actually Mansour in the negotiations.

To be fair, we don’t actually know that the individual who led the talks on the Taliban side doesn’t have connections with the organization.  After the fraud was revealed, all one anonymous diplomat seemed to know for sure was “It’s not him.  And we gave him a lot of money.”   Call him Mr. Blue, maybe.  Names out of Reservoir Dogs; plot out of Clueless.

AND WE’RE THERE , WHY?

At this point, it seems hard to resist the conclusion that we are in Afghanistan simply because we have been there.  If it made sense to be there last year, or nine years ago, then it must still make sense to be there now, since we obviously still haven’t won.

The good news, however, is that there is a straightforward solution – withdraw outside troops, as Karzai and Gorbachev suggest, and deal with what emerges.  Yes, the results may not be to our liking.  But is there anything else we could possibly do that would enhance the Taliban’s popularity more that providing them the leading role in resisting yet another outside invasion of Afghanistan – as we are currently doing?  Besides, the powers in Washington have already acknowledged that this is precisely the outcome they anticipate.  In the words of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “The Taliban, we recognize, are part of the political fabric of Afghanistan at this point.”

So why not just get on with it?  So far as Congress goes, the House of Representatives already has legislation in place to bring the war to a prompt end: H. R. 6045, filed by Barbara Lee (D – CA), would restrict the use of “funds for operations of the Armed Forces in Afghanistan” to “purposes of providing for the safe and orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan of all members of the Armed Forces and Department of Defense contractor personnel.”  The Senate still needs someone to step forward to file a parallel bill, but when it comes to the White House, the route to ending the war is simplest of all – the President can just stop it.

And the chances of that happening?  Well, obviously neither the current White House nor Pentagon leadership wants to admit that not only can’t the U.S. win this war, but at this point it’s hard to realistically imagine what “winning” a war in Afghanistan would even look like.  What they do know is that facing reality would surely mean being denounced as defeatists.  So lives will continue to be lost, amazing amounts of money squandered (it costs about a million dollars to maintain an American soldier for a year in Afghanistan), but face must be saved.

Back when he was running, Barack Obama used to say “We are the change we have been waiting for.”  Unfortunately, when it comes to Afghanistan, he does not count as one of the “we,” so the “we” who remain can expect no help from that quarter. Since it appears that the president is moved neither by the advice of foreign leaders, the logic of the situation, nor the feelings of his own base (Democrats oppose his Afghanistan policy by a 62-33 margin according to a November Quinnipiac poll), the only possibility for changing course lies in altering the domestic political equation, that is to say turning the status quo into a negative and making support for immediate withdrawal a positive.  And in the case of a sitting first term president, the most direct– and perhaps only way to do that seems to be a 2012 primary challenge.

The American Mid-Term Elections Seen From Abroad

Ever wonder what our elections look like to the rest of the world?  Well, this year we have at least one ready-made answer at hand – the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the group that primarily comments on elections in former Soviet, Yugoslav or “Soviet Bloc” nations, actually sent a team to observe the recent American mid-term elections. On the whole, the observers thought that “the vote reflected the will of the people,” but they did find a few things they thought were off: the multiplicity of voting systems in use throughout the country, the lack of an ID requirement and – above all – the large and growing impact of money.

Few Americans may recognize OSCE by name, but in addition to the above mentioned nations, the group includes virtually all of Europe, the U.S. and Canada and calls itself “the world’s largest regional security organization” with “56 participating States” spanning “the geographical area from Vancouver to Vladivostok.”  Its roots lie in the 1975 Helsinki Accords of the East-West détente era,  but it has assumed a larger role since the end of the Cold War, supervising the post-Yugoslav Civil War elections in Bosnia and acting as the prime electoral monitoring agent in former Eastern Bloc and Yugoslav nations.

OSCE also conducts less intensive “assessment” missions – to review the “administrative and legal framework for the conduct of elections” in long established democratic member nations.  The U.S. Mission was conducted by the organization’s Parliamentary Assembly, with 56 observers included 42 Members of Parliament from 21 countries who were briefed in Washington D.C. and sent to observe voting in six states and the District of Columbia.

Although finding that “polling proceeded in a calm and well-organized manner,” the observers were struck by the “lack of voter secrecy” due to “voting booths and electronic voting machines … often placed too close to each other, which enabled clear insight as to how a voter marked the ballot,” as well as “the widespread possibility to vote without any picture I.D.” – a requirement in most of the elections the organization monitors.

