A Review of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People

We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People
by Peter Van Buren, 288 Pages, Henry Holt and Company, $25.00.

My excuse for just now reviewing a book that came out last fall is that it took the U.S. State Department even longer than that to get around to reading this book – and their review was a lot more important than mine. “We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People” is the story of State Department career employee Peter Van Buren’s year in the field “rebuilding” Iraq after our invasion destroyed it. Although this was still a dangerous proposition (one base he lived at was mortared or rocketed over seventy times during his six months there), the level of killing was well past its peak by the time he arrived in 2009. The story he tells, then, is skewed more to the farcical than to the tragic end of the historical cycle.

With no night life and few other diversions available to the Provincial Reconstruction Teams that he served on, there was little to divert a dedicated note-taker like Van Buren, so by the fall of 2010 he already had a manuscript ready to submit for the departmental review required before publication of any work-related material. As he tells it, after hearing nothing within the allotted 30 day period, he went forward with publication plans, only to have the State Department contact his publisher a year later objecting to three passages it claimed contained classified information. Reading the book, however, it’s hard not to suspect that the Department’s decision to fire him in March of this year (currently under appeal) derived more from statements like “we acted like buffoons” than any supposed security breaches.

Van Buren’s previous work, he tells us, “was removed from the high level WikiLeaky things … We worked with Americans who were victims of crime abroad … the benign side of empire.” But for the first time since the Vietnam War, he says, the State Department pressured Foreign Service Officers into assignments they didn’t want by adding financial incentives and making tours of duty in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan a virtual requirement for advancement.

So, imagining that he knew what was good for him – career-wise, anyhow – off he went to spend a year watching power point presentations, eating sludge and living in shipping containers in order to apply that good old American know-how to another benighted land. And after the “ninety minutes of handy phrases and greetings,” which would be the only Arabic language training he got, he was good to go. After all, when money talks it needs no translation and Van Buren and his peers were there to spend money – in staggering amounts. By his reckoning, the Iraq reconstruction project ran over $170 billion and to put that in perspective he notes that “the reconstruction of Germany and Japan cost, in 2010 dollars, only $32 billion and $17 billion respectively.”

The whole operation seems to have operated on the Dubai model. Although there were 150,000 American subcontractors making six figure salaries, with free trips home, they were not expected to do “anything dirty, dark, or dangerous, such as cleaning latrines, digging holes, unloading things, guarding places, or serving food.” For that there were “young male workers imported from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, and other Third World garden spots.” Van Buren found himself “watching news from home about foreclosures, and … reading e-mails from my sister about school cutbacks,” while signing off on expenditures left and right. One program involved handing out $5000 in cash grants to Iraqis who would promise to “open a business” – any business, no strings attached.

Competition for biggest waste was stiff. There was the $2.58 million chicken processing plant that could not match the price of chicken imported from Brazil. And the new medical gases factory south of Baghdad whose product could not pass army checkpoints “because terrorists used such cylinders as bomb casings.” And the $171 million hospital whose opening Laura Bush had flown in for in 2004, yet was still not operating. Then there was the first Baghdad yellow pages, of which Van Buren writes, “[W]e could come up with only 250 businesses to include out of a city of several million. We could not safely go door-to-door and so hired a local contractor at seven bucks a copy to give away the books for us.”

And there the beekeeping for widows program – programs aimed at Iraqi women were actually quite popular among those charged to spend. Van Buren notes that “[S]ome of us expected the Republicans to like the fact that women could not work outside the house or drive,” so there was always a great of speculation as to why colonels found themselves always having to try “to come up with what they described as ‘some kind of goddamn chick event.’” Many suspected that “the real reason the Bush people liked it [the emphasis on women’s issues] was that it pissed off Muslim men.”

