In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.

For some reason, I think I have something to say to you. You think you have something to say to me? Email me at: gideonsblogger -at- yahoo -dot- com

 
Mickey Kaus liked the speech, basically. I can't decide if that's good or bad. So far as I can tell, Kaus's read on the election is: (1) Kerry is horrible, the worst candidate the Democrats could have reasonably come up with; (2) But he's a Democrat, so I want him to win; (3) Since I can't stand him, and I already know I want to vote Democrat, the way to make me more comfortable holding my nose is not to remind me overmuch who the candidate is; (4) Therefore, I think the best strategy is for Kerry to say nothing, do nothing, in fact barely show himself. Let Bush's negatives win the election for us.

Is this the only way Kerry can win? Maybe. But it's premised on two things: that the electorate has already rejected a second Bush term as unacceptable, and that they are comfortable entrusting the Presidency to the Democrats. I'm not convinced either sale is closed yet. And I don't see how Kerry closes the sale by presenting a "small target."

The 2000 election seemed to a lot of people like the 1960 election, with Gore cast as Nixon and Bush as Kennedy. The more I think about this election, the more it seems like a replay of 1976 - with Bush as Ford and Kerry as Carter. (And I'm not just saying that because Bush's cabinet sometimes seems to be composed entirely of Ford Administration veterans.) Bush, like Ford, is in a structurally stronger position but has an albatross around his neck (Nixon's resignation and pardon for Ford; Iraq for Bush.) Carter, like Kerry, was relatively unknown and tried to stay that way, and neither Carter nor Kerry was much liked by his party. (They were also both veterans who used their military experience as a kind of signifier of foreign policy toughness that was belied by many of their actual policy positions.)

Carter won in 1976, of course. But it was a very close thing.

The best way for Kerry to win might well be stealth. It may be that *nothing* he says or does can reassure the country as to what kind of President he'd be, so the best thing he can do is let the country try to fill in the picture with their hopes, and count on anti-Bush sentiment to carry him into the White House. But if that's Kerry's *best* hope then that's just another argument that this election is Bush's to lose - still, and regardless of what the polls say.

Finally: I am surprised Kaus wasn't more disturbed by the paleo-liberal cast of the domestic policy message. Personally, I think Kerry has no plans to be Lyndon Johnson any more than he has plans to be Bill Clinton. He doesn't intend to be a paleo-liberal government-expander or a neo-liberal government-reformer. He intends to do *nothing* about *anything.* He'll defend the status quo in terms of entitlements and so forth, and do nothing to reform them, but he'll also do nothing to expand them. But even this should be a disappointment for Kaus, and Kerry's rhetoric is more paleo-liberal than that even, which should disappoint him more. Why doesn't he comment much on that aspect? Probably because he's now in the mode of convincing himself that Kerry's cause is (a) not lost; (b) worth supporting even if he can win.

posted by Noah at 10:50 AM

 
What a lousy speech.

No, I didn't see it delivered. I read the transcript. Maybe if you were watching it, or listening to it, it worked better. But on paper, it's just weak.

The first sixth of the speech is nothing but me, me, me. I'm reporting for duty. I was born in the West Wing. I rode my bicycle into East Berlin and saw the horrors of Communism with my own eyes. Me, me, me and only 100 words about Kerry's three-decade record of public service: he targeted rapists and wife-beaters as a prosecutor, voted for a balanced budget and helped normalize relations with Vietnam. Isn't anyone embarrassed? The guy has been in politics his whole life and he has *nothing to say* about his political accomplishments. And the "personal history" section is worse than the very brief review of his record: nothing memorable, nothing humanizing, nothing that actually suggests a personality. It would be hard to write a worse resume section of the speech.

Then, "this is the most important election of our lifetime." Why? Well, we're at war. But let's not talk too much about that; really, this is the most important election of our lifetime because the middle class is squeezed by rising costs and stagnating wages.

Now, this is a legitimate problem. And Kerry's section on economic performance is a relative high point in the speech. But is this really the reason this is "the most important election of our lifetime"? Is our economic situation more precarious than in 1980, say, to pick a point within the lifetime of pretty much everyone voting in this election?

Then there are the tone-deaf echoes of great speeches given by others. I cringed at, "on behalf of a new birth of freedom" in the middle of a laundry list of cliche reasons to accept the nomination. Sometimes the speech felt written not only by a committee but a committee that edits with a blender rather than a blue pencil.

I winced at the paragraph about the flag - "Old Glory," "the stars and stripes forever." Not because the ultimate message - that Republicans have no monopoly on patriotism - is a bad message; it's a good, an essential message. I winced because the passage was so overstated that it undermined its message in the end.

And the Vietnam band-of-brothers business. You know, there are ways to make this work. McCain makes it work. Bob Kerry makes it work. Bob Dole made it work (and he was more like Max Cleland, an unlucky guy who "got shot" in Dole's own words, than a hero like McCain or Bob Kerry - or, to give him his props, a valiant officer like John Kerry). But John Kerry's invocation of his war experience, and the bond with his band, comes off as so pretentious precisely because he uses it so ham-fistedly to bolster his sense of moral superiority.

What does his vaunted combat experience mean to him, how does it shape the way he'd behave as Commander in Chief? Primarily, it means: he will be averse to the use of force.

Now, it's a fair attack on President Bush that he was too willing to use force in Iraq, and (more telling, I think) too wilfully blind to the potential negative consequences of using force. Whether or not I agree with the critique or with the decision to go to war in Iraq in retrospect, it's certainly fair game for political attack, and Kerry will push it.

But the mountain Kerry has to climb is to convince the American people that he'll be tough and decisive enough to use force when it *is* warranted. And Kerry had essentially nothing to say about that.

The fear that many folks on the fence have about Kerry as C-in-C is that "complexity" is a euphamism for indecision and procrastination. That Kerry's nuanced understanding of the world is not something he deploys to craft supple and intelligent policy, and protect American interests with less collateral damage than has been the case with the Bush Administration, but that it is a way of justifying inaction and protection himself personally against being damned in hindsight for making the wrong decision. What did Kerry do to dispel that fear last night? Not much that I can see.

All Kerry's talk about "responding" to attacks and about waging war when threats are "imminent" is designed to telegraph a single message: I will not take the war to the enemy.

I don't think that's an appealing message. Americans are rightly angry about the botched job in Iraq. Some who might otherwise be solid Bush voters, but are now undecided, think the war was justified but that it was handled dreadfully. Others in a similar situation think the war was *not* justified, the product of group-think and a kind of idee fixe rather than rational analysis. Neither of these groups fault Bush for being aggressive in his defense of American interests; they fault him for incompetence and ideological blindness. Kerry will not reassure them by telegraphing his own reluctance to act.

Kerry says he will get us out of Iraq by getting our allies to share the burden, and that he will be more effective at working with other nations to catch the terrorists. Those are messages America wants to hear; most people want us out of Iraq and most people are not pleased that so much of the world is angry at us. The implicit message is: the troubles we're having with our European and other allies are more the fault of bad personal chemistry and bungling by our current President than they are of genuinely differing interests and conflicting policies. I happen to think that understanding is badly wrong, but it's a message that works for Kerry, and he should keep using it. But again: to make it work he needs to avoid suggesting that he would *defer* to allies in setting American policy. And I think he badly failed to do that.

The problem is a lack of balance. If all Kerry says is what he *won't* do, people will wonder if there's anything he *will* do. And there are things that people want the President to do. People who worry that we are losing the war on terrorism think we have been too *slow* in responding to certain threats, not aggressive *enough.* Some of these people think Iraq was a counterproductive distraction, but none of these people want a President who is operates in a purely reactive mode. And Kerry gave these people essentially nothing to hang on, no positive program for how to fight the war. That's very bad, I think, and it's the weakness that Bush is most likely to pick up on and hammer at for the rest of the campaign.

The best attack-paragraph in the whole speech: the one about values, and how values without actions are just slogans. That's an old line against Republican "family-values" talk. But it's a good one to use against Bush specifically because one attack on Bush that hits home is that he thinks that if his *values* are right that necessarily his policies will have good *results.* That's ultimately a more telling critique of Bush's foreign policy than it is of his "family values" talk, but that's precisely why it's a good attack; as a critique of "family values" it's a cliche that won't convince anyone who isn't already a Democrat.

I breezed through the "real people" who are suffering under the Bush Administration; you can always find these kinds of anecdotes and they always sound the same. What's Kerry's economic plan?

1. Incentives to revitalize manufacturing. I don't know what this refers to, and Kerry declined to elaborate in the speech.

2. Investment in technology. Don't we have a problem with a hangover from the 1990s *over-investment* in technology? Is Kerry talking about anything here, or is this just copied from the 1992 Democratic platform?

3. Close tax loopholes that reward companies that outsource jobs overseas. This will have a negligible impact on employment trends, and Kerry knows it.

4. "Fair trade." I'm quite sure this means nothing at all; Kerry has a good record as a free trader and he's been scrupulous about never explaining what, specifically, he'd do to change the rules of international trade. I'm sure protectionist-minded manufacturing-sector unions can see through this.

5. Fiscal responsibility. I suspect Kerry actually means this, more than Clinton did in 1992. I actually think he'll propose much less spending as President than he will as a candidate, and that he will raise taxes, so the deficit should go down. But I don't think this is a big vote-getter. This is not 1992; the deficit is simply not the biggest economic issue on the public's mind. Maybe it should be, but I don't believe it is. I think people are worried about underemployment and rising inflation much more than they are about the budget.

Then there's a bunch of boilerplate on the usual Democratic issues of education, health care, etc. Nothing interesting here, just a recap of the usual themes. "Energy independence" is a new one on the list, but it's even more of a fantasy than most of the others. The impression I get based on this list is the same as I got from Al Gore's acceptance speech in 2000: this man is not running to *do* anything. He's trotting out the usual suspects that his party wants to hear about, but he has no ideas, no vision, no plans, and as President he will, by default, do nothing, and if he must do something he'll do what he thinks he needs to do to cover himself politically.