The foreign law makers also noted the degree to which “the electoral system continues to be decentralized and highly diverse with a lack of uniform country-wide standards,” adding that “there are several voting systems within some states, as regulations are made at the local county level” and even “the right to access polling stations by international election observers is regulated by state law, and in some cases parliamentary observers were not able to observe the voting inside polling stations.”  All of this will come as no surprise to anyone remembering the infamous “hanging chads” and “butterfly ballots” of the 2000 presidential election.

What is new, however, and, judging from the space their brief report accords it, what apparently made the strongest impression upon the OSCE Mission was “money playing a significant role in creating an uneven playing field between candidates.”  Noting that “the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC that private corporations should enjoy the same rights as individuals regarding campaign spending, tying this to the right of freedom of speech in the U.S. Constitution,” they found the ruling expanding “possibilities for interest groups, including private corporations” and likely helping “to determine the outcome in a number of races.”

The fact that “many political ads did not reveal the source of the funding, as this is not required by law,” struck them as undermining “the transparency and accountability in the elections,” which “could also lead to questions of whether all donations originated in the U.S., as the law stipulates in the Federal Election Campaign Act, or whether any funds came from foreign sources.”

So, in case you’ve been thinking that giving corporations a free hand in the electoral process represents a fundamental threat to American democracy, at least you know you’re not alone in this world.  And if you’ve been wondering just how big a deal that Supreme Court decision was, well the Sunlight Foundation – an American “non-profit, nonpartisan organization that uses the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency,” as it describes itself – estimates “outside groups raised and spent $126 million on elections without disclosing the source,” constituting “more than a quarter of the total $450 million spent by outside groups.”  And adding “the $60 million spent by groups that were allowed to raise unlimited money, but still had to disclose … the total amount of outside money made possible by the Citizens United ruling reaches $186 million or 40 percent of the total.”

Humongous jump in corporate electoral spending results in big wins for candidates with leave-big-business-alone platforms.

The above would pretty much qualify as a “Dog bites man” headline.  So maybe from that point of view we can understand why the newsmedia might not bother to treat this as the overriding story of the election.  I mean, what else would we expect, really?   And the fact that more of CNN’s election day exit poll respondents blamed Wall Street for the country’s current economic problems than either George W. Bush (the runner-up choice) or Barack Obama and still voted the way they did tells us how very effective that spending was in obfuscating the issues.

The biggest question coming out of the elections, of course, remains unanswered as of yet. And it will not be answered by studies, observation missions or news reporting.  Are we willing and able to save our democracy from going to the highest bidder?

Tom Gallagher has participated in eight OSCE missions, most recently in Kyrgyzstan.  Contact him at TomGallagherwrites.com

On Not Drawing the Wrong Conclusions from Racial Disparities

One generally walks on eggshells when discussing race in America. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, considering some of the alternative scenarios. But then there’s a recent fairly well publicized study to remind us of just how limiting it can be to stick to the “safe” parts of the topic.

A new Southern Poverty Law Center publication, Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis, reports “the high and disproportionate suspension rates being experienced by youth of color,” and more specifically, “the pronounced differences for Black males.” Authors Daniel J. Losen (of UCLA) and Russell Skiba (from Indiana University) found the student group with the lowest rate of suspension was “Asian/Pacific Islander,” followed by “White,” and then “Hispanic” – all three of them actually with rates below the overall average. Slightly above average were “Native American” students, while “Black” students were suspended at a rate more than double the average of the 18 urban school districts the study looked at.

This last statistic troubles the authors – as it should trouble anyone involved in education. They reason it is “unlikely that poverty could sufficiently explain the gender and racial differences in these current data.”  Now, I happen to think that they’ve got that right. Unfortunately, a certain narrowness of vision sets in and instead of considering the broader social or historical picture that might factor into this situation, they narrow their field of vision to what they can find within the middle school walls. Their only recommendation – beyond the gathering and dissemination of more information – is to investigate “the possibility of conscious or unconscious racial and gender biases at the school level .”

Certainly history tells us we cannot and should not rule out the possibility of discrimination in any of the situations under consideration, yet there are also even larger issues here – the actual life situation of many in the black community. As anyone who spends time around urban public schools pretty well understands, predominantly black schools are much more difficult places to teach than the average school – kids do not leave their difficult circumstances at home.

Unfortunately, however, the authors at no time convey any sense of awareness of the conditions of actual classroom teaching, and instead cite studies that purport to show that what is cannot be.  And really, you don’t even need to go anywhere near the schools to know this  – popular culture does a more than adequate job of conveying some of the harsh realities of the black urban scene  – to the point of celebrating them, some might say.

We get the sense, though, that Losen and Skiba might be satisfied if schools would just cut the suspension rate of black males to the national average – which would improve the situation about as much as a mandate that black students receive the same proportion of “A”s and “F”s as any other group would represent a genuine improvement in strictly academic matters.

