Blog For Arizona

Emerson, Obama and Clinton

by David Safier

I'm taking another Sunday stroll through Meta-education Land (I'm planning to suggest Meta-Education Land as a new ride at Disneyland. The thrills! The Chills! The Erudition!). Today I'm taking a digression to one of my favorite essays of all time, Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The American Scholar."

I was reminded of the essay when someone on a cable news show mentioned the historical uniqueness of the Democratic presidential primary, where the two candidates left standing happen to be African American in one case and female in the other. The commenter said something to this effect: "We have to think of these two, not as an African American or a woman running for president, but presidential candidates who happen to be African American and female."

I thought these were wise words. Don't place Obama's and Clinton's racial and gender identities as their primary identifiers. Make them secondary descriptors. Say, "Oh, by the way, Barack Obama, the presidential candidate with the following qualifications and positions on the issues . . . is also black," not "Here is this black guy who thinks he can be president." The same for Clinton. Put her positions and qualifications first, and her gender as something you would mention in the same way you say McCain is from Arizona. It's relevant, but not critical to whether she is qualified to be president.

In "The American Scholar," Emerson talks about the fable that there is actually one "Man" (He uses the prefeminist term "Man" to describe humanity, as did everyone at the time, rather than "Person,"), and we are all portions of that one being -- fingers and toes, necks and stomachs, as it were. And he regrets that we refuse to acknowledge our Oneness but instead have become loose appendages severed from the whole:

Unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

In this world of "walking monsters," the Person/Man who indulges in the noble act of farming "sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm." And so it goes with others who are consumed by their professions and ignore their Human-ness: "the attorney [becomes] a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship."

Two People, two representatives of our greater Humanity, are running to be the Democratic candidate for president. Among the characteristics of these People, one happens to have some of his ancestry going back to Africa, and the other happens to be a female. The question we need to ask ourselves is, "Which of these two People is the best Democratic choice to become the next President of the United States?" Their genders and ancestry are part of the mix, just as the fact that McCain is white and male is relevant. To deny that would be ridiculous. But they should not be the primary considerations.

Are we ready to see these two candidates as People first, as Emerson suggests we should? It is a genuine, and troubling question that, once this election is over, will continue to be discussed for decades.

Henry Adams: "A Teacher Affects Eternity"

by David Safier

In keeping with the tradition I've established of Sunday meta-Ed posts (I just made that term up to describe posts that deal with larger issues than the day-to-day workings of our schools and school districts), today I'm pulling some educational quotes from my favorite book of all time: The Education of Henry Adams.

Adams was one of our best 19th century American historians, as well as a novelist and poet. The Education of Henry Adams is rightly considered one of our great autobiographies and great works of literature. He was the grandson and great grandson of Presidents John Quincy Adams and John Adams. As an extra bonus, I believe he shares a broad family tree with our new blogger, John Adams.

Henry Adams was an idealist and a cynic, as you'll see in these quotes. This first quote, which may be the most glorious thing ever said about teaching, was a reflection on his seven year tenure as a Harvard professor:

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”

This is how he describes a teacher's task:

“Education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world.”

And, writing about himself, he reminds us all that sometimes, the more we know, the more confused we become:

“Adams read and failed to understand; then he asked questions and failed to get answers. Probably this was education.”

Now to Adams the cynic. He didn't think much of his formal schooling. He described a schoolmaster as:

"a man employed to tell lies to little boys."

In fact, his experience as a student led him to this conclusion:

“The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.”

Though I find many other words of wisdom in the book, I will close with his reminder to old teachers like myself, as well as to seasoned politicians and ministers:

“No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.”

Librarians Getting the Ax in Arizona

by David Safier

From today's Citizen:

Many Arizona school districts are shedding librarians and cutting their hours.

Sigh.

The No Child Left Behind Act also has not been kind to librarians. It has emphasized scientific-based, scripted reading programs based on drills, said Ann Dutton Ewbank, an Arizona State University librarian. It has devalued and left less time to deepen and widen student reading and research interests, she said.

Sigh.

Librarians say the lack of cash means libraries, once the heart of learning at any school, are turning into aging-book warehouses operated by people unqualified to run them.

Sob.