And finally, the long "One America", "we're all in one boat" coda. I think this is a good theme for Democrats, and Barack Obama showed how to play it. Kerry didn't. He didn't flub it badly, but it was kind of limp. Much of the section was phrased as an attack masquerading unconvincingly as a plea for an end to attacks. Some moments - "faith has given me values to live by" - struck me as utterly unconvincing. Two good lines: Kerry promised to "enlist people of talent, Republicans as well as Democrats" and, much more so, "I don't want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side." I think that expresses the real Kerry - he's not a religious man, and, while he's extraordinarily vain, and not at all humble in the face of other *people*, he is humble in the face of *reality* and therefore intrinsically cautious. He thinks he's better than anyone else, but he doesn't think *anyone* is especially good at shaping the world. He's constitutionally conservative in that way. And that kind of conservatism has its appeal - particularly in contrast to the Bush Adminsitration, and not only with convinced Democrats. Plus Kerry has so little authenticity, any little bit helps.

Was the speech a disaster? No. But I don't think it did the job. Dukakis' speech in 1988 was well-received but fundamentally empty and cautious. "Competence not ideology" seemed clever, but it turned out to be a lousy rallying-cry. He came out of the convention looking stronger than he really was, and ultimately got massacred at the polls. Clinton's acceptance speech in 1992 was absolutely magnificent, and played a real role in changing the dynamic of the campaign. "New Covenant" wasn't just another riff on "New Deal" and "New Frontier" - it actually encapsulated what this ticket stood for and how it differentiated itself from the previous few Democratic nominees. Ross Perot dropped out in large part because he saw the Democrat resurgence, and Bush never found his footing once he lost the leadership of the race. Dole's speech in 1996 was beautiful and moving, but Clinton figured out the weakness - that it was exclusively backward-looking - and his "Bridge to the 21st Century" response was treackly but devastatingly effective. The electorate decided that Dole was a good man, but not likely to be a successful President. Gore's speech in 2000 was reasonably effective at one thing - it got Democrats excited about him, which they had not been. But it was lousy as a message to the country at large, and it - and he - did not wear well. Gore came off as angry and combative, and no one could figure out who he was fighting since he'd been in office for the past eight years. Was he fighting Clinton? His father? Himself? Once people are doing this much psychoanalysis, it's hard for them to trust you as their President. Bush's acceptance speech in 2000 was better, though I didn't think it was masterful. The section about "growing up before we grow old" struck me as atrocious Boomer self-centeredness. But the speech was disciplined, organized, and clear - like the campaign. It showcased Bush's strengths and hid his weaknesses. It did the job.

Kerry's speech was not a disaster. But it reminds me more of Dukakis and Dole than of Clinton, and it had none of Dole's poetry to redeem it. It was fundamentally cautious and not convincing, and it was fundamentally backward-looking both in the degree to which it was an attack on Bush's decisions (without offering a clear alternative) and the degree of vagueness and real lack of interest when it touched on traditional Democratic themes.

I don't think it did for Kerry what Kerry needed done. If Bush's speechwriters figure out the right speech to get him out of his own bunker, the contrast in speeches could seriously change the campaign, and make it very hard for Kerry to catch up. Bush now has the upper hand. Let's see if he knows how to play it.

posted by Noah at 8:29 AM

 
Well, Bush-partisans should be feeling pretty good right now. The Democrats are two days into their convention, and there is no evidence of a bounce. In fact, the bounce is going the other way - Bush's job approval numbers are up and he's gaining on Kerry in both head-to-head and 3-way (with Nader) polls. The Edwards selection appears to have had no impact on the race (unlike, for example, the Kemp selection in 1996 and the Lieberman selection in 2000, each of which generated a significant bounce).

The 9-11 Commission report appears to have benefitted the President, for three reasons: (1) it reminded people of terrorism, which is still a positive for Bush, as against Iraq, which is a negative; (2) it basically endorsed a wide-scope view of what this war is about - that we're at war with ideological Islamist groups with expansive aims, and that the war cannot be fought in a law-enforcement manner - which dovetails with Administration rhetoric; and (3) it was evenhanded in blaming Bush and Clinton for each failing to attend to the terrorism problem before 9-11, which benefits Bush because it effectively takes pre-9-11 performance off the table. In addition, consumer confidence is up (which probably reflects an improving climate for job seekers) and Iraq is (mostly) off the front page.

It seems to me, at this point, the news cycle probably favors the President. If the situation with Iran heats up, that benefits the President because no one is going to think Kerry is a better guy to be tough on Iran. If it doesn't, then that also benefits the President because it makes it look like his foreign policy is working. If things deteriorate badly in Iraq, that certainly hurts the President. Demographically, Bush's biggest problem is that he hasn't sewn up white working class voters, the main reason being the war in Iraq. But Kerry has a somewhat hard time taking advantage of this because (at this point in time) his position is that we need *more* troops, and the reason Iraq is a negative for Bush is that the country wants *out* of there. All in all, it doesn't put Kerry in a great spot.

Then let's take a look at the electoral map, at least as drawn by Rasmussen Reports. It shows Kerry with 227 Electoral Votes and Bush with 208, which is Bush's best relative showing since they've been compiling this chart. And while the chart shows Kerry in the lead, the lead is somewhat deceptive, because the tossups are disproportionately in states that Bush should be able to carry. Specifically: Rasmussen puts Arkansas, Florida and Virginia in the tossup category, and I find it hard to see Bush losing any of these three except in a blowout. Virginia and Arkansas are prime Bush territory, and Bush has been polling pretty well in Florida, Florida has been doing economically better than average over his Presidency, and the Jewish vote in Florida - while it will still go solidly to Kerry - should be less overwhelmingly Democratic now than it was in 2000 without Lieberman on the ticket and with Bush's strong pro-Israel record. (The flip side is that the Cuban vote in Florida should be less energized for the GOP without Elian in the headlines, and as the exile generation ages.) If we assume Bush gets all three of these states, that puts him at 254 Electoral Votes - 16 short of victory.

Where does he get the 16 votes? Well, Rasmussen has 4 tossup states that are reasonable Bush targets - Iowa (7), New Hampshire (4), Ohio (20) and Pennsylvania (21). New Mexico (5) has been trending increasingly Democratic, so I think that state will be tougher, but Bush shouldn't write it off. In addition, Bush won't write off Wisconsin (10) or Minnesota (10) which have been trending Republican and in each of which Bush has been polling OK. So Bush can win by taking any two of Iowa, Wisconsin or Minnesota, or by winning just Ohio, or by winning just Pennsylvania. In other words, assuming Bush holds on to his Southern base, Kerry needs to *sweep* the Midwest battleground states to deny Bush a victory. That should make Bush feel better than Kerry, I should think.

Of course, there are two important caveats to the above. First, Rasmussen has Missouri in Bush's column. That's questionable. If, on the one hand, I'm surprised to see Arkansas considered a tossup, I'm also surprised they have Missouri solid. Bush should be favored there, but Kerry shouldn't write off that state. By the same token, just as I think Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa are genuinely all in play for Bush, with 27 total Electoral Votes that Kerry absolutely needs to win, I think Arizona, Colorado and Nevada, with 24 Electoral Votes that Bush absolutely needs, are in play for Kerry, and Rasmussen has these as Bush states. Nevada is certainly a tossup, and while Bush is clearly favored in Colorado and Arizona, he will probably have to fight to defend that turf.

Notwithstanding these two caveats, though, I think the map still favors Bush rather than Kerry. Coupled with recent polling trends, and the likely shape of the news over the next couple of months, Democrats shouldn't be anything like as confident as they appear to be. Unless Kerry's acceptance speech is a home-run (long odds based on his history), the Dems probably come out of the convention roughly even in the polls. Bush should get a bounce from his convention, which puts Kerry behind going into Labor Day. Which means the Democrats are really counting on a knockout in the debates or bad news that is blamed on Bush. I wouldn't feel good about that if I were them.

This is still a very close race, and Kerry could definitely still win. But statements that this is Kerry's race to lose are decidedly premature.

posted by Noah at 8:37 AM

 
Tomorrow morning, I'm supposed to give the d'var Torah - a teaching based on the weekly Torah text - at my synagogue. This week's portion is D'varim, the first portion of the book of D'varim, or Deuteronomy. This is the d'var I plan to give.

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Three weeks ago, I gave an impromptu drash on the subject of Bilam’s prophecy. I articulated the notion – from tradition, not my own idea – that there are multiple levels of prophecy, and that while your garden-variety prophet receives communication from the Divine via dreams or visions, and then must interpret this communication, Moses was of a different order: he saw God panim al panim, face to face, and when he spoke in God’s name God literally put the words in his mouth so that he spoke with God’s voice. And the only prophet, I said, ever raised to Moses’ prophetic level, receiving the word of God directly into his mouth, was Bilam, and this raising up was how God prevented Bilam from cursing Israel on behalf of Balak.

Well, today you might conclude that I am going to contradict myself. This week’s parshah, the first parshah of Dvarim, begins Moses’ great parting speech to the Israelites as they stand on the verge of the conquest of Canaan. And how is this oration described? In chapter 1, verse 5, the text is quite explicit: be-‘ever ha-yarden be-‘eretz mo’av ho’il Moshe be’er ‘et ha-torah ha-zo’t le’mor. (On the far side of the Jordan, in the land of Moab, Moses began to explain this Torah, saying thusly.)

Clearly, it would seem, whatever the status of the text of the other four books of Moses, this book is a book of his own composition. Moses is not speaking here words placed in his mouth by God over which he has no control; these words are his own. Moreover, they are an explanation of God’s Torah. Which would seem to imply that, in some sense, they are not part of that Torah.

To an extent, that’s precisely the way Don Isaac Abarbanel understands the matter. But only to an extent. His conclusion is intriguing: the final book of the Chumash is, indeed, Moses’ composition, and it is distinct from the rest of the Chumash because of this. But after Moses spoke his speech, God commanded him to write it down, word for word, as he spoke it. Because it was written down according to the command of God, the book of Deuteronomy has the same status – the same sanctity – as the prior four books. It was written by Moses, but it was also – and entirely – written by God.