The authors mount an argument against suspensions given for reasons they find insufficiently specific:

disrespect, excessive noise, threat, and loitering – behaviors that would seem to require more subjective judgment on the part of the referring agent.

And to demonstrate the inefficacy of school suspension, they raise an argument that we could only charitably call “obtuse”:

It is difficult to argue that disciplinary removals result in improvements to the school learning climate when schools with higher suspension and expulsion rates average lower test scores than do schools with lower suspension and expulsion rates.

In other words, they found that tougher schools have lower test scores!

I don’t for a minute mean to denigrate the authors’ concern for the education system’s inability to do much of anything to improve the situation of the students who are suspended, but dismissing the efficacy of suspension in this manner seems about on a par with judging a policy of evicting law breakers from public housing projects to have failed if the projects remain poorer and more dangerous than the average neighborhood.

Losen and Skiba seem to be either oblivious to or ignoring the truism that all parents want disruptive students out of their children’s classrooms – with the possible exception of the parents of the disrupters themselves.  (In fact, a formidable part of the basis of the highly promoted charter school movement is the claim and/or hope that a charter school can deliver a better educational product if it doesn’t have to deal with the “trouble-makers.”)

At times it almost seems that the authors may fail to grasp the simple fact that students are suspended not primarily for their own educational benefit, but for that of everyone else in the classroom.  And if we didn’t know it already, recent studies remind us how race-separated America’s schools remain, even after decades of desegregation efforts – which means that children whose education is negatively impacted by classroom disruption will disproportionately tend to be from the same group as the disrupters.

So if the fact that “certain racial/gender groups are at far greater risk” of suspension from school means that “harsh discipline policies becomes a civil rights issue as well,” as the report argues, then the fact that “certain racial/gender groups are at far greater risk” of experiencing significant disruption to their educational process must be a civil rights issue as well. The issue – and solution to the problem, then, is unfortunately not so simple as the study might wish it to be.

(As for the presumed “gender bias” identified in middle school suspension rates, I don’t think we’re even dealing with a particularly sensitive/controversial issue here – it’s hard to imagine anyone with the slightest familiarity with middle school-age children not being aware of the fact that there are substantially more truculent boys than girls among the age group.)

WHAT THEY MIGHT HAVE SAID

When Losen and Skiba touch upon the question of safety, they hint at broader issues they might usefully pursue:

To the extent that safety is the motivation behind the use of suspension, it is short sighted at best to fail to understand that removing many students from school simply leaves them unsupervised on the street. The frequent use of suspension by schools may thus lead to a net reduction in community safety.

Surely if we can argue – and rightly, I think – that putting these kids on the streets probably makes those streets less safe, we must know that we don’t want to be arguing that the solution is to just leave them in the classroom.

Why do schools suspend students?  For a thousand specific answers, most of which have to do with removing barriers to the educational process in the classroom from which they were removed.  Should they be sent home to watch videos all day?  Of course not.  So why are they?  Because so many schools lack the resources to do anything with them within the walls of the school but outside of their classroom.  An “in-school suspension” would likely be a far better alternative in most cases.  However, it requires deploying someone to deal with those students full time and there are ever fewer schools willing or able to fund positions solely for that purpose.  Had the authors focused on this dilemma, they might at least have contributed to a broader, more meaningful discussion of the situation.

So why didn’t they?  “Realism,” perhaps?  The authors may very reasonably have figured that dedicating greater resources toward classroom-disrupting students is a pretty hard sell in this period of budget cutbacks. Academic comfort levels?  Poverty and discrimination are recognized areas of study, so we’ll stick with them?

The alternative, of course, is to step back to eggshell territory, where we silently agree not to go. We would have to revisit a discussion that once led to the idea of affirmative action – a time that seems so far away. We would need to consider the ways that this country’s history of slavery continues to affect the life situations of black America to this day, in ways that differ from even the discrimination and poverty experienced by many immigrant groups that came to this country voluntarily.

The situation is not easily discussed. And there’s no telling what conclusions people may draw from it. For some, there’s the fear that dwelling on the topic might even run the risk of appearing to suggest that some groups are inherently intellectually inferior or superior.  Academics are not the only ones who don’t know how to “frame” the discussion. All good reasons to back off, maybe. And yet it’s hard to see how keeping the discussion artificially small gets us anywhere in the long run.

A Review of The Empire Strikes Out

The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold US Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad
by Robert Elias, 418 Pages, The New Press, $27.95.