The Mother of All Libraries

by David Safier

OK, the headline is a bit of a cheat. “The Mother of All Libraries” isn’t a boast by Saddam Hussein about his book collection in Baghdad. It actually refers to the public subscription library Ben Franklin set up in Philadelphia when he was a young man. (You can stop reading now if you wish.)

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’ve been receiving The Autobiography of Ben Franklin in 800 word email installments courtesy of Dailylit.com. I just read a section about how Franklin’s thirst for books led him to create the first subscription library in the colonies.

Books were ridiculously expensive in those days, so young men like Franklin could only afford a few. He and some friends pooled their books together, but it still wasn’t enough to suit him. So he came up with this plan:

Each subscriber [was] engag'd to pay a certain sum down for the first purchase of books, and an annual contribution for increasing them. So few were the readers at that time in Philadelphia, and the majority of us so poor, that I was not able, with great industry, to find more than fifty persons, mostly young tradesmen, willing to pay down for this purpose forty shillings each, and ten shillings per annum. On this little fund we began. The books were imported; the library wag opened one day in the week for lending to the subscribers, on their promissory notes to pay double the value if not duly returned.

Other towns imitated his idea and created libraries of their own. Soon, the common folks in the colonies “were observ'd by strangers to be better instructed and more intelligent than people of the same rank generally are in other countries.”

Franklin’s innovation was a major educational advance, bringing books to people who couldn’t afford to buy them, and it's one of the reasons, along with the spread of schools, that European visitors to the U.S. well into the mid-nineteenth century marveled at seeing people reading on the streets and discussing political matters as if they knew what they were talking about.

As for my headline: I didn’t make it up. I took it from Franklin himself. “This,” he wrote about his innovation, “was the mother of all the North American subscription libraries.” Take that, Saddam Hussein!

Shameless Self Promotion: “School Tales in 19th Century Literature”

by David Safier

Two Sundays ago, I promoted the website, FreeRice.com. Last Sunday it was DailyLit.com. Today, in a blatant act of self promotion, I’m introducing you to a site I created, School Tales in 19th Century Literature.

The site, very simply, is a collection of short stories, excerpts from novels and one essay by 19th century authors that take you inside the schools of the day. The authors include Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, W.E.B. Du Bois and Stephen Crane, among others.

Most of the pieces are enjoyable reads, in my opinion, but their value to me goes beyond their literary merit. A number of years ago when I was taking a graduate course in the history of American education, all I read about was what happened at the legislative and administrative levels. No one seemed interested in the students, the teachers or the classroom. That was what I wanted to learn about. What were my brother and sister teachers like in the early days of public education? What were the classrooms like? Who were their students?

After searching in vain through scholarly histories, I decided to go to the most accurate social historians of the time -- writers of fiction. Those are the folks whose job it is to create three dimensional portraits of people and their environments. Did these creative geniuses find their own schooling to be ripe subjects for their fiction, I wondered?

The answer, not surprisingly, is, yes. In Mark Twain’s autobiography, he commented that he wouldn’t spend much time describing the schools he went to, since he already did that in “Tom Sawyer.” In fact, nearly 15% of the novel is set in and around Tom’s school. The scenes are classic Twain – insightful, poignant, slightly amusing, uproariously funny.

W.E.B. Du Bois was a schoolmaster in a rural black community two summers, and he wrote about his experiences, as well as his visit to the community ten years later, in a poignant essay included in his "The Souls of Black Folks." Stephen Crane, author of “Red Badge of Courage,” wrote a series of short stories fictionalizing his school days. Walt Whitman, who had a short stint as a schoolmaster, and was reputedly a kind, innovative teacher, wrote a moralistic tale about a vicious, sadistic schoolmaster. (Whitman didn’t like teaching much, by the way. He once wrote to a friend, "O, damnation, damnation! thy other name is school-teaching and thy residence Woodbury.")

Anyone hoping to learn about the good old days when students were well behaved and teachers were wise and knowledgeable are in for a surprise. The schoolhouses in these stories are rarely places you would want to send your children, nor are the students well behaved young ladies and gentlemen, bright-eyed and eager to learn. The “hickory switch” was a favorite method teachers used to convince their charges to behave themselves.

