Democrats Helping McCain

As Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continue to snipe at each other over Obama's remarks about working-class voters who "get bitter" and "cling to guns or religion," E.J. Dionne has reached the only reasonable conclusion: both are "doing a splendid job helping John McCain get to the White House."

Obama's much-discussed remarks rightly recognized the anger that working people feel at being left behind by economic inequality. So far, so good.

But his comments on guns, bitterness and religion played right into the hands of Republicans who portray Democrats as liberal elitists. (While the GOP does all it can to make the richest Americans richer.)

I couldn't blame Clinton for seizing on this gaffe--until she started talking about how Al Gore and John Kerry as "very good men and men of faith" of whom "large segments of the electorate concluded that they did not really understand or relate to or, frankly, respect their ways of life."

It is the "frankly" as Dionne points out, that is the nastiest word in that remark: it is straight out of the Republican script for disparaging Democrats. It also ignores, Dionne notes, that Gore ran 360,000 votes ahead of Clinton in New York State when they were both on the ballot in 2000.

Obama shot himself in the foot. Clinton sang from a Republican script. He was foolish, but she was shameless.

I just hope the Democratic cause can survive this foolishness.

Riveting

Well, the article in the Times today about the poor quality rivets that might have been responsible for the sinking of the Titanic was certainly an eye-opener, and certainly the most interesting article on metallurgy that I can remember reading. I guess like most people I presumed that the Titanic sank when an iceberg made a giant gash in the bow of the ship, and not, as evidently was the case, the impact of the iceberg loosed poor quality rivets from their welds, opening six separate pathways for the Atlantic to pour into the hold of the ship. It was also fascinating to learn that the original shipbuilder, Harland and Wolff of Belfast, is still in business, and they are still, somewhat understandably, defensive about their role in the world’s most famous naval disaster. (Are they still building ships in Belfast? Across the Irish Sea, in Glasgow, the industry is completely moribund, as I found out during a quick tour of Clydeside last summer.)

Almost since the day the Titanic sank, it has been the subject of endless moralizings in story and song; for provoking the heavy hand of providence by declaring the ship “unsinkable” or for the class divisions that emerged in the scramble for the inadequate provision of lifeboats. But there is another moral, evidently, and one that seems quite relevant, given the news this past weekend about the massive cancelation of flights of planes that had been, due to lax FAA supervision, allowed to fly with numerous fuselage cracks. That is; businesses will always cut corners, even in cases, such as the riveting of an ocean liner, when the failure to take due diligence can lead to unspeakable disaster. Unless private industry is carefully and comprehensively regulated, and those regulations are rigorously enforced, the public is at risk. As with the Titanic, airlines will much rather advertise the amount of legroom in business class than their compliance with seemingly minor safety regulations. The moral is clear, and one can also point to the news over the weekend about the skyrocketing costs of prescription drugs; if you don’t want to go down with the ship listening to strains of “Near My God to Thee,” the government has to be free to protect its citizens from the rapacity of capitalism.

Bearing Arms

There’s a move afoot to strip John Yoo, the author of the now infamous 2002 “torture memo” of his tenured position at U of Cal Berekely’s Law School. I would have no problem indicting him as a war criminal, along with the entire top echelon of the Bush administration. Certainly Yoo, at least as much as a low level sad sack like Lynndie England, deserves to have life ruined because of his actions. But I’m not so sure about this tenure thing. First, for the most part I am profoundly indifferent to tenure debates, no doubt because I will never be awarded that academic pearl of great price, and I would rather tend to my sour grapes as an independent scholar and let others worry about on whom and for what this ultimate academic bauble ought to be bestowed or unbestowed. And more importantly, I see academic freedom as something that has protected, and will continue to protect, far more lefties than righties over the years, and taking down John Yoo probably would come with too high a price. Keep your tenure and be damned, I say.

Having come to the defense of Prof. Yoo's job, I must say that I was taken aback by when, on picking up a copy of Daniel Walker Howe’s Pulitzer and Bancroft prize winning history of the US from 1815 to 1848, What Hath God Wrought, and saw John Yoo thanked on the acknowledgement page, it made me far less interested in reading the book. (Like all academics, tenured or untenured, the first thing I read in a scholarly book are the acknowledgements .) There’s no doubt that in the period under consideration by Howe, waterboarding would have been considered a mild punishment indeed for runaway slaves or recalcitrant Indians; John Yoo is just a man born too late. He would have made a fine law clerk for Roger Taney.

