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The Nuclear Option

May 30, 2008 KevinLeave a comment

The Nuclear Option

As I’ve noted previously, I have a copy of Barack HopeChange Obama’s audiobook The Audacity of Hope, and I’ve been listening to it, off and on, throughout my workday. Today I began section 2, which contains chapters 2 and 3 (as far as I’ve gotten to date.)

But today’s excerpt had something I found interesting and important. Beginning at about 35 minutes into part 2:

Gaining control of the courts generally, and the Supreme Court in particular, had become the holy grail for a generation of conservative activists. And not just, they insisted, because they viewed the Court as the last bastion of pro-abortion, pro-Affirmative Action, pro-homosexual, pro-criminal, pro-regulation, anti-religious liberal elitism. According to these activists, liberal judges had placed themselves above the law, basing their opinions not on the Constitution, but on their own whims and desired results, finding rights to abortion, or sodomy that did not exist in the Constitution, subverting the democratic process, and perverting the Founding Fathers’ original intent.

To return the courts to their proper role required the appointment of strict constructionists to the Federal bench – men and women who understood the difference between interpreting and making laws.

Those on the Left saw the situation quite differently. With conservative Republicans making gains in the congressional and presidential elections, many liberals viewed the courts as the only thing standing in the way of a radical effort to roll back civil rights, women’s rights, civil liberties, environmental regulation, church and state separation, and the entire legacy of the New Deal.

He then goes on to discuss how the nomination of Robert Bork was defeated, awakening the Right to the fact that they, too, needed “grassroots” organizations to promote and defend their nominees, and defeat those of the Left. He goes on to relate how the Republican majority defeated 61 of Clinton’s nominees,

…and for the brief time that they held the majority, the Democrats tried the same tactic on George W. Bush’s nominees.

But when the Democrats lost their Senate majority in 2002, they had only one arrow left in their quiver, a strategy that could be summed up in one word, the battle-cry around which the Democratic faithful now rallied: Filibuster!

The Constitution makes no mention of the filibuster. It is a Senate rule, one that dates back to the first Congress. The basic idea is simple. Because all Senate business is conducted by unanimous consent, any Senator can bring proceedings to a halt by exercising his right to unlimited debate, refusing to move on to the next order of business. In other words, he can talk – for as long as he wants. So long as he, or like-minded colleagues are willing to stay on the floor and talk, everything else has to wait, which gives each Senator an enormous amount of leverage, and a determined minority effective veto power over any piece of legislation.

Throughout the Senate’s modern history, the filibuster has remained a preciously guarded prerogative, one of the distinguishing features, it is said, along with six year terms, and the allocation of two Senators to each state regardless of population, that separates the Senate from the House and serves as a firewall against the dangers of majority overreach.

There’s another, grimmer history of the filibuster, though, one that carries special relevance for me.

He then goes on to detail how the Southern Democrats used the filibuster to protect Jim Crow and prevent any civil rights legislation from passing. Of course, he doesn’t mention the fact that most of those Senators were Democrats. He mentions Richard B. Russell by name, and names his state, but not his party affiliation.

Then he returns to Bush’s court nominations.

So it came to pass that President Bush, emboldened by a bigger Republican majority in the Senate and his self-proclaimed mandate, decided in the first few weeks of his second term to re-nominate seven previously filibustered judges. As a poke in the eye to the Democrats, it produced the desired response. Democratic leader Harry Reid called it a “big wet kiss” to the far Right, and renewed the threat of a filibuster. Republicans, sensing that this was the time to go in for the kill, announced that if Democrats continued in their obstructionist ways, they would have no choice but to invoke the dreaded “nuclear option,” a novel procedural maneuver that would involve the Senate’s presiding officer – perhaps Vice President Cheney himself – ignoring the opinion of the Senate Parliamentarian, breaking 200 years of Senate precedent, and deciding with the simple bang of a gavel that the use of the filibuster was no longer permissible under the Senate rules – at least when it came to judicial nominations.

To me, the threat to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominations was just one more example of Republicans changing the rules in the middle of the game.

Uh, right. Like putting up Frank Lautenberg for Senate in 2002 when it became blindingly apparent that the legally nominated but corrupt Robert Torricelli was going to lose his election? A case in which the notoriously “liberal” New Jersey Supreme Court said “It’s OK, go ahead and break your own rules!”? That kind of “changing the rules in the middle of the game”?

“Changing the rules,” yes – but I was not aware that we were in the middle of the “game” of this Republic.