As you read the stories, you’ll find footnotes relating events to the history of the time, but you don’t have to read those. And I promise not to test you over the material.

Enjoy!

Dailylit.com: Your Daily Lit Fix

Last Sunday I wrote about the learn-while-you-feed-the-world site, Freerice.com. The basic idea of Freerice.com is, you take an online vocab quiz, and every time you get a right answer, 20 grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Program. Good stuff.

Today’s site, Dailylit.com won’t help feed the world, but it might feed your mind and soul a bit.

Here’s how it works. You choose a book from their list of 750 books ranging from classic to contemporary, and they email it to you in daily segments that take between two and five minutes to read. That’s it. Many of the books are free. Others you pay for.

I went into their list of 406 Classic books and chose a freebie, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. I read the book years ago and loved it, so I decided to go through it again. Franklin is the prototype for the uniquely American thinker-tinkerers who are not bound by centuries of tradition and think anything is possible. He’s an amazing individual.

Anyway, the book comes to me in 75 email segments, so I’ll finish it in two-and-a-half months, unless I want to request extra segments, which show up in my email box immediately. I had to force myself to read the first few, I admit – they broke my usual email rhythm – but now I look forward to the segments for the same reason – because they break my usual email rhythm.

If you’re looking for something less “edifying” than old Ben, you can read Skinny Bitch, The Three-Martini Playdate, Purchased for Pleasure or Bedded for Diamonds for under $5 each . (These aren’t personal recommendations, by the way. I’m just sayin’.)

Give it a try. You have much to gain, and nothing to lose but 3 minutes of your time each day.

(This is the end of a public service announcement from your friendly retired English teacher. You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.)

Al Gore's Assault on Irrationality

I was going to write my own review of Al Gore's book "The Assault on Reason" but I found this and simply see no reasonable prospect of improving upon it:

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! Coming to Tucson

Link: Tucson, AZ (Static: Book Tour). Amy's coming! If ever I had a crush on a reporter, it's Amy Goodman (well, I also had a thing for Kris Pickel, back in the day...). Amy's promoting her new book "Static: Government, Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back."

She will speak at the Rialto Theater on Friday, 10/13 at 6:15 PM. Tickets are $10 and proceeds support local independent media, KXCI and Access Tucson.

Reading Liberally: John W. Dean's "Conservatives Without Conscience"

This post is a magnet for pre-meeting discussion and resources for our inaugural meeting of Reading Liberally on Wednesday Oct. 4th at 7:30 PM at Bookmans on Speedway and Wilmot. We will be discussing John W. Dean's "Conservatives without Conscience".

First, it is recommended that you have read the book. It is available at booksellers everywhere, both on- and offline. The public library also has multiple copies.

We will not be the first to have read and discussed the book and there are very good treatment of the books by readers, book circles, interviewers, and reviewers available online to enhance our discussion. Some of the best are:

Firedoglake's salon: Part 1, Part 2

Keith Olbermann interviews John Dean about his book.

Dave Neiwert's (a journalist who cronicals the far right in the blog Orcinus and author of several books) critique of Dean's conclusions in CWC.

See you there!

Patrick J. Buchanan and the Reconquista

Patrick J. Buchanan's new book "State of Emergency" is in pre-sales. The book is about illegal immigration from Mexico, forthrightly seeking to thrust the conspiracy theory of a Mexican Reconquista of southwestern American states to the center of the debate.

This was a fairly obvious one, really, but I like all pronosticators, I have to blow my horn when I am right, and remain silent when I'm wrong, so as to give you an illusion that I know what the hell I'm talking about. I admit that did get wrong that the Introduction or Forward would be written by Tom Tancredo, however. I said in a post on Randy Graf's ties to the Buchanans and Tancredo in January, "I will predict now that Pat's next book will be about immigration with a forward by Tancredo: or maybe the other way around." I feel like Nostradamus without the wizard hat.

I will now further predict that Buchanan's book will become a staple feature of Graf's campaign. Every chance he gets he'll be hawking it, quoting it, and carrying it around like paranoia Bible. He might even start handing out autographed copies. I wouldn't mind having one; what a great peice of memorabilia of the great immigrant panic of '06.