This is strange, isn’t it? How can the same text be entirely written by Moses and entirely written by God? Abarbanel has turned God into a kind of precursor to Borges’ Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote. Borges’ story eulogizes Pierre Menard, a rather thorough failure as a novelist who, it is revealed, undertook a surprising project: to write Don Quixote. In his words: “He did not want to compose another Quixote --which is easy-- but the Quixote itself.” Identical in every word, Menard’s Quixote is, Borges affirms, radically different from – and in many ways superior to – Cervantes’ Quixote. The change in authorship changes the meaning of practically every line.

As I say, Abarbanel seems to be doing something similar to Moses’ oration, on God’s behalf, to what Borges did to Don Quixote on behalf of his own creation, Pierre Menard. But why? What is the reason? And what are the implications?

The reason, it seems to me, is that Abarbanel was, as these things go, a rationalist. He read the text and, quite plainly, the text indicates that these are the words of Moses, that this is Moses’ explanation of the Torah, and to deny this apparent fact was an affront to his reason. But he did not have the option to say that Dvarim was of human origin, because the divine authorship of the entirety of the Chumash was already canonical by Abarbanel’s time. Maimonides made it clear in one of his responsa: the entire Torah was given through Moses, as if in dictation, and to deny that even one word is of divine origin, and to ascribe that word to Moses’ own composition, is to deny the entirety of the Torah. So if his reason could not deny that Moses authored Dvarim, and his tradition could not deny that God authored Dvarim, what was Abarbanel to do? He reconciled them in a novel manner: the book was spoken by Moses, but then God commanded him to write the same words, thus making God the author.

Just as with Pierre Menard and the Quixote, the shift in asserted authorial identity has profound implications. For one thing, there are numerous apparent discrepancies between Moses’ account of events in Dvarim and the account in earlier books. Moses says he is not permitted to enter the Land of Israel, for example, because of the sin of the spies, whereas in Bamidbar God says he will not enter because of the sin of smiting the rock. If Moses were the author of Dvarim, these differences might simply teach us something about Moses and his view of things, but we would have to conclude that God is telling us His true reason for rejecting Moses. If God is the author of both books, then both reasons are true, and midrash has to reconcile them. Another example: the fourth commandment as recorded in Shemot is to remember (zachor) the Sabbath day, whereas in Dvarim the commandment is to guard (shamor) the Sabbath day. Is “guard” Moses’ gloss on the original commandment to "remember"? No: since Dvarim is equally of divine origin, it is equally part of the original commandment as spoken by God.

But the implication goes deeper than this. To take this concept to a level that Abarbanel probably would not approve of, what he has done is transform the question of God’s authorship of Dvarim from a strict historical question to a hermeneutical one. Abarbanel’s historical source is the text, and he reads it as a historical source – if it says Moses wrote the book then Moses wrote the book. But with respect to the book’s authority, Abarbanel asserts a hermeneutic derived from tradition: notwithstanding what was historical fact (Moses’ authorship) it is also true that God is the author of Dvarim. We know this not because we have other historical sources that substantiate God’s authorship but because the pragmatic content of the statement, “God is the author of Dvarim” is that we approach that text in the same manner as other texts that have this status of divine authorship: its verses touch all other verses, it can contain no errors (hence apparent errors have hidden meanings), etc.

In spite of the fact that Abarbanel lived hundreds of years ago, I would describe his approach to this problem as postmodern. And the postmodern approach is one that should be dear to the hearts of Conservative Jews. We are, after all, rationalists, at least as these things go, and yet we are (or claim to be) traditionalists as well. In our seminaries, we teach Wellhausenist source criticism – that Dvarim was written not by Moses, much less dictated by God, but was written by a school of religious reformers living hundreds of years later, at the end of the first Judean monarchy, a school that source critics identify as the group responsible for collecting and editing a variety of precursor texts and producing the Torah that we have today, more or less. We teach this because we have become convinced that there is historical truth to it, and we do not want to hide what we believe to be true. But how can we teach this and also teach that the Torah is the word of God, an authority that should govern our lives and on which we should rely for guidance on matters trivial and matters of life and death? Is there a way to reconcile what we know of historical truth with what we affirm as religious truth?

We will not find that way with the most obvious alternatives to the postmodern approach, which are, as I see them, fundamentalist on the one hand and liberal on the other. The fundamentalist approach asserts the inerrancy of the text in the most blunt manner. In a religion like Judaism, with a rich tradition of exegesis that itself has canonical status, fundamentalists must reckon with that tradition, and one way to do so is by turning it into another inerrant text. Thus, you can find Jews here in Brooklyn who assert that every word of Maimonides is absolute truth, including his notions of astronomy, and who therefore truly believe that the sun goes around the earth. Less dramatically but to me no less infuriatingly, if you open a copy of the Stone Chumash, which you can find in some of your pews, you can find instances where Hebrew words are translated according to a rabbinic interpretation of the word, rather than being translated literally and being footnoted with the rabbinic interpretation. Thus are complications in the text and in the world expunged and a simplistic inerrancy preserved. The liberal approach, meanwhile, in the name of reason effectively denies the authority of the text and of tradition. Text and tradition become not an authority but a resource; you use them for the purposes that “work for you” and reject them when your reason tells you that they are invalid. Forgive me for being as blunt about this approach as I was about the fundamentalist one, but I think that however you dress it up – as progressive revelation, what have you – what it amounts to is the reduction of religion to a kind of hobby, a cultural quirk.

Abarbanel’s approach to the question of the authorship of Dvarim points to what is potentially a more productive way of looking at the text and its authority. Authority is understood as a hermeneutical question – if a text is of divine origin, then it has certain qualities that shape how we read it, and how we use it. Other texts will not have these qualities and we will not approach them or use them that way. Historical inquiry follows a different hermeneutic, and we can read the same texts with that hermeneutic – but only for the purpose of historical inquiry.

As I say, this approach strikes me as more productive and correct than the alternatives. But I do have a nagging doubt: can we as a people persevere guided only by a hermeneutic? Isn’t there a psychological difference, after all, between the will to believe that God authored the Torah, and the unwilled conviction that God authored the Torah? Isn’t a postmodern hermeneutic thin spiritual gruel to nourish a people? I could make many rejoinders to my own questions. But in the end, this question will be answered by history. If we, Conservative Jews, are faithful, then our perseverance itself will vindicate our own ideology about why we are faithful. If we are not, then we will not be there to do the vindicating.

Shabbat Shalom.

posted by Noah at 2:39 PM

 
And speaking of less-paradiasical immigration questions: what is to be done about Turkey?

I happen to be an optimist about the AK party; I think it may very well follow the Christian Democrat example of Western Europe, and articulate a political Islam that is not Islamist or opposed to democratic norms. Such a development would be enormously positive for the region, and could serve as a model in the way that Kemalist secularism (which apes French laicite and anti-clericalism) much less Baathist atheism (which apes Nazi and Communist models) cannot. That's not to say an AK ascendancy bodes well for American influence in Turkey; odds are, a more Islamically-open Turkey will draw away from the United States even if it does not draw away from democracy. But in the long-term view, the health of such a strategic and populous region as the Middle East matters enormously, and so the success of Turkey's democracy - which depends on the domestication of Islam rather than its repression - matters, again in the long run, more than the success of America's alliance with that country.

But put that aside: even if Turkey is successful, what is to be done about her? That is to say: what is to be done about her in Europe?

I think it is safe to say that, at this juncture, after Turkey's democratic reforms, after the Cyprus vote, and after the agreement to admit historic basket-cases like Romania to the European Union, there is no reasonable argument against admitting Turkey to the club. No reasonable argument, that is, that Europe can admit to. Turkey was given criteria to meet for admission, and they have, by any reasonable standard, met them.

What is Europe, anyhow? That's the question Turkey poses in sharp relief. Is Europe a loose trade confederation? In that case, admitting Turkey makes sense, but the current European structure does not: what need is there for common passports, free movement of labor, etc. in a loose trade confederation? Is Europe a euphamism for Franco-Germany, a union that ends the prospect of any future wars for dominance on the European continent? Then why allow Britain in, much less Turkey, as these countries will be sufficiently large and strong to have a role in shaping policy, potentially not to Franco-Germany's liking? Is Europe a new superpower counterweight to the United States? Then, like any nation, it needs to have a strong central authority; and is progressive dilution by including the Slavic nations of Central Europe, much less Turkey, likely to speed the process of developing this authority? I think not. 

Or is Europe, as Chris Caldwell and explicitly and Stephen Kinzer implicitly suggest, a world government in the making, a piecemeal attempt to change the paradigm by which the peoples of the earth are ruled?

Europe-as-paradigm cannot reject Turkey, because rejecting Turkey means rejecting the paradigm. But Europe conceived otherwise - as a trade confederation, as Franco-Germany writ large, as a rival superpower in the making - cannot reject Turkey either, because rejecting Turkey would be disastrous for Europe's foreign policy, and specifically for the foreign policy of key member states such as France and Germany. Rejecting Turkey would drive that country into the arms of either its Muslim neighbors or the Americans; neither is an objective sought by or to be welcomed by European statesmen. But accepting Turkey means taking one more giant step, larger than any before, in the direction of the end of the nation-state and the end of national democracy. It is not plausible that Frenchmen and Germans will allow Turks - who currently roughly equal either of them in numbers and will, in a few decades, approach the total population of French and Germans combined - to vote as equals to shape the destiny and daily life of France and Germany. And it is contradictory to the whole premise of Europe (free movement of labor and all that) that Frenchmen and Germans could vote to protect their countries and their way of life from being transformed by an influx from Turkey. Admitting Turkey to the EU, as currently constituted, makes it very difficult to conceive how both democracy and the EU survive.

So once again, Europe's statesmen have led their people down a path from which turning aside is no longer possible. The only directions are backward, or forward. To date, Europe has always gone forward, and no one should bet that they will flinch now.