He continues:

Moreover, a good argument could be made that a vote on judicial nominations is precisely the situation where the filibuster’s supermajority requirement makes sense. Because federal judges receive lifetime appointments, and often serve through the terms of multiple Presidents, it behooves the President and benefits our Democracy to find moderate nominees who can find some measure of bipartisan support.

I’ve written on the topic of the Courts on numerous occasions, and I’m going to repeat myself here because this is precisely the kind of post that demands it. Barack Bipartisan Obama said early on in this excerpt, “According to these activists, liberal judges had placed themselves above the law, basing their opinions not on the Constitution, but on their own whims and desired results, finding rights to abortion, or sodomy that did not exist in the Constitution, subverting the democratic process, and perverting the Founding Fathers’ original intent”, subtly pooh-poohing the very idea that results-oriented judges exist on the Left. Once again, I’d like to quote the words of 9^th Circuit judge Alex Kozinski on this very subject:

Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that “speech, or . . . the press” also means the Internet…and that “persons, houses, papers, and effects” also means public telephone booths….When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases – or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we’re none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.

It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as springboards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it’s using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences.

The able judges of the panel majority are usually very sympathetic to individual rights, but they have succumbed to the temptation to pick and choose. – Silveira v. Lockyer, denial to hear appeal en banc, dissenting.

George Will in a piece from 2005 wrote:

When (Senator Harry) Reid endorsed Scalia for chief justice, he said: “I disagree with many of the results that he arrives at, but his reason for arriving at those results are (sic) very hard to dispute.” There you have, starkly and ingenuously confessed, the judicial philosophy — if it can be dignified as such — of Reid and like-minded Democrats: Regardless of constitutional reasoning that can be annoyingly hard to refute, we care only about results. How many thoughtful Democrats will wish to take their stand where Reid has planted that flag?

This is the debate the country has needed for several generations: Should the Constitution be treated as so plastic, so changeable that it enables justices to reach whatever social outcomes — “results” — they, like the result-oriented senators who confirm them, consider desirable? If so, in what sense does the Constitution still constitute the nation?

Barack Middle of the Road Obama suggests that the selection of moderate judges should be preferred, since they “benefit our Democracy.”

It’s not supposed to be a DEMOCRACY. It’s supposed to be a CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC. One in which the CONSTITUTION defines and limits the powers of the federal government, and the Judicial branch has to abide by it just like the Legislative and the Executive. It is the Constitution that Senators swear an oath to uphold and defend, not our “democracy.”

“Moderate” judges? I’ll let Scalia answer that one, since he’s been vetted by Reid himself and found to pass muster:

What in the world is a ‘moderate interpretation’ of the text? Halfway between what it really says and what you want it to say?

It is literally true that the U.S. Supreme Court has entirely liberated itself from the text of the Constitution.

What ‘we the people’ want most of all is someone who will agree with us as to what the evolving constitution says.

We are free at last, free at last. There is no respect in which we are chained or bound by the text of the Constitution. All it takes is five hands. – Antonin Scalia, excerpts from a speech quoted in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, 3/10/04

Then we get to the meat of the excerpt:

Few of the Bush (appellate court) nominees in question fell into the “moderate” category. Rather they showed a pattern of hostility towards civil rights, privacy, and checks on executive power that put them to the Right of even most Republican judges. One particularly troubling nominee had derisively called Social Security and other New Deal programs quote “the triumph of our own socialist revolution” unquote.

Interestingly, Barack I’m not a Socialist Obama doesn’t tell his readers (or listeners) that the “particularly troubling nominee” was Janice Rogers Brown, an African-American woman nominated to the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C. district. Her remark comes from a speech she gave to the Federalist Society, April 20, 2000, entitled “A Whiter Shade of Pale”: Sense and Nonsense – The Pursuit of Perfection in Law and Politics, which I strongly recommend you read. Here’s her quote in context:

There is nothing new, of course, in the idea that the framers did not buy into the notion of human perfectibility. And the document they drafted and the nation adopted in 1789 is shot through with provisions that can only be understood against the supposition that humanity’s capacity for evil and tyranny is quite as real and quite as great as its capacity for reason and altruism. Indeed, as noted earlier, in politics, the framers may have envisioned the former tendency as the stronger, especially in the wake of the country’s experience under the Articles of Confederation. The fear of “factions,” of an “encroaching tyranny”; the need for ambition to counter ambition”; all of these concerns identified in the Federalist Papers have stratagems designed to defend against them in the Constitution itself. We needed them, the framers were convinced, because “angels do not govern”; men do.