Think Progress has a great clip of Buchanan talking about his Reconquista fantasy on Imus. The scariest thing to me right now about Buchanan is that I so often agree with him. He is coming out swinging against the Neo-Cons, trashing his own party over Iraq and the Middle East, terrorism policy, Israeli policy, and he even shows a sense of humor about himself. Objectively, Bachanan is an ally of the left and the Democratic party, despite his crazed xenophobia.

If the GOP mainstream wants to poke a stick in Graf's spokes, they should be highlighting his connection to Buchanan and ask Graf if he agrees with Buchanan's views subjects other than immigration. You would see some very frenzied backpedalling then, boyo. If the Dems want to put a bee in Graf's bonnet, they should now be peppering him with questions demanding to know his stance on the Reconquista. Let Mr. Graf try to thread that needle.

John W. Dean, "Conservatives Without Conscience"

John W. Dean has done that hardest of things: speak the truth, even when it hurts.

Dean weaves together social science research, including the much derided findings of Bob Altemeyer's study that Conservative personalities tend to be fear-based, recent studies by political science scholars of changes to the rules and institutional culture of the Executive and Congress, and classical studies of authoritarian behavior and psychology. The result is a disturbing concordance of theory, science, and current events pointing inexorably at the fact that the GOP is dragging us toward an authoritarian state - perhaps even to the brink of fascism.

One of the most convincing features of Dean's book are the many lists of traits, atitudes, methods, and beliefs that characterize authoritarian modes of social behavior. Chillingly, so many of the predictive models sit four-square on what we have seen in recent years in the public forum. Reading them, you reaction will be icy chills in your veins.

Singled out for special criticism is the religious right's role in GOP's increasing authoritarianism. Dean characterizes many of the leaders of fundamentalist and evangelican Christians as the worst of the worst in terms of authoritarian personalities and leadership tactics. He characterizes the millions of politically active religious right as being nearly mindless authoritarian followers of the most agentic and uncritical kind.

The combination of a dogmatic, uncompromising relgious convictions and political authoritarian tendences is incompatible with a hereogenious, compromised-based political culture. If the authorians don't learn to deal with the give and take of politics, they will soon either destroy our political institutions, or be driven from power.

Not all fundamentalist or evangelical Christians are Authoritarian, however. Consider Jimmy Carter, probably one of the most profoundly relgious of men to have occupied the Presidency, yet he continues to speak out against the use of dogma in politics, and for the separation between personal religious faith and public policy and politics.

Dean convincingly defines many of today's top leaders of the GOP and Conservative Movement as Double High Authoritarians: people who display all the traits of both Social Domination leaders, and Right-Wing Authoritarian followers. These people are contrasted with traditional conservatives and come out as people who should not be trusted with government authority.

Strangely, Dean doesn't think that Bush is such a Double High authoritarian. Dean finds Bush to be a typical Authoritarian follower, and a remarkably successful, though unorthoxed PR man. The real villian in the Executive in Dean's view is Cheney, who dominates the Executive from his relatively obscure position. In Cheney, Dean finds all the worst traits of the Social Domination leader, and the Peter-Principle to boot. Dean argues that, far from being a competent and canny administrator, that Cheney is in reality a terrible incompetent who benefits of the Peter Principle and uses authoritarian tactics to keep the worst of his failures secret. In this, Dean echoes the idea that tyranny, secrecy, and incompetence go hand in hand; feeding upon and perpetuating one another.

Dean also examines the careers and behavior of figures such as Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich, Bill Frist, Jack Abramoff and his life-long buddy Grover Norquest, in the context of the history of Congress and lobbying. He finds their public actions to be on a whole new scale of corruption and anti-democratic behavior. And their personal lives are often just a unprincipled and selfish as to belie their public personnae of models of moral rectitude; in short, they're hypocrites of the first water.

Finally, Dean examines Karl Rove. Dean thinks that Rove is the most dangerous man in America because of his intimate knowledge of and demonstrated facility in using fear to manipulate the electorate. Rove is an Authorian follower, but an extraordinarily gifted one; the American Goebels.