Let me stress that I admire the achievement of modern Turkey, and that I am generally optimistic about the future of that state and that people. I don't think there's any reason why Europe couldn't assimilate a controlled flow of Turkish immigrants - if they wanted to. It's not at all clear, though, that they want to; the Germans, certainly, seem averse to the very idea of immigration, notwithstanding the fact that they have millions of immigrants (mostly non-citizens) in the country already. But union with Turkey would not mean a controlled immigration, but uncontrolled, and it would not be possible to assimilate Turks to European norms because Turkey would be an equal partner and equally justified in demanding that Europeans assimilate to Turkish norms. Whether or not those norms are superior, inferior or precisely equal in some mythical objective sense, there is no question that Europeans in general do not want to assimilate to them. To make an analogy: even an immigration enthusiast, who thinks Mexico is a great country that has made great strides towards democratization, who finds Mexicans hard-working, loyal and possessed of good values, and who is confident of America's ability to assimilate a large Mexican immigration - even that person might pause before contemplating political union with Mexico, letting Mexico vote on American foreign and domestic policy, etc.

I've argued for many years that America is better served by the increasing integration of core Europe than by the increasing expansion thereof. A Franco-German state comprising those two countries plus the BeNeLux, tightly integrated and looking like a larger version of the German federal state, is not contrary to our interests. The country would be stronger than any Continental power before, but Europe is not so central to the world any longer, and we are not threatened by one power dominating there. If other countries to the south and east are integrated with this power at the level of a customs union, that is only to the good. If Italy, or Spain, or Czechia, choose deeper integration, and vote to surrender their sovereignty and become part of the Leviathan, that does not change the picture overmuch. But a massive, sprawling EU quasi-state approaching 400 million souls, committed to something more than a customs union but incapable of being a functioning nation-state, will necessarily burden America. It will be unable to assist us militarily, unwilling to assist us diplomatically, unable generally to make coherent policy based on its interests because it will be unable, increasingly, to discern its interests. Though weak, it will be dangerous. But America has pursued the opposite course for decades, encouraging expansion first and integration later, and it is probably too late now.



posted by Noah at 10:37 AM

 
And speaking further of that urban immigrant paradise in which I dwell, let me limn a few words in praise of a local institution dear to my hear, Celebrate Brooklyn, an annual summer festival of music with a smattering of dance, movies and other fun in Prospect Park.

In the past couple of weeks, the family and I have seen a bunch of really interesting performances. I am not generally a huge fan of Latin music, which (seriously - no offense intended) sometimes seems to me like it's produced by the yard. But I was blown away by this collection of acts on July 3rd, particularly Cabas, a wild and crazy Columbian pop star who is, I can attest, not just a very pretty face (the screaming teenage girls at the concert can attest to that) but a very talented musician. If you like Latin music, Budweiser sponsors a series as part of Celebrate Brooklyn every year. Last year, the act that most impressed me was Cafe Tacuba from Mexico, though they didn't seem so enormously different from a guitar band like Pearl Jam.

Every year, Celebrate Brooklyn hosts a movie series, including at least one silent film accompanied by live music. This year, the movie in question was Buster Keaton's magnificent Civil War comedy, The General. I'd never seen this film before, and now, having seen it, I cannot forgive myself my negligence. And to add icing to the cake, the accompaniment was by the Alloy Orchestra, one of the most interesting groups around, one that specializes in music to accompany silent films. Their score for Fritz Lang's Metropolis is magnificent, and stands on its own apart from the film (and, if you've seen the film accompanied by that score, the score inevitably and vividly calls the images from the film to mind whenever you hear it).

This past weekend, we took two offerings. First was the Mark Morris Dance Group. Frankly, this was rather a disappointment. Morris's troup appeared a couple of years ago and performed a quite interesting if uneven collection of dances. But this was much less interesting, and frankly not very good. Dancers barely danced at all; they gestured, ran in circles, or stood still. There was considerable reliance on frankly juvenile R-rated humor. And one of the three dances was performed to country-western numbers that, I am quite sure, Morris was mostly interested in making fun of, and in a shallow way. I enjoyed The Hard Nut, Morris's version of The Nutcracker, well enough when I saw it a decade ago, and as I said, his troup's last performance at Celebrate Brooklyn was interesting. But after this one, I rather better understand what Laura Jacobs was getting at in her scathing review of Morris's work in The New Criterion last year.

Finally, we were formally inaugurated into the ranks of Brooklyn parents of young children when we attended a concert by Dan Zanes and Friends. Our nearly-two-year-old son could not stop repeating the name "Dan Zanes, Dan Zanes" all the way to the concert, but he had no real idea of what a "Dan Zanes" might be, and seemed a bit disappointed to discover he was just another adult male human. But once the concert began he was rapt in attention. I fear we have not heard the last of this cheerful fellow in our household.

Performances at Celebrate Brooklyn are outdoors, and frequently go on even in the rain. (Dan Zanes performed partly in a thunderstorm, and years ago when we heard the wonderful Red Clay Ramblers perform at the bandshell, the performers had to ask members of the audience onstage to hold umbrellas over them to protect their instruments. Talk about close to the action!) Prospect Park borders on a variety of neighborhoods, from the relatively upscale Park Slope to Prospect Heights, a mostly middle-class, mostly black neighborhood, to Jamaican and Hassidic Jewish Crown Heights, to other neighborhoods with a variety of ethnic groups and economic classes. Celebrate Brooklyn does a pretty good job of catering to all of these groups and their particular interests. You can pay for membership and get prime seating (and pretty much a guarantee of a seat) or you can just show up at the gate and, if you're early enough, get a seat for only $3; or you can just sit in the park outside of the seating area for free, and enjoy the music from a somewhat greater distance.

This is what city life is all about, and I applaud BRIC (the organization who puts together Celebrate Brooklyn) and the donors who fund their activities (including myself; pat on own back) for making it possible, year after year.
posted by Noah at 9:38 AM

 
In any event, in the latest issue, there are two pieces on immigration - one explicitly about it, and one implicitly. The first, about incipient and accelerating development of a Mexican underclass, is by the irrepressible Heather MacDonald, scourge of that same class. The second, about the economic success of immigrant-dominated Queens and the significance thereof, is by Stephen Malaga, the resident expert on urban development issues. It is a testament to City Journal as a magazine that it publishes, in the same issue, a piece that will be cheered by immigration restrictionists (and has - see here and here) and a piece that will be cheered by immigration enthusiasts.

Where do I stand on this question? Well, frankly, immigration is not my issue. But I'm not sure the two perspectives entirely contradict one another. Rather, I suspect - again, this is not my issue - that immigration is one of those questions - like environmentalism, like income inequality, like civil liberties and crime - where there are real trade-offs, gains and losses to either side that are difficult to weigh with the same scale. But some clarification of terms and illustration of geographic and class differences may be useful nonetheless.

One of the most important distinctions that is not made with respect to immigration - and whether immigration is a net benefit - is: a net benefit to whom? To immigrants? To the communities that receive the immigrants? To the employers of the immigrants? To the American citizenry as a whole? To "America" conceived as something other than or beyond the sum of the parochial interests of individual American citizens? Immigration enthusiasts are particularly loose in their language on this point, where immigration restrictionists tend to be more precise: when they say immigration is a net negative, they mean either a net negative to the communities that receive the immigrants or to the sum of the interests of all American citizens.

I am most skeptical of the macro-economic arguments against immigration, and most sympathetic to arguments about negative externalities. The social/cultural arguments are complex; some I have sympathy with and some I am skeptical of. Why am I skeptical of the macro-economic arguments? I feel like many of them are one-handed. There is no question that immigration, by providing additional labor competition, particularly at the lower end of the income scale, reduces labor bargaining power and therefore increases income inequality. But by the same token and for the same reasons, it increases productivity and reduces prices, with benefits that redound to all Americans. The biggest concerns about the economic impact of immigration, it seems to me, should be about the distributions of costs and benefits rather than the aggregate benefit.

These distributions can be unequal in terms of class, but also in terms of geography. It has not escaped my notice that the largest concentration of immigration-restrictionists is in Southern California, where the largest concentration of immigration-enthusiasts is in the New York Metro Area. Why would that be? Well, the negative externalities of immigration to Southern California are manifest and significant, while the benefits accrue primarily to employers (e.g., the agribusiness centers of the Central Valley) in terms of lower wage costs and a more flexible labor force, and to their customers (who live all over the country) in terms of lower prices. In addition to the negative externalities MacDonald cites (inreases in crime), Southern California is a relatively fragile ecology that has been profoundly - and negatively - transformed by massive overpopulation.

But everything looks the other way in New York. New York City is already a high-density area I would suspect, the highest in the nation. Immigrants are not radically transforming the landscape of New York; they are replenishing a city that otherwise steadily loses people to the surrounding suburbs and to the nation as a whole (and this is a process that has been going on for generations; New York has always depended on immigrants to maintain its population). Moreover, in New York, immigrants are present all through the economy, and perform vital functions that the entire city uses. New Yorkers - of all classes - reap a greater percentage of the economic rewards of immigration than do Californians, and some of the negative externalities in California are positive externalities in New York.

The cultural dimension is very different as well. Queens has, by one count I dimly recall, 168 different ethnic groups. At that level of diversity, Madison's wisdom about submerging faction in a large republic has considerable force. By contrast, Southern California's immigrant population is overwhelmingly from a single neighboring country. And, as noted, immigrants to New York come in all economic shapes and sizes, from Wall Street traders (looking around me, I see an immigrant from Ireland, an immigrant from South Africa, an immigrant from Taiwan, a Luxembourgeois national, an immigrant from Bangladesh, an immigrant from India, three immigrants from Canada, an immigrant from Greece and an immigrant from Cyprus), to small entrepreneurs, to retail workers, cabdrivers, construction crews and, yes, domestic servants. That's very different from an immigration picture concentrated at the lower-end of the economic spectrum.

New York and California represent two extremes in terms of local experience with immigration; I suspect that most of the country is in between. Texas, for example, has much less contentious immigration politics than California, in part because the middle class in Texas doesn't feel like they're being pushed out of their homes by a crush of newcomers (as Steve Sailer has pointed out, in Texas, if it gets too crowded where you are, you move to somewhere similar enough, whereas in California, many people feel like they've been expelled from Eden), in part because Texas has a more substantial old-Hispanic population that is thoroughly American to which new immigrants can more readily assimilate, and in part because Texas is much stingier in terms of public welfare than California is. But other states - e.g., Colorado - are developing a politics that looks much more like California's.