All of this was run out of the world’s biggest embassy, a place larger than Vatican City. As the American Ambassador said, “[A]long with the Great Wall of China, it’s one of the things you can see with the naked eye from outer space.” Van Buren attended an economics conference there that included a tourism briefing where it was reported that “in 2009 sixty five Western tourists visited Iraq” including “eighteen Taiwanese” and “seventeen Americans.” The briefing did not explain when Taiwanese had become Westerners. The US Army polled the tourists, though – they said hated the hotels in Iraq. (A sign in the Embassy advertised swing dance lessons on Tuesdays.)

Van Buren certainly had this reader snickering out loud regularly, but there was one point where he elicited a gasp that was in no way mirthful – when he described an aspect of lifesaving training the soldiers had undergone back in the states.

“The guys at Falcon who had been selected for the training all started with a big 180-pound, man-sized hog,” he writes. “The trainers blew half the pig’s face away, slit open its belly, and cut the femoral artery. The idea was to get the soldiers to ignore the horrific facial wound and the slit belly and focus on the femoral. If you couldn’t stop it from pushing blood out, your pig/soldier/friend bled to death in minutes. The soldiers topped one another with ghastly descriptions of how messed up their pigs had been. The trainers were never done. As soon as you controlled one thing, they shot, cut, or tore the pig in another way. At one point they threw the bleeding pig into the back of a pickup truck and you had to continue to work to save its life as the truck bounced down a rutted back road in North Carolina. … Soldiers who had undergone the experience were careful when and how they talked about it. No one enjoyed seeing an animal suffer, and most left the sessions with questions in their heads about right and wrong. What was a pig’s life worth?”

The phenomenon of the suffering of animals sometimes carrying greater impact than that of fellow humans is well known – orphaned pets and starving zoo animals have often touched people inured to endless stories about man’s inhumanity to his own species. And since Van Buren later recounts an episode in which a sergeant who had received this training saves a lieutenant’s life, perhaps we are to consider this ghastly procedure as something ultimately benefiting human life, even if extremely unpleasant to think about or perform.

But isn’t there is a larger question here? What was the justification for putting the lieutenant in harm’s way in the first place? Or, in specific terms, was George Bush’s war in Iraq worth even the life of a single pig? Or, for that matter, are the next twelve years of war in Afghanistan that Obama has committed us to worth it?

David Cameron’s No Poodle – He’s a New Breed

It was just like old times when British Prime Minister David Cameron came calling at the White House this month. Yes, the “Special Relationship” felt really special again just like back in the days when Tony Blair lined the U.K. up behind the Iraq War – when those French and Germans were having none of it – and made his reputation as “George Bush’s poodle.” For a couple of years in between, that sour old Gordon Brown was Prime Minister and obviously didn’t enjoy the sound of his master’s voice in Washington nearly so much. But now it seems that Barack Obama has his own pet at 10 Downing Street. Of course, Cameron’s Conservative, not Labour, so he’s an entirely different breed than Blair. But the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank seemed a bit off in characterizing Cameron as “serving as Obama’s guard dog.” Perhaps something more along the lines of a Yorkshire Terrier – Obama’s Yorkie.

It’s been a rough stretch for the president’s Afghanistan War policy: the Koran burnings; Afghan government soldiers and police killing NATO soldiers; American soldiers urinating on corpses; one soldier murdering sixteen civilians, Afghan President Karzai calling for the Americans to be confined to major bases. So when Cameron arrived and said of the war, “If you compare where we are today with where we’ve been two, three years ago, the situation is considerably improved,” it did suggest that the prime minister may have told his people not to brief him on the subject these past years. But oblivious support is better than no support at all and the White House loved it.

The prime minister also said “it would be hard to say that the al Qaida network is not effectively dismantled today.” Oh, wait a minute – wrong prime minister. That was Tony Blair talking – on February 6, 2003. But whatever the rationale of this war is supposed to be these days, David Cameron was here to say that he’s for it and that he and the president are “absolutely in lock-step” over the withdrawal process.