Dean doesn't offer any easy solutions for confronting the rising tide of Authoritarianism in American politics. Part of the solution is the learn how to resist appeals to fear in our political lives. That involves talking honestly and frequently about the reality of American Authoritarism. It also involves real conservatives distancing themselves from authoritarians, refusing to support them, and denouncing their radical (and certainly un-conserrvative) policies to fundamentally change American society and government.

If you follow social science to any degree, and if you keep up on current events, you won't find much new in Dean's book. But you will find it all in one place, presented in a very cogent and credible manner from a man who really is a Conservative with a conscience. If you are looking for a way to smack a family member out of their agentic state, this book might just do the trick.

Lewis Gould: Grand Old Party, A History of the Republicans

The master of strategy Sun Tzu wrote, "know thy enemy." In order to overcome an adversary, you must first understand him. This is a lesson that the Republicans have forgotten in their effort to conduct a "war on terrorism," but one which Democrats should heed in seeking to overthrow the current dominance of the GOP in the federal government. Fortunately, we have a master of political history, Professor Lewis L. Gould, to aid us with that understanding.

I consider myself fairly knowledgable about American history; as knowledgable as one can be from taking several courses in the history of American politics and foreign policy. Even so, there were connections I hadn't made and patterns I hadn't seen laid out in Gould's book.

Perhaps the most striking and ironic aspect of the GOP's history is how their ideology has almost entirely swapped places with the that of the Democrats over the course of the 20th century.

The GOP began by coalescing out of the remains of the Whig party and the corpus of several populist movements in the 1850's, culminating in the first convention in 1856 (this year is the Sesquicentennial of the Party's founding) which nominated Abraham Lincoln for President. The Party was dedicated to a nationalist vision of federal power, a stauch opposition to slavery, and the continued rapid industrialization of the nation.

The GOP remained committed to the emancipation, if not the legal equality of blacks, into the early 20th century. The stubborn opposition of the Democratic Party, and the GOP's unwillingness to invest sufficient political capital in racial equality, ended reconstruction well short of it's political goals, and consigned black Americans to Jim Crow and aprtheid. Neither party can be proud of this chapter of its history.

The GOP had several central beliefs they adhered to through the 19th century and into the first decade of the 20th: the protective tarriff as a means of industrial development and protecting American jobs and industry (as such they accomplished the considerable trick of uniting the political interests of both industrial interest and skilled organized labor), support for enfranchisement and civil rights for women and blacks, a largely isolationist foreign policy, and support of an active and powerful federal government.

On the flip-side, of course, the Democratic Party opposed all those positions. I have to admit, that were I alive during the first 6o or so years of the Republican Party's existence, I would likely have been a Republican.

Now, of course, the Republican Party has largely revesed itself on these issues, swapping them for the reactionary positions of the Democratic Party of the time, and an economic orthodoxy of free trade.

There have been several enduring themes in the ideology of the GOP which have not changed much over time, however.

The GOP has always been the party of business, strongly backing the interests of America's largest industrial concerns, even at the expense of other interests in their coalition: this is probably the most enduring feature, and greatest organizational strength of the GOP. They know which side their bread is butter on.

The second major feature is their moralizing tone and support for intrusive policiies to enforce the Christian ethos on society. From the temperance movement and Prohibition in by-gone decades, to the Moral Majority, obsession with reproductive choices, and condemnation of homosexuals of today, the GOP has always used issues of personal morality as a means of garnering votes and allowed itself to be the repository of evangelizing Christian's political ambitions.

Finally, the GOP has generally opposed heavy flows of immigration when they occured, both due to nativist sentiment and simple racism, and the fact the Democrats have generally been much more successful in folding these new citizens into their political coalition. This tendency has reared its ugly head several times in GOP history, the lastest nativist activism within the GOP being only the lastest of a pattern of anti-immigration tendencies.

But beyond these unifying themes, the party which evolved between the 1920s and the 1960's emerged from that transformation into an entirely new and different party. The world wars, the confrontation with communism, demographic changes, and especially the civil rights movement created a party that Theodore Roosevelt would no longer recognize as his own.

The current GOP also seems still to be a party in transition - mainly because it is founded upon a fading demographic base and a number of major contradictions.