But what about the nation as a whole? One of the distinctions I drew above - which enthusiasts are not scrupulous about, and which restrictionists call them on frequently - is between the collective interests of the American citizenry and the interests of "America" in some abstract sense. Let's take one very basic impact of immigration: it increases America's population, and specifically America's fertile population. There is no question that population, and reasonable growth thereof, is still an important measure of national power. To that extent, and all else being equal (which it may not be, of course), immigration is a net-benefit for "America" in that it makes America more powerful. But this doesn't mean it makes America's current citizenry better off; indeed, all else being equal (which, again, it may not be), it probably makes America's current citizenry less well-off, since there will be some "transaction cost" to acquiring this new population, which will be borne by the citizenry, and their "share" in the new, more powerful America is diluted by the newcomers. (And, if you look forward in time, and consider that immigrants as a whole tend to be more fertile than the native-born population, the descendents of the current citizenry will see their "share" diluted further.)

Does this mean that the Olympian perspective that considers "America" as an abstract entity with interests somewhat distinct from the aggregate interests of its citizenry is illegitimate? Not at all - but it behooves those who take this perspective to be explicit about it. Steve Sailer, prominent restrictionist, is explicit in his perspective: he's a "citizenist" who rejects the above Olympian view. Immigration enthusiasts are less explicit, and they should be more so, for the sake of honesty as well as for the sake of clarity. For if the debate is conducted in an open spirit, and the people of the United States determine that their values are best-served by an orderly but large-scale immigration, in spite of any costs to them personally, then they have judged their interests as they see fit, and dissenters should not gainsay them. We ask immigrants to adopt our ancestors as their own, to revere Washington as the father of their country, Lincoln as the savior of their union. There is no reason why current citizens of the United States could not similarly adopt the descendents of later immigrants as their heirs. But they should freely choose to do so, and for that to be the case, immigration must be debated openly and democratically.

There is no good reason why immigration policy should not be so debated, with civility and honor. And again, I must fault the enthusiast side more than the restrictionist for attempting to stifle legitimate debate. Swear words and scare quotes are no substitute for rational argument. I do not care whether someone is called a "nativist" - if that means that the citizens of the United States get to decide the immigration policy of the United States, then I'm a nativist. And I do not see how accusations of guilt by association - with zero-population-growth groups, for example, or industrial unions - taints the arguments made by the restrictionists. Nor do I see how the provenance of immigration opponents bears on the debate; a naturalized American is as free to opine on immigration as is any other citizen, and it's repugnant of some immigration proponents to suggest otherwise, directly or indirectly.

Finally there are many matters on which even many enthusiasts can agree with the restrictionists: that massive illegal immigration is necessarily problematic; that all Americans should want to make reasonable efforts to keep criminals and terrorists out of the country; and that where immigration puts strain on the unum that our pluribus is supposed to have become, this should be addressed with policy - not excluding immigration policy. Conducted in good faith - as many restrictionists and enthusiasts alike do, but not all and not often enough - the immigration debate should be an edifying spectacle, educational for the native-born and new immigrant alike, and should strengthen our mutual bonds, not tear us asunder.

posted by Noah at 8:17 AM

 
Do you read City Journal? If you don't, you should. They are more consistently challenging, serious and intriguing than just about any other publication I've read. Most of the time, by the time I'm through the first couple of paragraphs of an article, I can write the rest in my head, and I stop reading. With many of the pieces in City Journal, I can't do that - first, because there's too much data in the piece that I'd miss if I don't actually read, and second, because I frequently can't predict the precise contours of the argument without actually reading it. Finally, and for me as a proud urbanite, most importantly, City Journal is perhaps the only magazine in the country that is both proudly urban-focused and conservative in orientation. Rudy Giuliani used to read it regularly, and I assume still does. Anyone on the Right who cares about the whole country, and not just the "red states" should do so as well.

posted by Noah at 8:11 AM

 
First of all, Mr. Wood, it would be well if every one of us did read Njal's Saga.
 
More seriously: after reading this piece, I thought to myself, "well, at least I'm not part of the problem. I read lots of serious literature." At which point I tried to list, mentally, the books I'd read recently. And found myself . . . at a loss. Not that I hadn't read anything, but that, bare weeks and months after reading, I could not recall what I had read, nor, when I recalled what, when I had read it.
 
I'm now in the middle of two books - Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton and Paul Johnson's survey of the world history of Art. I'm enjoying each immensely. Before that, I read Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, and The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, the former of which I enjoyed and the latter of which I can say affected me more profoundly, though I'm not sure I would describe the sensation of reading it as precisely pleasurable. Before that, I believe, I read Homer's Odyssey, in the translation by Robert Fagles, which was revelatory in many ways but, in the end, I thought markedly inferior to the less-readable but more profound Iliad, which I read last summer in the stern Richard Lattimore translation. Earlier in the year, I re-read Joyce's Ulysses, finishing it for the first time. But then I start to falter, though I know I've read a number of other books this year - many of them unmemorable, true, many of them unliterary. But I should at least remember that I read them!

posted by Noah at 2:54 PM

 
This is a continuation of 13 Ways of Looking at a Death Camp. Numbers I through III are here.

IV.

Treblinka is the least preserved of all the death camps on Polish soil. After the uprising in ‘43, the Nazis razed the camp to the ground. The Jews of the region had nearly all been liquidated by then, so the camp’s destruction was no great loss. All that remained when the Russians arrived were the ends of the rail lines leading in to a field of ruin. After the war, after the rubble of the camp was cleared, the Polish government used the site as a burial ground for old tombstones from throughout the country. Grave markers which had been pulled up to serve as paving stones were uprooted once again and brought to Treblinka, where they were piled neatly in an ever-rising ziggurat.

With time, this peculiar burial mound became a tourist attraction of sorts, and pilgrims came in growing numbers - from America, from Israel, from Britain, and even from the Soviet Union. Sometimes the visitors looked for a stone familiar to them in some way – a family or first name, a name of a town or even a date with some personal significance; if they found it, they would lay a wreath of flowers, or place a smaller stone atop it as is the traditional custom. Sometimes they brought tokens of their own to be added to the pile: a locket, a pair of gloves, a gold ring, a sheaf of letters. And so the mountain continued to grow for years after the last gravestones had been placed there, the official memorials at other camp sites had been constructed, and the last survivors of the camp itself had died.

Initially, only Jews visited the Treblinka memorial. After 1989, however, the Poles began to reexamine their own history during the war, to dig up the graves that underlay the plazas and the factories of postwar Poland. And, while no official decision was ever made to broaden the scope of the memorial (since the memorial itself had no official existence), Poles began to make their own pilgrimages. Besides the mementos brought by individual families, officers of the state bureaucracy – on their own initiative, and without authorization – dug through the archives of a dozen governments for lists of deportees, draftees, labor conscripts, the executed, the starved, the missing. They found maps of the General Government and of German colonization; childhood photos of the murdered officers of Katyn; all this and more they brought in truckloads to Treblinka, and added to the monument. Russians came, too, with their posthumous decorations, their red flags and Lenin busts; an elderly woman scaled the mountain to its top to place her firstborn son’s baby shoes (he died of hunger during the siege of Leningrad) at the very summit. Two weeks later it was buried under the ruins of a Ukrainian church, burned in ‘46, whose husk was carried to the site on foot, board by charred board, by the surviving children of the vanished village where once it stood.

Today, the Treblinka mountain is the highest point in Poland. There have been proposals, periodically, to take it apart, to organize its constituent material. Archaeologists from Tel Aviv came recently to assist in the excavation of the mound; they plan to dig a tunnel into the center, from which a spiral staircase would ascend to the very top. From that height, you can see as far as Gdansk to the northwest; to the southwest until recently, you could almost make out the Marriott tower through the haze around Warsaw, but now the view is blocked by the ruins of a slave ship from Port-au-Prince, on which it isn’t safe to climb.

If you were to climb that staircase now, at the summit you would find a coarse, grey concrete platform, built of slabs of the dismantled Berlin Wall. The Germans come periodically to clear new offerings from the platform and raise it another half-meter on a hydraulic jack; they fill in the space below with rubble from Dresden. Climb on that, and in the center of the center slab you could see the graffiti looks a fresher blue than elsewhere: Behold thy Gods, O Israel, it reads, in a hand untutored in Hebrew script.

V.

At the heart – both physically and spiritually – of the Yad va-Shem national shrine at Dimona is the eternal flame. The “flame” (in actuality there are no flames; the famously flickering light is the product of air currents from the core below) lies at the bottom of a deep well of glass. Multiple reflections carry its image up to the level of the visitors’ gallery, and out, onto all the walls and even the faces of the visitors. The effect is so successful that some are afraid to step into such a fiery furnace – and many complain of the heat upon exiting, though the air is carefully controlled to within a half-degree of the standard seventy-two.

A custom has grown up for visitors to throw small objects into the flame. No one is certain where this practice began, but it is thought to have arisen as a natural extension of wishing wells. Individuals, couples or whole families will come and say kaddish or el maleh rachamim for their departed, sometimes of long ago but increasingly of recent memory, then reach into their pockets and toss, or give to their children to toss, a few coins, or pebbles, perhaps a prayer written on wood or ceramic or, especially among American visitors, some small personal memento, into the well of the flame. Then wait for the flash as their offering is consumed. Although condemned by both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Chief Rabbis, many consider it a beautiful, contemporary rite of Jewish mourning, practiced by thousands, and the income from this tourism is a major contributor to the financial upkeep of the facility as a whole.

A more troubling side of this popularity, of course, is the increasing use of the shrine as a site for suicides, of solitary individuals but especially of groups. In response, the height of the guardrail has been raised, and the soldiers guarding the shrine keep closer watch than in the past when teenagers enter without their parents or other adult supervision. The most recent tactic adopted, to much fanfare, has been the installation of a series of posters displaying the results of failed suicide attempts in the flame, photos of the bodies of those who got caught on the way down, and had to be retrieved. Most of those who come with suicide in mind are unaware that one could survive the attempt, but several have. None has lived more than a year, but a year of terrible suffering. It is hoped that the vivid prospect of slow death from radiation sickness will prove to be a powerful deterrent in the future to those who would throw themselves into the flame.