One thing you can’t accuse Robert Elias of being is a frontrunner. On the very first page of one of the most unusual baseball books you’re going to run across in this or any baseball season, he examines the origins of the name of the reigning champions of Major League Baseball and explains that we might as well be calling them the New York Wankers.  The Yankees don’t actually come in for any particular scorn, but Elias’s thoroughness requires that he start his story of baseball and foreign policy at the beginning, in the colonial era days when the song “Yankee Doodle” was at the top of the charts.

Any reader with a serious interest in both American foreign policy and the American League is going to love this book.  But I do mean a serious interest – with 97 pages of footnotes (so thorough as to include this writer) his book is no quick read but it is the sort you can open to any page and find something fascinating.  (For instance, when I just did so, I opened to Babe Ruth’s thoughts on Cuban independence and the story of the Washington Senators pitcher who led rebel forces against the Cuban dictator Machado in the 1920s.)  If you’re the kind of baseball fan who has thought about both Leon Trotsky and Hal Trosky, I’d say that Elias, who teaches history at the University of San Francisco, just may have written the definitive reference book for you. (He tells us that when the latter, a Cleveland Indians slugger of the 30’s, was having an off day fans might shout out that he should “go back to Russia.”)

Baseball’s earliest use in promoting Americanism abroad came in the world baseball tours that started in the late nineteenth century.  Elias reports that on the 1888 tour, organized by player, executive, and sporting goods magnate Albert Spalding, players tried to throw baseballs over the pyramids and to hit the sphinx in the eye. Their request to play nine in the Roman Coliseum was apparently nixed by archeologists with little appreciation for the game.

In 1878, the first league outside the US was established in Cuba, a country that would subsequently occupy a unique place in both strands of this book’s story. (Elias does appear to confuse the Cuban pitcher mentioned above with his brother who played outfield with the Senators, but as the serious fan knows, just as is the case with fielders, the best writers aren’t necessarily the ones that make the fewest errors, but the ones who make the most plays.)

The military has long held great fascination for the powers of the game who have had a particular thing for generals, starting with the now disproved claim that General Abner Doubleday invented the game.  Doubleday did actually serve at Fort Sumter, though, prompting baseball executive Branch Rickey to declare that “The only thing General Doubleday started was the Civil War.”  And the game served military purposes in sometimes surprising ways: Elias tells of World War I-era Boston Braves pitcher Bill James becoming an instructor in the U.S. Army largely on the strength of his expertise in throwing the new, smaller, more baseball-size hand grenade – the ability to throw a curve apparently being considered crucial at the time.  And one of the reasons Sun Yat Sen organized the Changsa Field Ball Society before overthrowing the Chinese monarchy was as a cover for teaching the art of grenade throwing.

So when baseball looked to hire its first commissioner, partially in response to the 1919 Black Sox scandal, it came as no surprise that there was serious interest in Generals John Pershing and Leonard Wood.  When they proved unavailable the club owners came up with someone who outdid the both of them in jingoism – Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Named after a (similarly but not identically spelled) Civil War battle in which his father had participated, Landis once told a group of American Legionnaires that “It was my great disappointment to give [Milwaukee Socialist Party Congressman Victor] Berger only twenty years in Leavenworth” for his opposition to World War I, rather than “having him lined up against the wall and shot.”

After former U.S. Senator Happy Chandler was dumped as the game’s second commissioner (ironically, Elias tells us, the final straw was his suggestion that the major leagues might have to suspend operations due to the Korean War), the job was offered to Generals Douglas McArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Emmett “Rosy” O’Donnell, and Maxwell Taylor before ultimately going to National League President Ford Frick.  (The owners finally landed themselves a general when they named William Eckert (the “Unknown Soldier” as some wags called him) commissioner despite the fact that he had apparently not actually been to a ball game in a decade.

The World War II era, when so many stars joined the military that the St. Louis Browns even won the pennant, is replete with baseball tales.  When Congress was considering the internment of Italians, Elias reports that a San Francisco attorney making the case against the policy used the example of its potential effect on a family such as Joe DiMaggio’s, that had eight American-born children but two parents who remained Italian citizens.

And then there was Hank Greenberg.  In his book “Baseball in 1941,” Robert Creamer noted that he’d “been surprised to discover that few baseball fans of my children’s generation know how good Greenberg was. I think the current preoccupation with career totals – 3000 hits, 500 home runs, 300 victories has diminished the appreciation of superb players who had shorter careers. But you ought to know about Greenberg.” As one of that generation, I know that when we first looked into the home run hitters of olden times, not just before steroids, but even before the 162 game schedule, we found there were three players who had hit 58 or more home runs in a single season – Babe Ruth, of course, Jimmy Foxx, who turned out to have been the game’s second most prolific home run hitter up to that time,  and Hank Greenberg.   With 331 home runs, Greenberg had obviously had a good career and yet he didn’t seem to size up to the other two.