Perhaps the greatest contradiction is the espousal, now mainly pro-forma and reflexive, of 'fiscal responsibility' while at the same time espousing as a litmus test of GOP othodoxy the need for ever-larger tax cuts, but without the political will to seriously cut spending. They modern GOP has a great hostility to what they term "root-canal politics". Far easier politically to advocate "supply side" theory and the "starve the beast" analogy to avoid the hard, and politically costly, work of actually balancing budgets when cutting taxes. Better to let future generations pay for their cowardice; the unborn can't vote, even if they must be protected at the expense of women.

For all the GOP's rhetoric over the evils of government regulation and need to shrink government, they continue to pursue moralistic policies that require intrusions into personal freedom that would be unthinkable if their purpose were economic. Their critique of intrusive government power, while at the same time abusing that power for to impose their moral view of the world on citizens, becomes more patently ridiculous every day.

Between these two contradictions the GOP has fostered an ever-more intrusive government, while failing consistently to shink the size of government. These major contradictions are untenable, even to the GOP's own base. They will eventually cost the party its credibility with voters. Rhetoric contradicted by one's own actions cannot long endure.

The demographic changes in America, swiftly creating a more pluralistic society, does not bode well for a party that winks at intolerance and is actively hostile to growing ethnic groups, such America's growing Hispanic population. After some progress by Bush, the nativist elements of the GOP coalitions appear to have set the GOP up for an implosion of Hispanic support on par with that it experienced among blacks in between the 1940s and 1960s.

Finally, the GOP seems to have maintained yet one more thread of consistency in its ideology throughout the years that may prove its downfall. The GOP has long viewed the Democratic Party, due in part to its long-ago association with the losing side in the Civil War, to be traitorous and illegitimate. They seem not to be convinced of the legitimacy of a two party system at all. This tendency has emerged frequently in the rhetoric of the GOP in times of electoral stress, most recently in the constant questioning of the patriotism and motives of Democrats opposed to the Iraq war and President Bush's extra-legal anti-terrorism measures, and even over immigration policy.

I think that the next few years will see the GOP attempting to significantly redefine itself following a major realignment in 2006, 2008, and beyond, when voters demonstrate to the GOP that their multiple contradictions will no longer be tolerated.

God Vs. The Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law by Marci A. Hamilton

“Religion is under assault by secularism in America.”

You’ve heard it so often that it even sounds true to many liberals. However, like so much the Right says these days, it is just rhetorical covering fire for a political manuever with exactly the opposite objective.

In reality, politicians are far to eager to give religious activity and organizations special treatment not afforded to others. Our political institutions have been so solicitous of religion, that they have put in place a formidable array of legal protections and exemptions for religious practice and organization without questioning whether the general welfare is harmed thereby.

Like any other human endeavor, religion, when unshackled from a common social contract and protected from the consequences of behavior, can become destructive to the common welfare. Marci Hamilton’s book explores exactly what has gone wrong in the American legal system’s handling of religious activity and organizations that impose costs and cause harm to others. She finds that religious organizations have systematically freed themselves from the social contract under the banner of religious freedom. The catalog of abuses her book records is long and ranges from the distortion of local land use laws that protect the heath and welfare of our families, to the lawless response of the Catholic church to predatory abuse of our children.

The Man Who Tried to Hold Back the Cold War

Having started reading a biography of Henry Agard Wallace out of sheer curiosity, I was surprised to find his political biography to be eerily relevant to our current political environment. Wallace was a scientific breeder and farmer whose family owned a popular Iowa farmer’s newspaper. He wrote for and edited the paper and later founded the Pioneer Hy-Bred corporation, which sold hybrid corn, chickens and other produce, which became a multi-billion dollar concern (an entrepreneurial capitalist irony that will become richer as the story proceeds). He was originally a Republican, like his father, Henry C. Wallace, who served as Secretary of Agriculture under Harding. The inaction of the Republicans in the face of the terrible suffering of the Great Depression drove Henry A. Wallace into the arms of more the pragmatic and experimental New Dealers within the Democratic Party.