VI.

The apartment was on the outskirts of the city, not far, in fact, from the camp: a flat in a tower beside a highway, one among hundreds, identical and scattered about like droppings in a field. The buildings were the color of dust, the ground a hard grey skin broken by tufts of brown grass and puddles of rainwater. Here and there a playground swing, a shrine to the virgin, or a little seated Saviour in a box like an outhouse, resting his head in his left hand and wearing a pained expression, as though he were constipated. David said hello to each as they passed. Buck up, man, God knows you’ve seen rougher times. She laughed along.

“I am not promising anything of my father,” Elzbieta said, “you understand.”

“I’m not promising you’ll see him in headlines or anything either.”

“Don’t be silly. I only say that it is very early in the morning now for him. I wish you could meet him when he was younger. But he is very informed even today.”

They had met at the camp, of course. She had surprised him when she entered the barracks, and he dropped his tape recorder. After apologies, the tape recorder had to explained, and the simplest explanation David could muster was: he was working on a story, perhaps to become a book, about Poland. Yes, his family was from here. No, after the war. But he wasn't interested in the war so much; he wanted to write about the country as it lived, not as it died. The struggle under and after Communism, that sort of thing. And he didn't want just to hang out in the jazz clubs of Warsaw; he wanted to see the real country. All this was, of course, entirely spurious. So she told him about her father, who had had some small role in anti-government activities in the 1970s. Would he like to interview him? Very much indeed.

Upstairs, she threw their jackets in the washtub and made him tea while he poked about the apartment. He examined the Lapp etchings and West African masks on the living room walls, the photo calendar of New York above her desk below her bed, the cot in her kid brother’s room where her mother slept when the son’s asthma or her husband’s snoring acted up. She served him pickle salad, boiled potatoes and Italian plums which he took whole and spit out the stone. Her father awoke just as Elzbieta had risen to clear the dishes.

David offered his hand from his chair, and motioned to the older man to sit next to him. The father smiled at his guest and waved, and mumbled to his daughter in Polish.

“Tell him to sit, stay a while,” David said.

“He wants to know how you like in the city.”

“Tell him I love it. I would stay here forever. Tell him to sit.”

The daughter pointed to her empty chair as she translated, but her father waved her down, remaining standing in the doorway. Curled nostrils and dark hair on the back of his hands; his ancestry was unmistakable, but David couldn't think of a polite way to bring the subject up, not even to a landsmann. He would never have guessed from looking at the daughter.

The father played with his greying, uneven beard with his left hand as he stood there, contemplating, with his eyes fixed not so much on his guest as the space he occupied. After a moment, he came up with a question.

“Why doesn’t he sit down? Does he only take interviews standing?”

“He doesn’t want to sit down; you stay; I’m almost finish the dishes.”

“Well, what did he ask?”

Elzbieta rubbed her hands on her apron and replaced it on its hook beside the sink. “It wasn’t a question; he said Lublin is too much an old city, to much of the east.”

“Tell him it looks very modern; on the tram, when we were walking, we saw shops just like in America. Tell him I’m impressed. Even this apartment, tell him. I’d love to hear about all the architecture of the city, from an expert like him; tell him that.”

The older man snorted into his moustache, and his daughter laughed. “He says -- it’s funny. He asks if you know about the secret about the apartment, about the housing development.”

“Not unless you told me.”

Elzbieta looked at her father as she told the story. “They did competition for building this development in the sixties, for an artistic purpose, and so that it would be the best housing for the workers. It was part of the reforms from the period. All the most important architects of the time participated.”

Her father interrupted her, and her retort had just the faintest edge, as if astonished that a warning were still necessary after so many times around this course.

“I'm sorry,” she apologized, in English. “My father was working as architect for then as well. But he was passed over for this competition. The winning design was a plan to build thirty-six apartment blocks, of the usual type, to be laid out in such a way that, from the air, they see the portrait of Wladislaw Gomulka, in full profile.”

Her father doubled up his chin and frowned dramatically, and she aped him, and they laughed, and David with them.

“From the air!” the American cried. “That’s perfect! Well, you certainly can’t see it from the ground.”

She translated without relaxing her jaw, pinching in her vowels and making herself giggle. Her father cut her off, and began waving his hands, speaking through his own laughter.

“He says, of course you can’t see it; they never build it this way, this is the funny part. Because of shortages, the project is not begun until 1971; by then Gomulka is sensitive, politically, so they alter the design to form the profile of Brezhnev.”

The name translated itself, and her father knew to laugh again, to shake his flannel shirttails loose, and expose their raggedness. Can you imagine, he asked? The best housing for the workers, in Brezhnev’s nose? Can you imagine? He laughed and laughed, rubbed his eyes and sneezed and laughed again, shuffling back to his bedroom.
posted by Noah at 9:05 AM

 
John Derbyshire raises some very worthwhile points with respect to the trial of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Three points, in fact: whence does the court derive its jurisdiction? what law could Saddam possibly have traduced? and in what sense does legalizing the process of disposing of Saddam Hussein serve our (or anyone's) policy aims?

These are good questions to be asking. But there are some questions behind them that need asking, and answering, to tease out what is really being asked here.

Start with the first question: jurisdiction. Before we can ask who has jurisdiction to try Saddam Hussein, we must ask: who determines who has jurisdiction? There is an end to appeal in all things, and that end is the sovereign source of all authority in the jurisdiction. This, in Iraq, can be one of only three entities: the United States (by right of conquest), Saddam himself (by virtue of his Presidential office, though now deposed by force from same), and the Iraqi people as represented by the new Iraqi government. Inasmuch as the assertion or denial of jurisdiction means anything, it signifies a debate about who is sovereign in Iraq. The trial of Saddam Hussein, then, first and foremost is an assertion of sovereignty, just as was the trial of Charles I. And since the trial is taking place in Iraq, with Iraqi judges, the trial is, first and foremost, an assertion by the new government of Iraq that *it* is sovereign (or, rather, the legitimate representative of the sovereign Iraqi people).

This understanding should shed more light on the meaning of the Nuremburg Trials. They were, first and foremost, an assertion that the victors in WWII were sovereign in German territory. Had the defendants been tried by a German court, a different message about sovereignty would have been delivered, a message more similar to the message intended to be delivered in Iraq. Similarly, this understanding explicates a key meaning of the trial of Milosevic. The assertion of the right to try him is the assertion of ultimate sovereign authority. In the case of Milosevic, that authority is apparently vested in international bureaucratic bodies charged with the prosecution. Whether *this* is a good thing, I leave to another time to debate.

With this in mind, we can approach the second question. The purpose of an ordinary criminal trial is, indeed, positivistic - the trial establishes whether positive law has been transgressed. But that is surely not the meaning of the Nuremburg, Milosevic or Saddam Hussein trials - and this should be no surprise to anyone. Nuremburg, for example, was understood at the time to be a rebuke to a purely positivistic vision of the law (as, indeed, there was some notion at the time that German courts' devotion to positivism helped smooth the path for Nazi corruption of the law). The intention, in all cases, is to invoke a moral law, accessible to reason, to convict those guilty of gross and norotious evils.

Understood in this way, some of Derb's objections should be answered. If we're not talking about positive law, really, then, we don't need to debate *which* positive law was transgressed, or how Saddam Hussein could be prosecuted under a law he himself signed. Nor do we need to debate the justice of punishing someone under laws passed after the crime was committed. If it is just to kill Saddam Hussein by lining him up against the wall without ceremony, surely there is no injustice in killing him after the ceremony of a trial.

What, then, is the purpose of the trial? The purpose of the trial is to establish (a) the facts - that he committed the evils of which he is accused; (b) to declare that these facts are the *reason* he is being killed (assuming he is sentenced to death, as I expect); and (c) to implicate the sovereign authority by whose power sentence is passed and executed in the sentencing and execution of same.

In all these ways, a trial is different from lining Saddam Hussein up against the wall and simply killing him. There will be an official record of his crimes; this might happen anyhow, but the trial provides a formal process for this. No more debate about whether he did what it is said he did. There will be a declaration of guilt - i.e., we will know he was punished (let's assume killed) *for* these crimes, and not, for example, to cover up some more heinous crime on the part of those who killed him. And the people of Iraq will have been implicated in the moral judgement - for by their power will the judgement be carried out. To the extent that these differences serve our aims of policy, a trial serves those aims.

Derb raises two additional objections, apart from the concern that the trial is not a true legal process and so is, in some profound sense, illegitimate. They are: that Saddam Hussein might actually get off, and that war is a matter of self-defense, not justice, and so we want to kill our enemies, not try them. They are both good points. Here are my answers.

To the first: for Saddam to get off, one of three things would have to be true. Either the evidence would have to be sufficiently equivocal as to his culpability in the known crimes of the regime that Iraqis would be unconvinced of his moral guilt. Or Iraqis would have to be sufficiently sympathetic to the fallen regime, and antagonistic to its replacement, that they deny the authority of this court as the representative of the sovereign people to execute judgement on Saddma Hussein. Or Iraqis would have to be incapable of sufficient moral reason to deem Saddam Hussein's behavior to be grossly evil.

In all these ways, the trial is a test of the regime and of the Iraqi people, a test of moral reason, a test of legitimacy, and a test of will. No, we should not undertake to stage such test if we don't expect to pass, because failure is disastrous. But the Iraqis will be tested thusly at some point, and if not now, when?

Moreover, killing Saddam in his spider hole would not obviate these tests. Would the evidence of Saddam's guilt be less equivocal if we had killed him upon capture? Would Iraqis be less sympathetic to him, and more friendly to his replacements? Would our authority in killing him be deemed more legitimate? I don't see how one can answer yes to any of these questions. To the extent, then, that the trial serves any purpose other than simply making Saddam cease to be, it serves these purposes better than summary execution upon capture would.