The real story here is, or ought to be, two leaders persisting in the pursuit of a ten year old war “increasingly unpopular on both sides of the Atlantic,” as the International Herald Tribune characterized the situation. An ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted earlier this month found Americans now consider the war “not worth fighting” by a 60-35 percent margin and 55 percent think “most Afghans oppose what the United States is trying to do in Afghanistan,” while only 30 percent believe they support it. Following the deaths of the 16 villagers, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found 61 percent of Americans supporting bringing the remaining U.S. troops home immediately, with only 17 percent against.

The war enjoys even less support in the United Kingdom, where an ITV1 News at Ten poll found 46 percent of respondents professing to have no idea why British troops were in Afghanistan, 55 percent thinking the threat of terrorism on British soil was increased by British forces remaining there, 57 percent not believing that the deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan are justified by the cause they are fighting for and 73 percent considering the war “unwinnable.” 55 percent supported immediate withdrawal.

So, no surprise, Obama was thrilled with the Prime Minister’s visit, declaring that “in good times and in bad, [Cameron] is just the kind of partner that you want at your side. I trust him. He says what he does, and he does what he says. And I’ve seen his character.” Precisely the type of qualities you look for in man’s best friend.

To say that the two were joined at the hip during Cameron’s visit would be to employ too slight a metaphor. Joined at the brain is more like it: They went so far as to co-author an op ed for the Washington Post. So when Obama wrote about “imposing tough sanctions on the Iranian regime for failing to meet its international obligations” and warned that otherwise Iran would “face the consequences,” well, that was Cameron too. And when Obama failed to mention the corresponding U.S. obligations to reduce its nuclear arsenal – as U.S. presidents always do, it was also Cameron failing to mention U.K. obligations to reduce its own – as U.K. prime ministers always do.

Cameron separately told his American audience that “we take nothing off the table” when it comes to Iran, just the same as the president had said. So if any American were doubting the sanity of reserving the right to use nuclear weapons to ensure that Iran doesn’t acquire nuclear weapons, now you know that the Brits think just the same – at least the ones in power do. And, oh yeah, Cameron told us he thought Obama’s bombing of Libya was cool, too – and he said that on his own.

As a reward for being such a good political lap dog, Cameron not only got a hot dog and a basketball game from the president, but a state dinner at the White House – only the sixth of the Obama Administration. They even created a new dish in his honor – Bison Wellington, which, according to the menu, is “a perfect pairing of U.S. and U.K. cultures … a classic English dish given an American twist with the use of buffalo tenderloin.” News reports did not specify whether the prime minister ate from a bowl or at the table.

Honey, We’re Bombing a New Country

“Did you see this here, dear?  It says the U.S. bombed another country last week.”

“No, I didn’t.  Which one?”

“Somalia.”

“And why did we do that, honey?”

“It looks like there are some people there who don’t like us, dear.”

“And with all we do for those people in the war against terrorism! Now which one is Somalia, again?”

“It’s in Africa and it’s not the Sudan, the other one we usually confuse it with.”

“But didn’t we used to bomb those people?”

“Yes, but it’s been a couple of years.”

“And who are the people we’re bombing?”

“It’s some group called the Shabab.  Dear, while you’re on the computer, could you Google them?”

“Okay, here it is – you can also spell it Shabaab and they call them al Shabaab, too.  Hmm, you wonder how we’re ever going to find these people if we don’t even know their name – anyhow, it says they remind a lot of people of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and they talk to al Queda in Yemen, and they’re trying overthrow the government of Somalia.  That sounds very bad, doesn’t it.”

“Yes, it does.  I think I’ll write them down on our Scrabble word list – the name seems likely to come up again.”

“Did the Shabab say this happened, honey?

“No, I don’t know if we know where their office is, actually.  It just says that unnamed ‘American officials’ told the Washington Post about it.  It was the first time we’ve used a drone aircraft to fire a missile in Somalia ”

“And they don’t even give the names of the people they talked to ?  Now, that’s some sloppy reporting, isn’t it?”

“No, dear, this is secret.”