If you are like most people, the name Henry Wallace might be familiar, but you aren’t sure exactly why. Henry Wallace became Secretary of Agriculture in the first two Roosevelt Administrations, where he presided over some of the largest and most influential New Deal programs. In 1940, Wallace joined the Presidential ticket to shore up Roosevelt’s left wing. As Vice President, Wallace was unusually active in war planning and setting policy, and headed the Economic Warfare Board. Heading into the 1944 Presidential season, Roosevelt decided to run for a fourth term, despite his failing health, and Wallace was his heir apparent, polling the far beyond any other contender for the Presidency in 1948. But due to political maneuvering still not fully understood, but clearly approved of by the ailing Roosevelt, Wallace was dumped from the ticket and Truman was chosen instead.

Robert A. Pape "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism"

“They hate us for our freedoms” –George W. Bush

Most reasonable people realize that the President’s now infamous characterization of the 9/11 terrorists’ motive is drivel. But many reasonable people, when asked what does drive people to commit suicide terrorist acts will give reasons that, though less obviously drivel, are none-the-less completely wrong.

There have been many plausible and well-intentioned hypotheses about the root causes of suicide terrorism. The causes are generally held to be some combination of unstable or suicidal personalities, indoctrination in the tenets of fundamentalist Islam, socio-economic deprivations, and the history of Western, especially American, involvement in the Middle East. That is how I thought about the phenomenon myself, until I read Robert Pape’s comprehensive study of every suicide terrorist incident since the inception of modern suicide terrorism in 1980.

There is nothing better for destroying misconceptions and faulty assumptions than a fat dose of facts. Pape created a detailed database of every suicide terrorism incident between 1980 and 2003 – 315 attacks in all – to test hypotheses regarding what variables actually predict suicide terror, and what factors are actually causal. The result of his work is published in his book, “Dying to Win.” The hypothesis left standing at the end of the day is surprising and has dire import for the conduct of American foreign policy.

It is simply this:

Suicide terrorism is an effective tool of nationalism that is used specifically against democratic states engaged in military occupation of territory the terrorist group considers its homeland.

William Greider's "The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy"

William Greider's book is as much a return to his roots as a journalist as it is an explication of some hard truths about capitalism, as well as some hopeful praise. Greider's main task was to search out and explain those all too rare people and enterprises who are exploring how to make capitalism sustainable and to conform with our social values of family, equity, and basic decency.

Greider has created a genuinely optimistic and forward-looking roadmap for how we can start to bring capitalism back under the control of our democratic institutions, and make it work to serve our deepest values.

Greider's work will be of use to policy makers who wish to stop enabling the destructive aspects of capitalism, as well as for people who yearn to invest for long term value and build economic enterprises that reflect their values. Most of the ideas explored are in practical use in some form, or are plausible attempts to creatively address current socio-economic ills, such as corporate welfare and environmental degredation.

Much of Greider's prescription for curing capitalism of its anti-social behavior lies in the turning the interests of the common man into a powerful decisionmaker in our system of capital finance. Many of the conclusions about what reforms are needed parallel those of John Bogle's "Battle for the Soul of Capitalism", which I reviewed previously. Many of the practical ideas for how to accomplish that goal originated with Louis Kelso, who pioneered the Employee Stock Ownership  Plan and many other alternative financial models for democratizing capitalism, and with the pioneers of Socially Responsible Investing, which prioritizes sustainability, workplace equity, and stakeholder outcomes, higher than has generally been the case in the investment decisions of institutional investors.

Here are some helpful resources on the book:

• Greider's article about his book in The Nation
• A review by SRI advisors
• An interview of Greider about the book with Diane Rehm (Realplayer)
• A NYT Book review by John B. Judis
• A summary of a keynote address by Greider on workplace democracy

I strongly recommend the book to Democrats who wish to find a responsible and practical voice on the issue of economic development. Greider's grounding in practical solutions addresses both the concerns of capitalism's critics and the demands of the marketplace, and can be the basis for a constructive Democratic critique of business as usual. Only by standing for genuinely viable improvements to our current dysfunctional capitalist system by offering creative and socially responsible alternatives can Democrats offer an alternative to the 'me-too' boosterism of the DLC. The DLC's sychophantic alliance with finance capital has placed Democrats on the side of elite institutions and corporate management, and has left the party estranged from the interests and asperations of average citizens in the marketplace. To return to a lasting Democratic majority, we have to articulate a vision of the good life that preserves the best of American capitalism and sustains the values that make us human.