Greenberg was Jewish and while there were never any bars to Jews playing in the major leagues, as there were for blacks, there were those who were not all that happy about it.  Elias writes: “Except for Jackie Robinson. No ballplayer took more abuse than Greenberg, who asked, ‘How the hell could you get up to home plate every day and have some son of a bitch call you a Jew bastard and a kike and a sheenie without feeling the pressure.”  SO there was considerable irony when Greenberg was accused in the media of bribing a doctor to be declared ineligible for the military in 1940. He responded by asking for a new physical, was inducted for a one year term, reenlisted after Pearl Harbor and was out of baseball until 1945.  Given that in the four full seasons before he went into the Army, Greenberg had averaged 43 home runs and 148 RBIs a year, but played only two more seasons afterwards, we have our explanation as to why people have to be told “how good Greenberg was.”

Ted Williams, probably the only player with career stats more negatively impacted by military service than Greenberg, turns out not to have been the total enthusiast some might expect.  Having already served in World War II, he thought he was called back into the service during the Korean War for his star value.  Although he flew thirty-nine combat missions in that war and was hit three times, he later said, “If it were an emergency, fine.  But Korea wasn’t an all-out war.  They should have let the professionals handle it. Vietnam was another undeclared war.  If I had a kid [there] I’d have been screaming.”

Baseball players served in the Cold War as well.  After Paul Robeson’s 1949 statement that “It would be unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against the Soviet Union,” Jackie Robinson was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee to say that blacks would, in fact, “help their country … against Russia or any other enemy.”  Years later he would call this testimony “the greatest regret of my life” in part due to his “increased respect for Paul Robeson who sacrificed himself … sincerely trying to help his people.”

Political definitions were about as loose in baseball as in the nation at large. When Dodger owner Walter O’Malley accused Cardinal owner Fred Saigh of being a socialist for suggesting revenue sharing between teams on TV contracts — well maybe.  But San Francisco Giants manager Alvin Dark claiming that “Any pitcher who throws at a batter and tries to hit him is a communist” ?  Now that does seem like too much. And naturally, the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players who organized the 1885 Players League were “terrorists” in the eyes of Albert Spalding. Elias even covers the Patriot League invented in Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, written out of history because of the degree of its infiltration by Communists. And just like with Hank Greenberg, you should know how good The Great American Novel is.  You just couldn’t be too careful in those days – the Cincinnati Reds became the Redlegs for a decade or so, until it became clear that they weren’t really, you know, reds.

The beat goes on right through to the present day. The president of the Baseball Hall of Fame canceled a twenty-fifth anniversary showing of Bull Durham in 2003, because of stars Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon’s opposition to the Iraq invasion. Two years later, then- Oakland A’s pitcher Barry Zito founded Strikeouts for Troops, noting that “Baseball is ingrained in the fabric of America, just like the military.  We thought it was a good marriage.”  Elias tells us that the organization’s funds are distributed by “the Freedom Alliance, a right-wing, pro-war organization featuring the conservative broadcaster Sean Hannity and Alliance founder Oliver North.”

I could go on, but really you should get the book.

The Remarkable Resilience of This Socialism Thing

The timing was perfect – on May 1, President Obama would tell the University of Michigan graduates they ought to be able to discuss politics civilly, without fearing that people would start “Throwing around phrases like ‘socialist’ and ‘Soviet-style takeover,’ ‘fascist’ and ‘right-wing nut’” – words he thought had “the effect of comparing our government, or our political opponents, to authoritarian and even murderous regimes.”  Understandable enough, maybe, that first on the President’s lips would be “socialist,” seeing as how there were people who’d come to the commencement ceremony primarily to brandish signs calling him precisely that.  But only a couple of days later we got the latest reminder of just how many people apparently don’t feel a need to be sheltered from the word these days.

Twenty-nine percent of the nation, it seems, has “a positive reaction to the word “socialism” (with 59% in the negative) – according to the Pew Research Center’s latest findings.  Democrats are actually 44% to 43% in the positive column, while the President’s other perceived base, the under-30’s, were only 49% to 43% negative.  (Their view of “capitalism” was also negative, by the way – 48% to 43%.)  This latest news was actually not as good a showing for “socialism” as January’s Gallup Poll where 36% were positive toward the idea, including 53% of Democrats and 61% of those identifying as “liberals.”  And last year, when Rasmussen Reports asked a more pointed question, it found 20% of the populace preferring socialism to capitalism, compared to 53% who preferred capitalism, with only a 33% to 37% spread among those under thirty.