“What do you mean secret?  You’re reading it in the newspaper, aren’t you?  Is this one of those Wiki Leak things?”

“No, these unnamed people are authorized to be telling us military secrets.  It’s just that we can’t bomb Somalia.”

“What you mean we can’t bomb Somalia?  Didn’t you just tell me we just did bomb Somalia?”

“Well, dear, we’re not at war with Somalia, so we can’t bomb them.  It’s like Canada – Canada’s not at war with us, so they can’t bomb us.”

“Well, thank God for that, anyway.”

“So even though we did bomb Somalia we don’t say we bombed Somalia – except to the Washington Post.  It’s a secret.”

“Well, for Pete’s sake, what kind of secret can it be when you bomb someone.  All the neighbors would be bound to know.  You’d probably break all their windows.  And did you say it was a drone aircraft.  “Drone” always sounds like one of those Star Wars characters to me, but it must be one of those religions over there I don’t understand, right?”

“No.  The drones are airplanes where the pilot sits in an office in Texas and bombs Somalia or Yemen.  Or Afghanistan or Pakistan.  Or Iraq or Libya  The Administration calls them America’s “unique assets.”

“The pilot sits in Texas and can bomb someone from there?”

“Or it could be Nevada or Virginia or somewhere else.  We don’t know for sure.  Remember, it’s a secret.  I think they try to put them in red states, though.”

“Well, all of this is pretty strange, isn’t it?”

“Why, yes it is.  And I see that someone named Philip Alston is worried that drone warfare might foster some kind of ‘PlayStation’ mentality, where war seemed just like a video game.  But he’s from the United Nations, originally from Australia, I see – I think that’s where that Julian Assange came from.  Apparently he’s the UN’s special representative on extrajudicial executions – as if they didn’t have more important things to be spending our money on in that organization!”

“Now tell me again just why we’re bombing these Shabab?”

“Well, they’re terrorists.  Our officials say they’re calling for ‘strikes against the United States’ and they’re ‘planning operations outside of Somalia.’”

“You mean like we’re doing to them?”

“Dear, have you taken your medication today?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  This is all so confusing.  I’m going to bed.  But remind me, honey, are we still bombing Kosovo?”

Scott’s Top 10 Reasons

Dear Dave:

So, you still ignore my Top Ten Lists, do you? You don’t know real talent when you see it. You think you’re too good for me, huh, Mr. Fancy Pants! Well I’ll tell you a thing or two. I not only have a master’s degree, I even started a PhD once. Remember when Jodie Foster said to the corrupt psychiatric warden “I went to UVa, doctor. It’s not a charm school.” Guess what–yeah! That’s where I began my PhD! OK–so I never finished. Now I’ll let you and your silly staff (if you can stop groping them for a second, Mr. Molest Man) all speculate wildly as to why I never finished. (hint: it wasn’t because I thought it was piled high and deep).

Don’t care? OK, I’ll make it multiple choice so at least you don’t have to brainstorm. This particular exam question assumes the form of Dave’s Top Ten Reasons I Never Finished my UVa Doctorate:

[drum roll]

Number 10: I knocked up one of my freshman groupies.

Number 9: Fell in love with the Provost’s daughter.

Number 8: Knocked up the Rector’s wife–or was it (b) above? I forget.

Number 7: Peed on Edgar Allan Poe’s dorm room wall at the Academical Village.

Number 6: Told a visiting lecturer that Thomas Jefferson was the main character in a really bad 1970s sitcom.

Number 5: Lied on the admissions application form when I said I came from da hood, yoh, to introduce more diversity to the student body.

Number 4: Failed to buy Microsoft stock in order to pay the tuition some day.

Number 3: Decided I really belonged at some fourth-rate state U in Illinois to get a master’s in English as a Foreign Language.

Number 2: Was seen fraternizing with an instructor from Charlottesville Community College.

..and the number-one reason I never finished the UVa doctorate:

I never found the right classroom building.