John C. Bogle's "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism"

Despite the ideological trope that capitalism is somehow the natural state of human economies, and that any government regulation risks causing the ‘invisible hand’ of the market to bitch-slap us all, the truth is that capitalism depends entirely upon a very complex body of law and social norms. Without the proper legal incentives to channel self-interest into benefiting society, Wall Street begins to behave like La Costa Nostra with better tailoring.

In the aftermath of the massive corporate failures that have characterized the past several years, it is easy to overlook that those failures where not due mainly to criminals doing illegal things, but to ethical people doing business as usual. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Global Crossing and other now infamous business failures were only the rottenest apples in a bad barrel; not aberrations, but an extreme example of what we have allowed to become quite representative examples of the massive and widespread failure of corporate governance.

George Sauders' "The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil"

I just finished reading George Saunder's novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. It is nothing like what you would expect, but yet is everything you could want in a political satire for our times. Instead of rushing headlong at the subject as I am wont to do (and did do in my own novella Homeland), Saunders started from a much more exploratory place and wound up with what is essentially a Dr. Suess book about genocide.

More from Saunders on how the book was written on the flip...

Richard A. Clarke's "The Scorpion's Gate"

I just finished reading “The Scorpion's Gate” by former Terrorism Czar, and every Democrat’s favorite Republican, Richard A. Clarke. I cannot say that it was the best fiction I’ve read. It suffered far too much of the novice story-teller’s fault of filling in the gaps in the reader’s knowledge with unrealistic expository dialog which the author has to strain to explain away. I grant, however, that I can think of no other way the author could have conveyed the great depth and nuance of his understanding of Middle Eastern politics and geo-strategy more as efficiently and more artfully. Also, the ending is fairly anti-climactic, as are all novels premised on the idea of a cabal trying to drive world-altering events forward, only to be foiled by better-intentioned protagonists.

Within these limitations, however, Clarke does manage, as the jacket cover promises, to tell the truth more effectively through fiction. Clarke’s story begins a few years down the road. America has been invited to leave Iraq by the now Shiite dominated parliament and a popular revolution in Saudi Arabia, involving former Al Qaida members, has toppled the House of Saud, though not the grip of the Wahabi clerics, and the nation has been renamed Islamyah. Islamyah is under economic embargo by the United States and oil is up to $85 a barrel.

Against this backdrop, a political intrigue pitting the U.S. intelligence services against the Defense Department unfolds. The DOD and its Secretary wish to see every threat in the Middle East through the lens of their hatred for the new Islamyah government and their self-interested desire to place the Saudi royals back on the throne. The intelligence services want to know what’s really going on and Clarke’s story follows the international adventures of a few protagonists from the Western intel services in the quest to find the truth before it’s too late.

The central thrust of Clarke’s story is that the real threat to American security is not from Islamyah, or even Al Qaida, or even a growing superpower like China, but from the Shiite pan-national movement led by the mullahs of Iran. This is a central insight into Middle Eastern politics that most experts on the region agree is the strongest threat to American energy security, as the greatest deposits in the Gulf region, making up the great preponderance of the world’s reserves, have majority Shiite populations living on them. Those populations are scattered among Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia (Islamyah), and the Gulf Emirates, but the Shiite religious identity could be used to care rump states out of all these – as is arguably already underway in Iraq. I myself have written about Shiite pan-nationalism as being the greatest threat to America in the region, despite Bush’s irresponsible use of a chimerical threat that Al Qaida will form the revolutionary vanguard for a re-establishment of a unified Caliphate across the entire Ulemma.

Beyond the political message of his book, Clarke does manage to provide some great insight into the process of bureaucratic infighting, international espionage, and modern military capabilities. His characters are well-drawn, though I did find myself often confused as to which spy belonged to what agency, that was probably my short-coming not Clarke’s. There is murder, mayhem, love, betrayal, friendship, unlikely alliances, and tragic endings enough for any aficionado of Tom Clancy, John Le Carre, or Ian Fleming.