How can this be? we might ask, given that you just about never encounter any positive treatment of “socialism” in the mass media and virtually everyone in the public sphere has been running away from the word  for – well, for maybe sixty years now.  Yes, there may be liberal commentators who don’t trash the concept (and the polls suggest they may even privately like it – just as Rush Limbaugh has always said), but they sure won’t praise it either.  Likewise, there are politicians who may not get upset being called a socialist, but so far as I can see, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont remains the single member in either branch of Congress known to actually use the word in describing his views.  Socialism is simply not a concept in public circulation.

There was that one amazing moment, of course – the February 16, 2009 Newsweek cover announcing, “We are all socialists now.”  This extraordinary bit of journalistic exuberance now looks primarily like a reaction to the unity of purpose the Bush and Obama Administrations had displayed in their bank bailout bills.  And since then – except for those  periodic polling reports –  it’s pretty much been a year of Sarah Palin-type stuff about Obama leading us down the long march to “Soviet-Lite” socialism that FDR started, and so forth – you could look it up.  (And maybe a more recent Rasmussen Reports shows some of the effect – apparently capitalism’s edge is now up to 60-18%.)

Anyhow, with discussion of the topic nowhere to be found in the public realm, I figured maybe I should ask around – and here’s what I found.

Some were quite economic in describing the “positive associations” that “socialism” held for them, offering virtual textbook definitions:

“Socialism is the collective and democratic management of shared resources, whether cultural (education), financial (pensions), scientific (medical care), or natural (environmental laws).” Or, “Means equality doesn’t it?  Maximizes use values instead of exchange values.  But mostly I like it because it minimizes the anarchy of capitalist production.” And, “Ownership of natural resources by the people, ownership of the means of production by the people who work there.” Also, “In ‘social’ism, the focus is on society and people. In capitalism, the central thing is dead inert capital, and making IT all important.”

Others associated a broader meaning, calling it:

“Not an ideology nor is it an economic system. It is simply a national culture that prioritizes the reduction of human suffering;” or “Reflective of a set of values in which the community matters as much as the individual;” and “Solidarity – if I had to say just one word” or “belief in the common good.”

Some were more colloquial:

“It boils down to this: We can create a society in which people meet and respect each other’s needs, or a society based on the principle of dog-eat-dog. Which would you prefer?”

Others spiritual:

“Human compassion like that mentioned by every spiritual belief on earth.  Socialism to me is the political practice of one’s spiritual belief in life’s connection to each other person on this planet, every species on it and the planet itself.”

Humanistic:

“Emphasis on collective welfare rather than individual accumulation.  Concern for the least well off rather than the richest.  Recognition that economic rights are human rights and attempting to secure them.  State power exercised in the interest of the largest class of people rather than the smallest,” or “Worker involved, democratic, personal responsibility, society concerned, protection of the minority, universal good, individual working for the better of the whole.”

Ebullient:

“The first words that pop into my mind when I hear someone say “socialism”: kindness, decency, plenty, fairness, peace. God help me, I see an image of flowers and rainbows and children playing.”

Civic:

“Pride in and /or responsibility for public institutions. And the institutions, government, NGO, or privately held, hopefully are able to support and be responsible for citizens. It is democratic.   Capitalism –  1 Dollar, 1 Vote – is profoundly anti democratic”

Or religious:

My absolute favorite– someone explained how he held a “positive view of socialism because after all it’s what Our Lady wants.”  So, to the tune of the Internationale:

“Sing we a song of high revolt;
make great the Lord, his name exalt!
Sing we the song that Mary sang
of God at war with human wrong.
Sing we of him who deeply cares
and still with us our burden bears.
He who with strength the proud disowns,
brings down the mighty from their thrones.
By him the poor are lifted up;
he satisfies with bread and cup
the hungry men of many lands;
the rich must go with empty hands.
He calls us to revolt and fight
with him for what is just and right,
to sing and live Magnificatin crowded street and council flat.”

When pressed as to what in the world he had sent along, the respondent explained that “It’s a hymn based on the Magnificat of Mary that they actually sing in some churches in the UK.”

Arguably the only thing new I learned from all this was the hymn.  And yet, I could not fail to be struck by the breadth of response to my small survey.  Now this is something I think you’d have to call an underground culture at this point – one that runs deep as well as silent.  After all, my reference to “textbook definitions” above was intended on the wry side, given that it’s quite unlikely that any of these people really picked up much of what “socialism” suggests to them from actual text books.  Nor – the “Magnificat Internationale” notwithstanding – did they likely pick it up at services on Sunday – or any other day of the week.  This affinity for socialism seems to be an almost neutrino-like phenomenon – it’s all around, but it’s undetected.