It was a quite opposite notion of humanity, of its fundamental nature and capacities, that animated the great concurrent event in the West in 1789 — the revolution in France. Out of that revolutionary holocaust — intellectually an improbable melding of Rousseau with Descartes — the powerful notion of abstract human rights was born. At the risk of being skewered by historians of ideas, I want to suggest that the belief in and the impulse toward human perfection, at least in the political life of a nation, is an idea whose arc can be traced from the Enlightenment, through the Terror, to Marx and Engels, to the Revolutions of 1917 and 1937. The latter date marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution. All of these events were manifestations of a particularly skewed view of human nature and the nature of human reason. To the extent the Enlightenment sought to substitute the paradigm of reason for faith, custom or tradition, it failed to provide rational explanation of the significance of human life. It thus led, in a sort of ultimate irony, to the repudiation of reason and to a full-fledged flight from truth — what Revel describes as “an almost pathological indifference to the truth.”

There were obviously urgent economic and social reasons driving not only the political culture but the constitutional culture in the mid-1930’s — though it was actually the mistakes of governments (closed borders, high tariffs, and other protectionist measures) that transformed a “momentary breakdown into an international cataclysm.” The climate of opinion favoring collectivist social and political solutions had a worldwide dimension.

Politically, the belief in human perfectibility is another way of asserting that differences between the few and the many can, over time, be erased. That creed is a critical philosophical proposition underlying the New Deal. What is extraordinary is the way that thesis infiltrated and affected American constitutionalism over the next three-quarters of a century. Its effect was not simply to repudiate, both philosophically and in legal doctrine, the framers’ conception of humanity, but to cut away the very ground on which the Constitution rests. Because the only way to come to terms with an enduring Constitution is to believe that the human condition is itself enduring.

For complex reasons, attempts to impose a collectivist political solution in the United States failed. But, the political failure was of little practical concern, in a way that is oddly unappreciated, that same impulse succeeded within the judiciary, especially in the federal high court. The idea of abstract rights, government entitlements as the most significant form of property, is well suited to conditions of economic distress and the emergence of a propertyless class. But the economic convulsions of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s passed away; the doctrinal underpinnings of West Coast Hotel and the “switch in time” did not. Indeed, over the next half century it consumed much of the classical conception of the Constitution.

Barack New Deal Obama protests that nominees like Ms. Brown want to “roll back” the “progress” that the courts have brought about. I’ve discussed this before, too. Law professor (and now Dean of the U.C. Irvine School of Law) Erwin Chemerinsky appears on the radio talk show of Republican apparatchik Hugh Hewitt weekly as one of the “Smart Guys,” along with Chapman University law professor John Eastman. Coincidentally, on Wednesday, June 8, 2005 – the day of Janice Rogers Brown’s confirmation to the Appellate position on a partisan 56-43 vote (with only one Democrat crossing the aisle to vote in her favor – Ben Nelson of Nebraska) – the Smart Guys were on Hewitt’s show, and Chemerinski made precisely the same argument. First, Eastman responds to Chuck Schumer’s objection to Brown’s confirmation

You know, I mean, it’s just so preposterous, I don’t even know where to begin. The reason Chuck Schumer is so upset about this is Justice Brown is the kind of judge who will, you know, adhere to the Constitution. And when the members of the legislature, even the exalted Chuck Schumer himself, want to take actions that is not authorized by the Constitution, she’ll be willing to stand up and do her duty, and strike it down. That’s not an arrogance, that’s what the judges are there for, to adhere to the Constitution, and not to let the legislature roll over them and do whatever they want. You know, it really is preposterous. We’ve turned this upside down. The judges that do exactly what they’re supposed to do are demonized, and those that take a powder and let the legislature get away with every abuse, every extension of power imaginable, are touted at the cocktail circuit.

Chemerinsky then throws in the “roll back” language – in his case “shred” – used by Obama:

I think what Senator Schumer is saying, and is absolutely right, is that Janice Rogers Brown’s repeated statements that she believes that the New Deal programs like social security are unconstitutional, is truly a radical view. That’s not a judge who wants to uphold the Constitution. That’s a judge who wants to shred the last eighty years of American Constitutional law. Janice Rogers Brown saying she believes that the Bill of Rights should not apply to the states, would undo the last seventy years of Constitutional law. That’s not a judge who wants to follow the law. That’s a judge who wants to make the law in her own radical, conservative views.