Thus, to Derb's second point. I agree totally that our aim is to kill our enemies, and not to bring them to justice. But this is equally true up and down the chain of command; we do not set forth in war to acquire POWs but to defeat the enemy, generally by killing him. Nonetheless, if the enemy falls into our hands, we are bound to capture him and treat him according to the laws of war, not to summarily execute him because it would be more convenient. Similarly, while there is nothing wrong with seeking to capture Saddam dead or alive, nor even with having a preference for him dead, if delivered alive it is not reaonsable to say that we should simply have killed him. Once captured, he is no longer an enemy trying to kill us, and if we are to dispose of him it must be by some other means than summary execution. There must be a process of some sort. His current trial is one such; trial by the Hague would be another; by a Kuwaiti court another; by an American court another.

Derb makes the analogy to Romania, and the summary execution of the Ceaucescus. Has the procedure by which Romania was rid of these odious two tainted the new regime? Well, if I recall arguments about this very point five and ten years ago, to some extent yes. Romania was considered - by Romanians as well as outsiders - to have handled things rather less well than the Poles, Czechs, Russians, Germans and others with ex-dictators to dispose of. Certainly it is not something the Romanians are proud of. But let me make another analogy: to Iraq in 1958. The king, prince regent and much of the royal family of Iraq were murdered as part of a coup in a spectacularly bloody massacre. Does Derb think our interests - or the Iraqis' - would in any way be served by a repeat performance with Saddam on the receiving end?

Saddam Hussein deserves no compassion, on our part or on the part of Iraqis. Nor is he *entitled* to due process or the other protections of positive law. He is condemned for gross evil, and he is faced with the moral judgement of his people. They - and we - need to follow some formality for their - and our - own sakes, not for his; for the sake of moral clarity and to keep that country and ourselves from tumbling into the abyss.
posted by Noah at 9:50 AM

 
We're now in the "three weeks" - the period from the 17th of Tammuz (in this calendar year, July 6th) through the 9th of Av that is the deepest period of mourning on the Jewish calendar. The 17th of Tammuz marks the date the walls of Jerusalem were breached by Nebuchadnezzar and his troops, and the 9th of Av marks the date of the destruction of the First Temple (as well as the Second, as well as - according to tradition - many other calamities in Jewish history). I have never observed the daylight fast of the 17th of Tammuz, though I usually observe the full-day fast of the 9th of Av, and I've never observed the restrictions of the three week period between the two dates (e.g., no listening to music or other festive behavior). Nonetheless, I thought I'd do something to mark the period this year: put old writing of dubious relevance on the blog.

Seriously, though, I've always held a grudge against Yom Ha-Shoah - Holocaust Remembrance Day - for a number of reasons. First, the date comes too soon after Passover, a joyous festival, resulting in a radical mood shift I've never been able to handle. The period between Pesach (Passover) and Shavuot (Pentecost) is a period of quasi-mourning (at least until La'G ba-Omer, a minor holiday that falls on the 33rd day of the period) but not of deep sorrow. Inserting Holocaust Memorial Day in between is intrusive. Second, the choice of date feels like a slight to tradition, in that traditionally all calamities of similar magnitude - apart from the destruction of the two Temples, only the expulsion from Spain looms in any way comparably in Jewish memory - are ascribed to the 9th of Av. Establishing a new day feels like an assertion of discontinuity: *this* destruction is unprecedented, and cannot be contained in the traditional understanding of Jewish history. And while I understand the impulse behind such a decision, it's not clear to me that the decision was wise.

But mostly I just don't like Holocaust commemorations. I get annoyed for the same reasons Leon Wieseltier gets annoyed (words seem inadequate to address the experience, and so one feels that with regard to that of which one cannot speak one must perforce be silent) and then I get annoyed at *that* feeling (a well-orchestrated throng, shouting silence is, when one reflects, perhaps the least-appropriate memorial for the murdered).

My maternal grandparents lost nearly their entire families to the Nazi murderers; my grandmother lost everyone, and my grandfather lost all but two brothers. Twelve years ago, I made what I guess you'd have to call something of a pilgrimage to Poland, not so much to visit the specific places where they lived (there's nothing really left) but to make some kind of connection with a country that always seemed to me like an estranged cousin. And of course, a Jew does not visit Poland without a visit to the camps, however unedifying such a visit may be.

So I thought, in lieu of anything more intelligent to say, I'd unearth some of what I wrote in the aftermath of that trip, do a little editing, and post the results over the next couple of weeks.

Here, then, and over the next couple of weeks, are:

==========

13 Ways of Looking at a Death Camp.

I.

For the first time in three days the sun made a welcome appearance the morning that they visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex. Their group had spent the previous day’s rain huddled under the sheltering roof of Krakow’s medieval market, scouring the bins and stalls for souvenirs: for amber, silver, wooden boxes and wooden spoons – and little wooden Jews – Jews with fiddles and Jews with scrolls, in streimels, kaftans and payyos, with red, drooping noses and black, drooping eyes – like the wooden Indians one might acquire at a tourist stand in Arizona. Professor Sass bought one. He imagined setting it down at the front of his old desk at the university, the amusement of watching the undergraduates’ reactions when they sat down to discuss their paper topics with his little friend wringing his hands in their faces. On the bus, he leaned across the aisle and waved it at the Muravciks’ teenage daughter, had the fiddler do a little dance for her. She scowled dutifully and stared at the ceiling. He thought it best to leave it on board when they arrived at the camp.

The woman who would lead them through this place stood waiting in the sun. She was solid but soft, a full woman, and the Professor’s eyes were drawn to where she put a gentle but persistent strain on her soft pink suit and white blouse. Her monologue swelled with statistics: so many from Krakow alone, so many Soviet POWs, so many in the month of June, 1943. Eventually, he looked deliberately away from her, still not listening, and feeling the embarrassment of a younger man.

She led them down the paths of suffering, station by station. While the barracks at Birkenau were left bare — the crematoria kept as the ruins the Nazis left them in – the barracks at Auschwitz had been redone as museum installations. There were pavilions for every nationality in Europe. One for the Belgians; one for the Jews. Had you been there, you would not have been redeemed. Because they were an American tour, they were taken to the Jewish pavilion, Americans being too few even by this calculus to merit their own pavilion.

No one in the group needed to re-hear the story that even those who had not lived it had heard firsthand. Sass preferred to look than to listen, and let the guide’s drone fade just so far away from him to be part of the camp tableau for him to view: the shirtless workmen repairing the wall of one of the barracks; the garbled sounds of a protest speech wafting over from the other side of the camp, where the convent had been built; the flowerbed planted by the nuns between the parking lot and the museum cafeteria; the Great Patriotic War tramping in red and white across the black exhibit placards. He thought of David making a comment about that; a smile, thinking that he wished he had more students like David, wished, in fact, David could have been his student rather than this awkward half-relation that he was; then a deeper smile thinking that that is precisely what David would think he would think, and would wish him not to, and, below that, would wish for himself. And below that, his own son’s voice rebuking him in his physicianly tones.

He watched the other members of their group skitter about the camp making their mark upon the place. Mr. Frankel straining to hoist himself up on a bunk in the barracks. It feels like a bunk. Now he has to get down. Mrs. Hauptmann touching the door of the oven, her fingers coming off dusty; the widening of her eyes as she considers the provenance of the dust and her panicked search for a washroom to remove the evidence of her transgression. Mr. Muravcik, holding a camcorder, shouting at his pouty daughter with her tummy sticking out to show some respect for God's sake. Two million people died here, the least she could do is stand straight and smile when he points the camera. Their guide like a chubby-legged sheepdog chasing down her stray lambs before they hurt themselves, and bringing them safely into the slaughterhouse.

And then there were the installations devoted to the dimensions of the catastrophe. The idea was to numb one’s intellectual sense of the number with visual overkill: a room full of shoes is followed by a room full of prosthetic legs. One absorbs the shoes, but then thinks, if there were so many with prosthetic legs. . . . They came to a room filled with hair, grey hair, in soft billows and clouds like wool from a shearing. “The gas,” explained the guide, “turned all the hair grey. So it was no good for wigs.”

As she watched the stragglers of the group file out, she put her hand on the Professor's. “You are alright?”

“Fine, fine. My wife wore one for the last year or so. After the cancer.”

She nodded; she had heard, before, again. “But it was not grey, I hope,” she ventured.

Sass smiled, biting with false teeth. “No, not grey. She had always wanted to be a blonde, like you.”

II.

David trudged through the rain at Majdanek engaging his guilt in dialectic. He hadn’t worn his boots that day, and the rain had soaked through his sneakers. Every squishy step some part of him thought of the hostel in Lublin where he could change into dry socks. So, of course, he felt guilty: in such a place, at such a time, I’m thinking about drying my feet? Wouldn’t the people who suffered here have been thankful to have even wet socks? I should be thankful that my socks are wet; being too comfortable would be wrong somehow. Now this thought made him feel even more guilty: so if I feel a little discomfort, that somehow matters, it brings me closer to these people who were starved, beaten, worked to death, not to mention tortured, maimed and killed at a whim. You want a little rain to set the mood? Maybe you should write a travel guide: Always be sure to visit death camps on rainy days; your discomfort will keep your spirits appropriately somber, and you will be able to appreciate the shattering implications of the events which took place on the ground where you walk all the better if your shoes leak like a sponge every time you take a step. So he tried not to think at all: I’ll let the experience speak to me as it comes, not try to interpret or determine how I feel about this or that. And at this, his guilt glands began to smoke from strain. Maybe, just maybe, this place isn’t about your little experience, they screeched. Maybe you should take off your water-logged shoes when you tread on holy ground.

Most of the barracks were locked, but the open ones had little exhibits set up. In one, a pair of man-sized tortoises carved by Polish inmates as a signal not to work swiftly. his mind whirled; how were such collosi hidden, let alone produced in secrecy? The next barracks was for shoes. It took him a moment to notice them; they were the same black color as the wet wood. When he tried to step further in, a rope barred his way, and only then did he look down and see what the floor was made of. He could not see the end of them; the back was too dark. Nothing was written on the walls for explanation. It recalled a painting by Anselm Keifer, of a torchlit wooden hall, apparently empty but in fact inhabited by the pantheon of German heroes: Leibnitz, Bach, Goethe, Frederick the Great, Beethoven, Kant, Hegel, Hölderlin, Bismarck, Wagner, Nietzsche, Rilke. There were no images of the great men, however; they were represented by disembodied signatures hovering in the drafty air. The painting was technically a zero, and yet somehow affected him more strongly than anything in this place. Perhaps he could more easily see himself as a disembodied signature than as an inmate wearing these shoes.