One person argued that it was, “Probably better to talk about ‘economic democracy’ rather than socialism” because “once a word is tainted, I don’t think it can be rehabilitated, at least for a generation or two” – an argument many have made over the years.  But isn’t the upshot of the recent surveys that the “generation or two” may now have passed – more than half a century since the McCarthy Hearings ended?  And the younger you are, the more favorable you’re now likely to be toward socialism – at least so the polls say.

Another thought that “The great irony is that one of the reasons socialism polls well among young people is that the right has repeatedly attacked Obama and many of the things he supports as socialist. People look at it and say, ‘if that’s socialism, I’m for it.’”

(The one public figure who has tried to correct this misperception of the President’s policies is Texas Representative Ron Paul, who – whatever else you might want to say about him – does take these things seriously.  He argues that the President’s programs are “corporatist” rather than “socialist,” citing “the health care bill that recently passed [that] does not establish a Canadian-style government-run single payer health care system” but “relies on mandates forcing every American to purchase private health insurance or pay a fine.”)

So how does the effect of association of socialism with Obama compare with the fact that in the more than twenty years since the Soviet Union last “tainted” the word, “socialism” has come to now suggest places more like Sweden and France?  A good question for the next poll – no?

All of this is certainly not to suggest that there is no rhyme or reason to the President’s efforts to keep the word beyond the pale of polite political discussion.  Even if a third of the population is positive on the idea, you don’t win many elections in this country with a third of the vote, so better to find a way to identify with the two-thirds.  On the other hand, as for those who have “kept the faith” on socialism – or just recently picked it up, well they might want to discuss it a bit.

Our Foreign Policy Minsky Moment

If there can be any kind of silver lining to our ongoing “Great Recession” it might be that it has elevated the level of economic discussion, at least slightly. For instance, when’s the last time you heard anyone talking about the “magic of the marketplace?”  On the contrary, a fair number of writers and economists seem to have experienced recovered memories of things the country once used to know – like that a capitalist economy is cyclical and inherently prone to crises such as the current one.  In this, the ninth year of our Afghanistan War, the discussion of our foreign policy cries out for similar flashes of enlightenment.

The most interesting economic concept to emerge from recent obscurity is the “Minsky Moment,” Hyman Minsky having been an economist who described a type of social amnesia that occurs as people will themselves into believing that business cycles are things of the past as they engage in riskier and riskier financial activity.  Admirers of Minsky, who died in 1997, named the point when the dream comes crashing down into the nightmare of the next financial crisis after him.  Minsky saw several stages to the process, as gradual societal memory loss of past depressions and recessions leads to something of a state of euphoria when we may hear arguments, such as heard only a few years ago, that transformative innovations like computerization and the Internet have created a “new economy” of permanent prosperity.

Looking at the course of American foreign policy from the Vietnam War to the current day, it is hard to miss a similar dream cycle playing out there.  After Vietnam, a new sense of modesty came over American foreign policy.  Yes, our military could unleash destruction upon southeast Asia that was in some respects unmatched in world history.  And, yes, we might be able to keep it up indefinitely – we would not be “defeated” in the conventional sense.  But the ultimate message of that war was No: No matter what our military might, we could not impose our will on a country that did not wish to have its system dictated by foreign armies from halfway around the world.

Not every one approved of this national dose of humility, of course.  The “Vietnam Syndrome” was roundly denounced in interventionist circles, as the new reticence toward foreign military intervention steered policymakers toward subversion rather than invasion.  Nicaragua can probably thank the Vietnam Syndrome for the fact that Ronald Reagan merely funded its government’s  political and military opposition rather than engaging in full scale invasion.

But slowly the memories faded and were replaced with new ones.  The first George Bush’s Gulf War did not turn into a quagmire. And Bill Clinton’s bombings of Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia sort of returned the country to its old habits. The euphoria stage surely arrived with the second George Bush when a senior adviser to the President could inform a reporter that he was merely ”in what we call the reality-based community” who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality,” while the White House recognized that ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

We have left that stage, clearly. A statement like the above now seems as unimaginable as it did in the first decades after the Vietnam War.  Yet the turnaround is obviously far from completed; the country has not really shed the omnipotence illusion.  For, while the rationale for the Iraq War may now be widely understood as farcical, the Afghanistan War remains on the upswing.

Every war is different, to be sure, and at one point the Afghanistan and Vietnam Wars appeared to have little more in common than the fact that they were on the same continent.  After all, who could be further apart than the communist Viet Cong and the fundamentalist Taliban?  But as time has passed an overwhelming resemblance has come to the fore: Both wars are attempts to “create our own reality” in countries that have many times demonstrated that they will not allow this to happen.