Finding Yoo in the Jacksonian era brought to mind something else that has been troubling me; why do almost news reports from our current war speak of “Iraqi militias?” Are these the sort of militias that the authors and ratifiers of the Second Amendment would have recognized? Would Andrew Jackson have approved? Are they the product of a mustering out of all able-bodied adult men by a legitimate authority, or are they simply private armies, a rag tag collection of fighters who either enlisted or were coerced to fight? The rhetorical question answers itself, but the broader question is whether present-day Iraq is the martial utopia envisisoned by defenders of the second amendment, where an armed populace, organized into subordinate military forces, limits the power of the central government, and allows people who consider themselves disadvantaged by current constitutional arrangements to exercise their right to assemble en masse and petition for a redress of grievances and kill a few folks in the process. Bush and his enablers like John Yoo wanted to bring American democracy as they understood it to Iraq, a democracy in which the right of armed self-defense had been elevated to a position of paramount importance. And given what they have wrought in Iraq, to paraphrase Daniel Walker Howe, an armed democracy in which every political battle is also waged on the streets and with the lives of Iraqis, who can say they have not succeeded?

An Honest Radical

Abe Osheroff, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade raised in Brooklyn, died Sunday in Seattle. He was a long-time member of the Communist Party who eventually saw through its flaws and left it, but he remained an independent radical for the rest of his life. He's gone now, but his good example remains.

Abe's ability to leave the Communist Party yet sustain his radicalism was something he shared with two other New York veterans of the Lincoln Brigade--Irving Weissman and George Watt. I was closest to Irving, who introduced me to Abe and George at reunions of the Brigade.

Abe was a great bear of a man, a college-educated carpenter with an earthy sense of humor and a keen mind. During the days of the civil rights movement, he once built a community center in the deep South. He got word that white supremacists were after him, but he worked on with a pistol strapped to his waist and a shotgun in his toolbox. And he got the job done.

He made two documentaries about the Spanish Civil War, and he never flinched from asking tough questions about the war. Anyone who went to Spain, he once told me, saw some shit. And it was important, he added, to be honest about that. His passion, integrity, humor and strength were unforgettable. He was an activist to the end, protesting the war in Iraq.

My most vivid memory of him brings me back to a Lincoln Brigade reunion that I attended with my wife and then-infant son when we were very new parents.

Abe, with gusto, told us how to tell when a baby is grown up: kiss his feet. When they're babies, he explained, their feet smell great. Only when they grow up, he said, do their feet start to stink.

I don't think I ever got around to kissing either of my children's feet. But the next chance I get I'll be sure to tell them the story of Abe Osheroff.

Iraq Fatigue

I awoke this morning to hear an NPR story announcing that from August on, US troops sent to Iraq will be serving 12-month tours instead of the current 15 months. So far as this gives troops a shorter tour in a bad war, I'm glad for it. But I can't shake the feeling that this announcement is part of a Bush administration effort to acknowledge fatigue with the war without really changing fundamental policies in any way.

The military has, of course, warned the president that Iraq is wearing down our armed forces. But I suspect that the president is responding to more than the military here.

If this announcement is part of a media management strategy, it is something of a success: it creates an illusion of movement and change after two days of vague and bleak testimony by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker before the House and Senate. (The second day of testimony seems to have had so little new to say that it barely made the front page of the Times.)

In the presidential race, the reduction in the length of tours may give John McCain something to wave before voters who want to see a change in our Iraq policy.

But compared to the full course correction that is needed, it doesn't amount to much.

It is one more sign, if one was needed, that the Bush administration will simply hand off the war to the next administration.

Congested

So congestion pricing has gone down to a rather ignominious defeat, and the responsibility for its failure is shared widely. I haven’t been following this too carefully, but one of the reasons for its failure seems to be that Mayor Bloomberg did not do an adequate job in his wheeling and dealing. Certainly much of the outcome can be laid at the feet of Sheldon Silver, who in the most annoying and insensitive way possible, i.e., not even allowing a bill of this importance to come up for a vote, has reminded everyone that absolutely nothing has changed in Albany, that it’s still three men in a room, and all important decisions are still made out of sight and out of mind of New York State’s public.