But Eastman understands exactly what Chemerinski – and, by extension Obama, is arguing:

Hang on, here, because Erwin…there’s a wonderfully subtle change in your phraseology that demonstrates what’s going on here. You said she won’t follow the Constitution, and then you said it’s because she won’t follow the last seventy or eighty years of Constitutional law. What happened seventy or eighty years ago that changed the Constitution? There was not a single amendment at issue in the 1930’s that changed the Constitution. Some radical, federal programs were pushed through. Some radical judges, under pressure, finally signed on them, and the notion that we can’t question that unconstitutional action that occurred in the 1930’s, and somehow that defending that unconstitutionality is adherent to the rule of law, is rather extraordinary. There are scholars on left and right that have understood that what went on in the 1930’s was…had no basis in Constitutional law, or in the letter of the Constitution itself.

So Obama wants moderate nominees?

The title of this essay is “The Nuclear Option.” I named it that for a reason. John McCain has caught a lot of flak for preventing the implementation of “The Nuclear Option” with his Gang of 14 who negotiated the compromise that also resulted in Judge Brown’s confirmation.

But he was right.

As we go into the 2008 elections, the Democrats will, once again, control the House and Senate – perhaps with significant majorities. No matter who ends up in the White House, the Senate Judiciary Committee will be run by Democrats, and any and all nominees will be vetted by them. If John McCain wins the White House, then “moderates” are the best we as a nation can expect to see confirmed, but if Obama or Hillary wins, then Republicans will be in precisely the same position the Democrats were in. Filibuster will be the Republican’s only arrow in their quiver.

What do you want to bet that “The Nuclear Option” will be brought up by the Democrats in that event?

At least that’s not a tool the Republicans generously handed them.

April 25, 2008 KevinLeave a comment

Memeage.

Just for the hell of it, I thought I’d do this meme even though no one (to my knowledge) tagged me with it:

1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!
2. Find page 123.
3. Find the first five sentences.
4. Post the next three sentences.

Now, I’m not going to post a picture of my reloading/blogging/websurfing area (it looks like the aftermath of a tornado), but bear in mind I’ve got books on just about every horizontal surface to my left and right – and one is a 7′ tall bookshelf with six shelves. But it just so happens that I have a book on my computer desk (under a pile of stuff) so that’s the one I’m pulling.

Here we go:

I am really, sir, the English public schoolboy. That’s an eighteenth-century product. What with the love of truth that – God help me! – they rammed into me at Clifton and the belief Arnold forced upon Rugby that the vilest of sins – the vilest of all sins – is to peach to the head master!

That’s a portion of an excerpt from Tom Brown’s School Days taken by James Bowman for his book Honor: A History in the chapter “Honor Between the Wars.”

Now I’m supposed to tag five others, but… meh.

“Does she want to serve me Cheez Whiz on Triscuits, or bust a cap in my ass?”

March 8, 2008 KevinLeave a comment

Via Tam, I visited the Creative Loafing web site for a review of the book She’s Got a Gun by Georgia State University photography professor Nancy Floyd. This book is similar to Kyle Cassidy’s recent Armed America, but it concentrates specifically on the fairer sex. It’s a pretty good piece, and I’ll probably pick up a copy of the book, but the site also has a slide show of some of the images from the book, narrated by the writer of the Creative Loafing review.

You’ve GOT to watch that.

Here are a few images from that slide show:

That last young lady is eleven years old. According to the review, her comment for the piece was “Shooting is FUN!”

Indeed it is.

February 18, 2008 KevinLeave a comment

Book Meme.

This one’s been all over the web. Nobody tagged me with it (that I know of) but I like it, and I thought I’d respond to it:

Which [type of] book do you irrationally cringe away from reading, despite seeing only positive reviews?

Anything on Oprah’s list(s).

If you could bring three [fictional] characters to life for a social event (afternoon tea, a night of clubbing, perhaps a world cruise), who would they be and what would the event be?

Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan in his position as Imperial Auditor; S.M. Stirling’s Raj Ammenda Halgern Da Luis Whitehall; and R.A. Heinlein’s Mycroft Holmes. Mike could come along by satellite relay, and we could plot and carry out the conquering of the planet!

You are told you can’t die until you read the most boring novel on the planet. While this immortality is great for awhile, eventually you realize it’s past time to die. Which book would you expect to get you a nice grave?

That was Samuel R. Delany’s Dahlgren. I read it until I saw the bright light, and then I put it down.

Come on, we’ve all been there. Which book have you pretended, or at least hinted, that you’ve read, when in fact you’ve been nowhere near it?