Our foreign policy Minsky Moment, if there is to be one, will certainly not originate in the White House or the Pentagon, though. The White House would be too afraid of the political consequences of facing the facts and the Pentagon would be too embarrassed to do so. We will have to figure out how some other way to wake the country from its dreams.

Nuclear Posture Review: Oops! We Missed One!

In one of the more remarkable public course changes Washington has yet seen, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has added Israel’s name to the previously released short list of exceptions to the general policies articulated in the Pentagon’s new Nuclear Posture Review. Originally released on April 6, the Review, which stands as the highest expression of the nation’s nuclear strategy, stated that nonnuclear nations abiding by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty would generally not be threatened with nuclear retaliation for non-nuclear attacks.

The policy did note the exception of “outliers” which were identical to the “rogue states” referred to by the Bush administration. At the time of the document’s release, Gates told a press conference, “There is a message for Iran and North Korea here…if you’re not going to play by the rules, if you’re going to be a proliferator, then all options are on the table in terms of how we deal with you.” North Korea is known to have nuclear weapons and Iran is widely thought to be in active pursuit of a nuclear capability.

Now Gates has amended that list, noting that “upon careful consideration we have decided that a realistic appraisal of the situation requires that we acknowledge the existence of another nation widely believed not to be in compliance with the Nonproliferation Treaty – Israel.” President Obama himself immediately asserted that what he called a “simple policy clarification” implied no change in United States policy toward its closest Middle East ally, saying this “in no way alters America’s commitment to the existence and security of Israel.” The addition, he said, “should not lead anyone to believe that hostilities with our great friend are even remotely anticipated.” He described it rather as a “signal” that his Administration considered it “important to convey to all parties in the region that we see the situation as it really is, not as we might wish to see it.”

Although the President steered clear of further detail, this first American acknowledgment that Israel, a non-signer of the Nonproliferation Treaty, has amassed a nuclear weapons arsenal is seen by many Middle East analysts as representing a potentially tectonic shift in world politics. Israel’s nuclear arsenal has been an open secret for decades. Former Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu served 18 years in prison for telling the British press details of the nuclear weapons program in 1986. At the time, London’s Sunday Times estimated its production to be in excess of 100 weapons.

Israel’s first warhead is thought to have been produced in the late 1960’s. The country is also believed by many to have collaborated with South Africa in that country’s development of nuclear arms, before its force was dismantled in 1989 on the eve of the nation’s transition to majority rule. Current estimates put Israel’s warhead numbers at anywhere from 75 to 400; the high figure would likely make the country the world’s third largest nuclear power – after the United States and Russia. Israel’s official policy is to offer no comment on the matter.

Observers attributed this astounding “policy clarification” to delayed effects of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s surprising decision to name the President as the award’s recipient during his first year in office. One White House insider, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, “As you know, the President in no way sought the Prize. In fact, a lot of people around him urged him to decline, thinking that it would place too high a burden of expectation around his future policies. But you see, the thing is the award seems to have gotten under his skin – to the point where he appears to have decided that if he’s ever going to play any kind of role in bringing peace to the Middle East, both sides have got to see him as being reality-based.”

Other sources noted that Gates was considered the right choice to be the messenger of such a bold policy alteration since he has altered it in the past – it is less than two years since the Defense Secretary declared that the U.S. would not forswear first use of nuclear weapons in retaliation for chemical or biological attacks upon the US or its allies, a policy that the new Review repudiates. At the time of his earlier statement, Gates was serving in his current position in George W. Bush’s Cabinet. One CIA source thought it would take several days for world opinion “to sort itself out over this shocking outbreak of candor.”

Okay, so Gates and Obama didn’t actually say anything about Israel’s nuclear arsenal and the way it might make the highly touted new Nuclear Posture Review seem hypocritical. But since the new policy was unveiled in early April, we could hardly wait until next April Fool’s Day to satirize it, now could we? The point of this little thought experiment in candor is not to suggest that any of the actual nuclear policy changes Obama is currently making or proposing are in any way wrong or useless. It is rather to illustrate just how much further the U.S. would need to go in order to actually be seen as “reality-based” in many parts of the world.
Domestically, the current administration is widely viewed as relatively “dovish” on matters relating to nuclear weaponry – at least in comparison to its predecessor. Likewise, the idea of dissuading Iran from joining the world’s nuclear powers is hardly a controversial one here at home. But the presumption that our government therefore enjoys worldwide credibility in these matters runs up against some harsh perceptions: For much of the world, the global campaign to prevent Iran from getting what Israel already has seems to indicate only that the one nation to have ever used nuclear weapons has no immediate plans to change its policies in any serious way.

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