Scott has taught English as a Foreign Language at overseas corporations and universities since 1986. He currently works in Saudi Arabia.

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.

Sarah Palin Embraces Nietzsche and Alberto Gonzales

Comics aficionados may remember Bizarro World (or something like that), an ugly, angular, twisted parallel universe in which Superman had a craggy face and was almost as evil as Glenn Beck.

In contrast to the dark side, there is also a fifth dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the sign post up ahead.  Your next stop—Perfect World!  A world in which congressmen and women are the opposite of what we experience in the here and now. Where Sarah Palin tells the truth and has an IQ of over 80. Where Dick Cheney shuts the hell up and peppers his own face with birdshot.

A Demockracy.com reporter inadvertently penetrated the inter dimensional portal into Perfect World after tripping over a mayonnaise jar on Funk & Wagnall’s porch. The White House press corps reporters all looked like Brad Pitt, Mandy Moore, Matt Damon and Julia Stiles and everyone spoke in very counterintuitive ways.  The calendar on the wall said February 2013.

“President Palin,” someone said, “After 9/11, don’t you feel we must sometimes ignore the ambiguous, the gray, and focus on good and bad, right and wrong, in the Middle East?”

“All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.  All things are subject to interpretation.  Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.  I reject power for its own sake and embrace the search for truth, always. Y’all don’t mind if quote Nietzsche now, do ya? Hee hee hee.”

Madam President, would not the U.S. be justified in invading Iran based on that country’s lies and deceptions?”

“No, for as I said, I embrace the search for truth, not power for its own sake, and certainly not for some barbaric notion of preemptive strikes or regime change. Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to me than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.”

“Madam President, should the Republican Party take its rightful place among the creationist evangelicals in order to secure a landslide victory in the midterm elections?”

“The Republican Party will as always stand for intellectuality and the search for truth and not pander to religious lunacy. Nietzsche said, “In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. How’s that for some philosophy for ya!”

“But what about the right to life issue, Madam President?”

“Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true:  they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms—in themselves such judgments are stupidities.”

Later, in the Oval Office with Vice President Alberto Gonzales…

“Al, although I appreciate personal loyalty, you must know that loyalty to your country and nation of laws is paramount, ya follow? Ask not what you can do for me; ask what you can do for your country.”

“Indeed, Madam President. And I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

“Well said, Al, and with feeling. Tuggin’ at my heart strings, aren’tcha!”

“And I remembered all the words, Madam President.”

“Yes, ya certainly did, Al. What a wonderful photographic memory you have. You shoulda been a lawyer.”

“I am a lawyer, Madam Palin. That’s why our Constitution stands firm and strong.”

“You’re a unique man of integrity, Al.  I’d embrace ya but I don’t wanna distract ya. Ya know how hot I am.”

“Once a beauty queen, always a beauty queen, Madam President. In fact I am finding it exceedingly difficult to focus on my work with that blouse you’re wearing.”

“Yah! D’ja like it? Anyways, at bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once upon this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.”

“Thank you, Madam. Well, the integrity of this administration is the envy of the free world. And now if you’ll excuse me, Madam President, it’s time for me to go out and rescue stray kittens.”

“Very good, Al.  I’ll be in the philosophy section of the Library of Congress if you need me.”

Teabagger Fossils Found on Noah’s Ark!

I think I can safely assume that Teabaggers believe only white Christians go to heaven, that the Big Bang and evolution theories are Satan’s fabrication to distract us from spirituality, and that dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark. Does that about sum it up?

But perhaps it all makes sense. Genesis states that the Ark contained every “every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth,” both “clean” and “beasts that are unclean.” No doubt, cool and scary dinosaurs not only thundered, and thumped, but also creepethed, and thus would qualify.