In reading the commentary, there was a fair amount of outrage that a question so important to New York City was decided in Albany. This seems to be the usual New York City parochialism at work. The congestion pricing plan was killed by the state assembly, dominated by New York City and downstate representatives (Joe Bruno in the state senate had indicated his approval) It is clear that politicians in the metropolitan area killed the plan, led by Richard Brodsky, who offered one specious argument after the other against the plan. Too many were at best lukewarm about the plan, if not openly hostile.

Once again this might be due to Bloomberg’s faltering powers of persuasion, but it seems to rest on another reality; all environmental or quality of life reforms are all too easily tagged by their opponents of goo-goo-ish and “elitist,” as something that benefits the middle class and upper classes, and leaves the poor to pay the bill. I don’t understand this. People who drive cars into Manhattan have enough money to own a car, pay $40 for a tank of gas, and pay whatever exorbitant rate Manhattan parking is going for these days.

The whole sorry mess reminds me why I always despair that environmental reform will ever make much headway. To the extent that environmental reforms (as they invariably do) involves some inconvenience to somebody, some restriction on the vaunted freedom to pollute at will, the somebodies inconvenienced will holler, complain the burdens fall unfairly on them, and will resolutely argue their puny self-interests against the greater good for the greatest number, since the peronsal inconvenience is clear and immediate, and the realization of the greater good more abstract and only coming about some time in the future, self-interest almost always wins. At some point I suspect, as the environmental crisis worsens, an environmental version of Robert Moses will emerge, willing and able to smash heads together, and something like congestion pricing will be enacted in New York City.

Public Records and Contempt for Democracy

Gerald Benjamin, Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences at SUNY-New Paltz, offers these thoughts on our post "I've Got a Secret" and the Pataki administration's failure to deliver many of its records to the New York State Archives.

There is more to this story. Almost immediately upon taking office the Pataki administration stopped the near contemporaneous annual publication of the Public Papers of the Governor. Theretofore these have been published annually since the mid-19th Century.

Some argued that this decision, allegedly taken for reasons of budgetary stringency,was of little consequence. Governors, they said, only published materials in these papers that redounded to their personal and political benefit. But documents made available at one time, in one political context, might have very different--and far less flattering--implications in another time, after the entire record of an administration was made and known.

Moreover, the published papers were available in libraries throughout the state, and useful not only for scholars but for initiating students into the study of history, government and politics through the use of original documents.

I know the value of these papers for researchers from personal experience. The public papers of Governors Rockefeller, Carey and Cuomo were absolutely central to books I wrote about the legacies of these three governors.

The electronic manner in which we now so commonly communicate leaves traces that are increasingly ephemeral. Much that is electronic should be saved, and I appreciate the effort of the NYS library to assure that this in fact occurs. But at minimum we must act to assure public access to the written, hard-copy public documents and records created by elected leaders in the course of governance.

These documents are the property of the people of New York. Leaders who fail to realize this, and who seek to alter history by altering these records, or denying access to them, show a fundamental misunderstanding of the need for citizens in a democracy to know about and understand what our state government has done in critical areas of policy and why these actions were taken. These leaders not only diminish our ability to hold them accountable for their actions while in office, but distort the record in a way that makes it harder for us to know our history, and to learn from it.

This treatment of the public's record is a manifestation of both arrogance and, sadly, contempt for democracy.

I've Got a Secret

One is distressed, though not terribly surprised, to read in the Times yesterday, to quote the redoubtable Jim Folts, the stalwart head of reference services at the New York State Archives, that “The State Archives did not receive from the Pataki administration many types of records that have been received from prior administrations.” Those records included correspondence, messages to the Legislature and other speeches, photographs and proclamations. All that has been received are press releases. A spokesperson for Pataki has said the bulk of what was “required,” has been turned over, but that “we remain in possession of some documents that are being reviewed. If deemed appropriate, they will be made available to the archives at a later date.”


One is also distressed to read that there is no law or provision requiring NYS governors to turn over anything to the archives. An attempt to clarify the governor’s responsibilities in this regard was made during the Pataki administration, where it passed in the Assembly, though predictably died in the Senate (though one suspects, nowadays, that Joe Bruno would be interested in getting every scrap of paper from the late Spitzer administration before public scrutiny as quickly as possible.) Some administrations, such as Cuomo’s have been very forthcoming, and have turned over almost all of their records (though almost every administration, according to Folts, destroys their appointment files, the record of who got what government position and why.)