Some part of his mind knew that he should feel more horribly guilty now than ever – German artists, German heroes you are identifying with? Here? – but the glands had run out of juice.

He had seen the painting with his grandfather at a museum show two years before he died. “This is what I’m talking about – nothing, you see this nothing of a painting?” That was Jacob’s opinion, as it typically was when they went to museums.

David thought about this on the subway back to Queens. “You should paint the war,” he eventually replied.

Back in his studio, his grandfather pulled out a canvas from behind a stack of folding chairs. “You like? I made ten, fifteen years ago this one.” A red-faced, frowning Nazi, mit helmet und führer moustache, opened the door to a room full of Jews. And it was full: faces and arms overlapped one the other, so that you could not tell who belonged to what, so that the whole group became a mountain of bodies, a single organism facing every direction at once, and uncertain where it had put its legs. It was execrable.

David asked, “Is this supposed to be a gas chamber?” His grandfather replied, “No, this is just a room where they are hiding, and the Nazi is finding them out. To take from the gas chamber they used the Jews. I have a friend in Queens.”

David felt the ache of powerful, guilty curiosity. “What’s he like, your friend?” was what he finally asked. His grandfather shrugged. “Like? Well, he’s a little cheap, maybe, when we go out as a group, my friends. And he has no taste for the art, I tell you that.”

David took out his tape-recorder to make a note of his thoughts, when a knock on the door startled him and he dropped it into the shoes.

III.

Rabbi Elisha Parnas, author of the best-selling Where Have You Been All YOUR Life?, sat in a Krakow cafe holding a wet towel to his head.

“Let me take a look,” his secretary said, and the rabbi lifted it to let him. “It doesn’t look too bad; it’s just red.”

“We’ll go back tomorrow,” the rabbi declared, with a forced finality.

“Eli, you got on television today; what’s the point of going through this again? So they can dump boiling oil on you next time?”

“They ruined my good suit, Avi; I should just let them get away with that?”

“So, send the dry-cleaning bill to Lech Walesa. You were on international television. The government will come out with some statement by tomorrow; they’ll move the convent like they promised. You won, I’m telling you. Let me take another look.”

The rabbi lifted his towel again to let him; his secretary continued to cluck, but the rabbi was not letting himself think of his wound, or of the insult dealt him. He was right after all: they had won; that was what mattered.

Yet Rabbi Parnas was not thinking of his victory either, but rather of his ancient namesake, Abraham Parnas ben Chaim, and an ancient victory of his. In his day, Rabbi Abraham had spent his entire life fighting the Grey Friars over their church bells. The monastery abutted the old Lublin cemetery, and many were the times that a Jew would be saying kaddish, on a yahrzeit or even at a funeral, only to be interrupted by a hollow, foreign tolling. Influence was used in the Council of the Four Lands; suit was brought in the gentile courts; emissaries were even sent to Rome; but all were content to let negotiations and proceedings drag on without effect, waiting for when the rabbi’s death would put an end to his pestering.

And one day Rabbi Abraham Parnas ben Chaim did die. And when the men of the burial society carried him out to his dynastic plot, his students following in mournful train, the bells began, louder and, so it seemed to the mourners, more defiant than ever they had dared to ring while their rabbi had lived. And at that moment, hearing the bells taunting him, Rabbi Parnas sat up. His eyes still closed, his body still wrapped in the kittel, he walked out of the cemetery, back to the synagogue, where he took down the Sefer Torah and read one verse. None were bold enough to approach and see which. He then returned the scroll to the ark and marched back to his final rest.

The mourners followed their late master back to the cemetery, and instead of ringing they heard cries and wailing from the monastery. The bells had fallen from their tower, and did such damage as they fell that the tower itself threatened to fall in upon the monks. The following day it did, and the funds were never raised for its restoration. The rabbi, and all those who died after him in the city of Lublin, could be buried in peace.

Rabbi Elisha Parnas had worked up a stirring speech around this little tale, and he was more than a little annoyed that the workmen had prevented him from getting to that part when they dumped scalding water on his head. Still, he had to admit the visuals were fantastic. No more whining from the Church about the ungrateful rabbi evicting the poor nuns that prayed for the martyred souls of Auschwitz.

He let Avi take him back to their hotel, promised that he wouldn’t go back tomorrow, promised that he’d see a doctor, promised that he’d call his wife who was worried sick about her crazy husband always trying to get himself killed, promised he’d take a nap. But when he lay down, the vision returned to him: he hears the bells tolling, and in his mind’s eye he sees himself standing before the convent, a torah scroll laid out before him on a stack of cinderblocks. He cannot find the verse, has wearied his arms with rolling in search of it, and sits bent-over upon the ground. As he runs his fingers through the sparse grass, his nails catch on fragments of bone, a tooth, and his heart begins to shudder. Frantically he tears at the earth, tossing the clumps of ashy soil bound with roots over his shoulder and crying, Oh Lord God, Thou knowest. But when he turns to see the charred teeth of his people rising, he faces into the whirlwind.
posted by Noah at 4:19 PM

 
So it's Edwards. Woo-hoo.

You want my opinion? I never liked Edwards. Never liked him, never trusted him. I think he's a lightweight, a smooth-talking poser. I think his "two Americas" shtick is ridiculous. I think he talks to America like it's a jury, and that is not a good thing.

I never really understood the enthusiasm for him. Yeah, he's good at delivering a speech. He was a trial lawyer; of course he's good at delivering a speech. So? This is the most important Presidential skill we can think of? I also know he's like, good-looking and from the South, which I suppose is helpful. Can serious people actually base their political preference on this stuff?

But then, I never really understood the hatred for John Kerry either. Kerry strikes me as a serious, sober, very intelligent, very liberal senator. The main character faults he stands rightfully accused of are: over-caution and obsessive personal ambition. The latter is certainly negative but simply cannot be considered disqualifying; if it were, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Bush I and Clinton would have to be ruled out. There are a lot of duds in that bunch, but also a majority of recent Presidents. The former is more serious, particularly when you consider just how thin his record is after long service. But is it enough to inspire the profound contempt that so many seem to have for the guy? He's a lousy candidate, but it seemed to me from the beginning that he was the very best of a weak field.

Why do I dislike Edwards but find Kerry basically tolerable? Let's put it this way: Edwards was a trial lawyer; Kerry was a prosecutor.

There is one thing that Kerry should pick up from Edwards, though, and it's not hair care advice. I said I couldn't stand Edwards' "two Americas" line. It's a distant echo of the losing 1984 Mondale campaign, and particularly of Cuomo's famous and beloved (and, the Dems ought to admit it by now, politically disastrous) speech.

But another Edwards line is a very promising line of attack: the "war against work."

Since the Reagan years, GOP orthodoxy on taxes has been: cut taxes on capital because high and multiple taxation of capital reduces the incentive to invest, which reduces productivity growth, which means we get richer more slowly as a society. All true. But since you have to tax something, and you systematically lower taxes on capital, you will wind up taxing labor more heavily.

This is what has happened over the past 20+ years. The proportion of total taxes represented by the payroll tax - a tax on earned wages - has shot up, while taxes on "unearned" income - capital gains, dividends, etc. - have gone down.

The Democrats have a strong and legitimate point to make that this trend is unjust.

Now, the Republicans have a bunch of legitimate answers - among them, that there are a host of rebates and credits and the like designed to offset the payroll tax; that the payroll tax is supposed to pay for Social Security, so cutting it would require cutting benefits down the road; that Social Security Reform is, in fact, designed to turn a big chunk of this tax into an investment on behalf of future beneficiaries, which amounts to a tax cut; and, of course, that a rising tide lifts all boats.

But the Democrats can be smart in their response in turn. They can make two legitimate, hard-to-answer counterattacks to the GOP line.

First: if the objective is to encourage investment, why are we giving a windfall to people who already have investments, by cutting taxes on their returns, rather than lowering the cost of actually investing? Wouldn't it make more sense - and be more efficient - to tax all income the same, but to expand IRAs to make a larger chunk of savings tax-deductible? We could even have tax-credits for saving that phase out with income, or other mechanism to effectively "match" the savings of lower-income citizens, just as many companies "match" 401k contributions by their employees.

Second: since we have to tax something, and since we want to encourage the deployment of capital to make the economy more productive, wouldn't it make sense to tax wealth rather than labor? Labor, after all, produces value. Wealth, unless it is invested, just sits there. Hyper-capitalist Switzerland has a 0.25% wealth tax. Why shouldn't we have something similar in the U.S.? A tax on wealth would not discourage investment - it would encourage it, since it would become more important than ever to earn a return in order to have income to pay the wealth tax.

There are GOP answers to both of the above. To the first: great! We're all for a universal IRA that makes more savings deductible! But a "match" or a phased-out tax credit effectively creates a high marginal tax rate, so we're against that. To the second: in theory, this sounds lovely. But in practice, it means an enormous new set of paperwork and staff to administer said paperwork, and there are privacy issues, and so forth. And anyhow, a policy of mild (<2%) annual inflation achieves the same effect: inflation *is* a tax on wealth, with the proceeds redistributed to debtors. So we'd only agree to an explicit wealth tax if it was coupled with a return to the gold standard.

But these answers do not make for great debating points in a Presidential campaign (and there are answers to them as well - and answers to the answers to the answers, etc. This stuff doesn't end, you know.)

The Democrats have the germ of a potentially winnning, "3rd Way" type of issue with this "war against work" business, but only if they use it right. I'm far from convinced they will; I suspect, rather, that they'll just fulminate against the deficit and the irresponsibility of Bush's tax cuts. Bush, through over-spending and a tax cut larded with too many gimmicks and special-interest goodies (most of both added by Congress, but so what; Bush signed it) has erased the traditional Republican advantage on taxes and fiscal responsibility. Kerry/Edwards have a chance to expand the breach. We'll see if they capitalize on it, or if they fall back on mindless Shrummery.
posted by Noah at 9:27 AM