It’s not well known, but there were also prehistoric Teabaggers and evangelist preachers on Noah’s Ark. The reason it’s not well known is because the T-Rex ate them all. That razor-toothed Jurassic predator was probably hungry, but he also became cranky whenever fundamentalist ministers started yammering about creationism and family values. He was, moreover, confused and upset by the constant thumping of the Bible—which was admittedly a work in progress but already had a satisfyingly solid cover—and which he mistook for the footsteps of a dilophosaurus. The noise was all the more misleading because every time the Bible got thumped, Noah’s water glass shook like the one in Jurassic Park.

Enough already, so T-Rex simply chomped down on the preacher in mid-sentence: “We are all sinners in the eyes of Gawd! Ah have sin–arrghhghglugg!”

I suspect T Rex was smarter than we think, besides having big sharp teeth. He knew full well that when choosing a tasty appetizer, one should always eat the most annoying one–thus securing not only a half-day’s worth of protein but also some blessed silence.

Mrs. T, on the other hand, found herself enraged by one particular creeping thing that creepethed upon the earth, an overweight bald human given to incessant happy talk divorced of all reality. And so it came to pass that his happy talk was interrupted in mid-stream with a big gulp: “We have in fact made great progress, Noah. Now, I know some polls show that 78% of the creepy things that creepeth upon this Ark believe there’s a catastrophic flood in progress. But I believe most creepy things also want us to overcome this flood. We don’t need this Ark at all, Noah. Not only can we win the war, are win—arrghhhglugg!”

And God spake unto Noah, behold, this is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you, that all living things have a Purpose, and that the most fearsome and cool dino of all existeth to rid the earth of creationists and happy talkers and all wicked beings that creepeth upon the earth.

Sex Clubs, Nazis, Tea Parties, Oh My!

The party of “fiscal responsibility” (ignore the last eight years when a non-Democrat, non-black guy was in office) and “family values” was recently caught with its pants down and sweaty one dollar bills in hand.

Of course, I’m referring to Bondage Gate, or the news that The Republican National Committee reimbursed about $2,000 in expenses rung up by the Young Eagles at a Hollywood nightclub featuring topless dancers and bondage outfits.

The good news is that it the women were of age and, um, they were ACTUALLY women.

Whether obfuscating or obstructing, the Republican party lost its footing a long time ago and, more recently, has been taken over by a horde of fat, stupid, angry white men and their equally fat, stupid, and angry spouses.  A group that thinks Obama is some sort of secret radical, half-breed fabric.

A group that somehow and someway believes the ability to articulate oneself in public equates one to the murdering of six million Jews. The particularly ironic part of all this is that the National Socialists were of course right-wing fascists, much closer in ideology to many of the so-called Tea Partiers.

What about the claim that the Tea Party is apolitical? Gallup’s recent poll debunks this claim once and for all. First of all, the scary part:

Twenty-seven percent of Americans identify themselves with the Tea Party.

What about Republican vs. Independent vs. Democrat:

49% Republican

43% Independent

8%  Democrat

Since party affiliation can mean different things to different people, with many R’s and D’s claiming to be independents in mixed company, ideology might be a better indicator. The self-identified ideology of Tea Party members is:

70% Conservative

22% Moderate

8% Other

What can we make of this:

Besides that the fact that 8% of Teabaggers are apparently hipsters trying to be ironic, the only thing to conclude here is that Teabaggers are largely much more conservative and Republican than the public at large.

Oh yeah, and also according to Gallup… rich….and white…

No big surprises here.

Indeed, the new base of the Republican Party has nothing to run on but fear and fear itself.

In short, the salacious and lascivious peregrination on the part of Michael Steele and the GOP has finally brought back some dignity to the real, non-Teabagger, Republican Party. But at what cost?

Football and Politics

With the Super Bowl, politics, and a combination of the two leading the headlines in recent weeks, today’s Politics as Unusual satirical column attempts to counter the appalling and just plain weird anti-abortion ad aired during the Super Bowl by Focus on the Family. This is the ad that I believe Focus on the Family really wanted to show but couldn’t due to the fact that the equally creepy talking baby from the E-trade ads was already under contract:

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