This is becoming a distressingly common phenomena; top government officials holding back their papers, or systematically combing through them (as did Rudolph Giuliani after leaving City Hall.) There have been all sorts of rumbles from the current administration in Washington (hard drives cleansed, documents gone missing) to make it clear that the administration of Bush II will become the least well documented presidential administration in recent history.

It has occurred to me that we are perhaps living in the twilight of the archival age. First, there is an obsession with how “history will judge” current politicians. (Has any president been subject to more articles about his eventual ranking among his peers than George W. Bush? And we know how it will all turn out; most scholars will think him the worst or among the worst of all time, nosing out Buchanan. A few idiots will write books defending Bush and his war, and learned commentators will sagely note that “there is much dispute about George W. Bush’s place in history.”)

And there is the additional problem of the presidential libraries, where every president now has the right to design their own monument, and the very idea of preserving any records that might becloud the reputation of the honoree becomes problematic. To which might be added the reality that the destroying of presidential or gubernatorial papers, if no evident crime is being covered up, probably is cost free to the destroyer. Archivists and historians will howl, a law suit might be filed that will drag out for years, and in the end, the worst that would likely happen are some slapped wrists.

And there is the ironic impact of the internet and email, which of course have replaced, to a large extent, phone calls. Private correspondence used to represent the tip of the iceberg of an administration’s record; often several phone calls were exchanged before a letter was written, summarizing the conversations, and the written record was often a sanitized or bowdlerized version of the phone tconversations. Now with email, the first, and often, uncensored thoughts of officials are captured directly, and with our ability to preserve records, comes an even greater desire on the part of many officials to hide it from scrutiny. And government has become such an exercise in secrecy, and keeping information from the public, that the “right to know” even after an administration is long gone from power, becomes an exercise in lese majestie. We live as much as in age of secrecy as an age of information; never before in human history have more people spent more time and more money in keeping things secret. This is bound to effect the future of archives. The more we can know, the more we can hide.

Anyway, to return to Pataki, what is needed is for historians and anyone else who cares about the past, present, or future of New York State , to demand that he turn over his records to the NYS Archives. (And with a Dem in the Governor’s mansion, perhaps now is the time to get a bill on gubernatorial records past the Senate.) And we must remember and enforce the old rules; when records are withheld, we are entitled to the presumption that the withholder has something to hide. And though the phenomena of document-withholders like Pataki is very distressing, I must say that in some ways it is satisfying that in the highly hyped information age, when our ability to preserve records has taken quantum leaps over what was possible only decades ago, one of the greatest resources available to the historian and journalist will likely continue to remain the age-old tools of gossip, innuendo, calumnies by interested parties with axes to grind, and ill-sourced speculation. Dame rumor will likely continue to blather, triumphing over all well-meaning efforts to get her to hold her tongue.

Great Greek and Cypriot Food in a Changing Neighborhood

In Astoria, Queens the taco stands and women in head scarves are reminders that the neighborhood is not as Greek as it once was. Nevertheless, Astoria's Greek restaurants are still a great attraction--especially the Zenon Taverna.

I first went to Zenon in the early 1990s and found it a great meze place. I returned today, after an absence of more than ten years, to celebrate the birthday of my friend's son. I found a spruced up taverna with an even bigger menu.

When my friend Demetrios Mihailides discovered Zenon many years ago, it was a low-key hangout for Cypriot soccer players with great food. Since then Stelios Papageorgiou, who was trained in Cyprus and took over Zenon in 1988, has expanded the taverna into a bigger operation that does catering, banquets and take-out food.

Zenon may be doing a bigger kind of business, but the food is still excellent. Cypriot cooking has subtle differences from Greek cooking that went over my head; all I know is that I enjoyed the tatziki, grilled octopus, spinach pies, retsina and red wine that we had for appetizers. Then we moved on to the equally good heart of the meal: roast lamb, vegetarian meat balls, roasted potatoes, sausages, kabobs, stuffed grape leaves, and fried squid.

Not only was the food excellent, but the service was friendly. The white-walled upstairs banquet room, where we ate to the delightful sounds of Demetrios' s son A.J. enjoying his birthday with his friends, was airy and comfortable. The ground floor dining room, where most customers eat, looked equally pleasant.

Astoria may be changing, but the good food at Zenon, located at 34-10 31st Avenue, is a constant; most of the entrees are well under $15.

If you're going there from Manhattan, take the N train to the 30th Avenue stop; it's a short walk up 31st Avenue to Zenon.

Hillary and the Marschallin

I usually don’t read Maureen Dowd when I click through the Times’s editorial pages; there are enough real news stories to read in the Times and elsewhere, to waste much time with her second-hand musings on whatever she is currently writing about. But today for some reason, I read her column, “The Hillary Waltz.” And I was very interested to see her compare Hillary Clinton to one of the great characters in opera (and one of my favorites), the Field Marshall’s wife, the Marschallin, from Richard Strauss’s opera “Der Rosenkavalier,” with its memorable libretto by the Austrian poet Hugo von Hoffmansthal.

For those not familiar with the opera, let me quote Dowd’s synopsis:
The Marschallin is a princess married to a Viennese field marshal who has a liaison dangereuse with a younger man, Count Octavian. [Although Octavian is played in the opera by a woman, one of opera’s many “pants parts.”] Though she’s worried about her fleeting youth and the fickleness of men, she instructs the young man on the ways of love and then gracefully sets him free, allowing him to find happiness with young Sophie as a soaring waltz plays.

Dowd argues that as the older woman with a young male ingénue, Hillary is teaching Obama valuable lessons in life, how to be rough, how to fight elections to win, with all of the nastiness that Dowd has associated with the Clinton’s for many years now. Obama needs Clinton’s tough love. Let me quote Dowd again: “ Whether or not she wins, Hillary has already given noble service as a sophisticated political tutor for Obama, providing her younger colleague with much-needed seasoning. Who else was going to toughen him up?”

As usual, I don’t quite follow Dowd’s argument (but I certainly appreciated the operatic reference.) Were Hillary and Obama former lovers? Did Obama leave her for another woman? How is a love affair like trying to beat out the brains of your political opponent?

What was interesting about Dowd’s column for me is that for the past few weeks I have been thinking of Hillary and the Marschallin, but it was in connection to a different part of the opera. In the middle of last act, the Marschallin makes a grand entrance, and tells her cousin, the lecherous Baron Ochs, that because his attempt to seduce the maid Mariand’l (who is Octavian, a woman playing a man, disguised as a woman; the gender complexities are thick in this opera) his engagement with Sophie is off, leaving the scene clear for Octavian to take off his dress and many Sophie. Anyway, when Baron Ochs tries to plead his case, she cuts him off with a famous line:
Versteht Er nicht, wenn eine Sach; ein End hat? (Do you not understand when something is at an end?)

This is of course the very line that many Democrats have been asking of Hillary the past several weeks. Doesn’t she realize that her quest to be president is over? Isn’t it time to summon whatever dignity she might have left, pack her belongings, and return home? I have been of two minds about this. Obviously, the Democrats need to pick a candidate as soon as they can. But just as Obama had every right to enter the race, thereby greatly complicating what seemed like it would be an easy road for Hillary for the Democratic nomination, Hillary has every right to stay in the race, and until such time as she decides to withdraw, and while you’re running, all you can do is to go all out and try to defeat your opponent.

There is much more to be said about this, but I have been struck by the extent that so many Obama supporters have come to loathe Hillary. It’s curious. Perhaps, in part, it is because like the Marshcallin (or to give another example, Mrs. Robinson), she is seen as that least likeable of female stereotypes, the older woman as seductress, trying to steal something that really doesn’t belong to her. Strauss and Hofmanstahl knew enough that when you write a comedy it can’t end with the older woman getting her man. The teenagers have to get together, and the Marshallin’s affair with Octavian will end in sadness, knowing that it couldn’t have lasted anyway.

In the other most famous line in the opera, at the very end, when Sophie and Octavian are declaring their love in ecstatic, soaring music, and someone comments that young people are always the same, ardent and amorous, and how nice it is to be a teenager in love, the Marschallin answers with a world weary and wistful, “Ja, Ja,” and leaves the stage to the lovers. In any event, the Democrats will likely, in the near future consummate their love affair with Barak Obama, and Hillary will likely be off stage left (stage right?), keeping a stoic and proud exterior, with her own infinitely regretful version of the Marshallin’s “Ja, Ja.” (And trudge home to her own version of Baron Ochs.)

One last comment, follow my and Maureen Dowd’s advice and give Der Rosenkavalier a try, and make your own far fetched analoigies to the contemporary American political scene.