None. If I haven’t read it, I say so.

As an addition to the last question, has there been a book that you really thought you had read, only to realize when you read a review about it/go to ‘reread’ it that you haven’t? Which book?

Nope.

You’ve been appointed Book Adviser to a VIP (who’s not a big reader). What’s the first book you’d recommend and why? (if you feel like you’d have to know the person, go ahead of personalize the VIP).

Depends on the VIP. If it’s a politician, Bill Whittle’s Silent America. The “why” is self-explanatory.

A good fairy comes and grants you one wish: you will have perfect reading comprehension in the foreign language of your choice. Which language do you go with?

Oy. I don’t have enough time to read the stuff I want to that’s in English. I’d say Latin. There’s a bunch of Roman-era stuff that would be interesting in the original, and French, Italian, and Spanish are all latin-based, which would make picking those languages up much simpler.

Alternately, Mandarin Chinese.

A mischievous fairy comes and says that you must choose one book that you will reread once a year for the rest of your life (you can read other books as well). Which book would you pick?

Frank Herbert’s Dune, if I’m going to read for pleasure. I reread it about every five years as it is.

I know that the book blogging community, and its various challenges, have pushed my reading borders. What’s one bookish thing you ‘discovered’ from book blogging (maybe a new genre, or author, or new appreciation for cover art-anything)?

I read a huge amount of non-fiction now that I never would have read before, and it is spurred exclusively from me wanting to know more about the subjects that interest me that I’ve found through blogging.

That good fairy is back for one final visit. Now, she’s granting you your dream library! Describe it. Is everything leather bound? Is it full of first edition hardcovers? Pristine trade paperbacks? Perhaps a few favorite authors have inscribed their works?

Realistically, I prefer paperbacks for their handiness and compactness. If I could have a “dream library, all my books would be paperback-sized printed on archival acid-free paper and archival bound.

February 12, 2008 KevinLeave a comment

Quote of the Day.

From Tam:

Look, if I want to read about failed relationships, career problems, family struggles, and substance abuse, I’ll write a friggin’ diary. The characters in the books I like to read have problems, too, but they usually solve them with laser beams or tactical nuclear warheads. I read these books because I wish I could solve my problems that way, too. This is called “escapism”, and is why most folks seek entertainment in the first place.

Hear hear!

This was almost the QotD, from the same post:

See, housing costs money, and you need a house to keep your books in so that they don’t get wet or blow around too much. If it weren’t for books you wouldn’t need a house and could just live under a bridge someplace, which is a lot cheaper and would therefore allow you to retire now.

My only argument with that is that my house also keeps my guns dry and rust-free. Other than that, no quibbles.

January 31, 2008 KevinLeave a comment

Flowers for Algernon?.

If you’re unaware, that’s the title of a 1959 Science Fiction novella (one included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1) by Daniel Keyes that was made into the 1968 film Charly. In the story, surgeons alter the brain of a mentally retarded man, and he becomes brilliant – but only for a while.

I was reminded of that story by this:

Deep Brain Stimulation May Improve Recall

It brought back vivid, 30-year-old memories for patient, researchers say

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 30 (HealthDay News) — Deep brain stimulation (DBS) may help improve memory, suggests a Canadian study that found that DBS of the brain’s hypothalamus unexpectedly prompted detailed memories in a patient.

DBS — which involves electrical stimulation of targeted brain areas — is used to treat Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders, and is being studied as a potential treatment for a number of other conditions, including cluster headaches and aggressive behavior.

The team at Toronto Western Hospital was testing DBS as a potential appetite suppressant in a morbidly obese 50-year-old man. While the researchers were stimulating implanted electrode contacts in order to identify potential appetite suppressant sites in the hypothalamus, the patient reported a vivid memory of being in a park with friends when he was about 20 years old.

As the researchers increased the electrical stimulation, the memory became more vivid.

The heightened memory occurred again when the researchers repeated the test in a double-blinded setting. The electrode contacts that proved most effective at provoking memories were located close to the fornix, a bundle of fibers that carries signals within the limbic system, which is involved in memory and emotions.

In addition, electrical stimulation boosted activity in the temporal lobe and hippocampus, important components of the brain’s memory circuit.

The researchers also found that three weeks of continuous stimulation of the hypothalamus led to significant improvements in the patient’s results on two learning tests. He was also better able to remember unrelated paired objects during stimulation.

The study authors concluded that “just as DBS can influence motor and limbic circuits, it may be possible to apply electrical stimulation to modulate memory function and, in doing so, gain a better understanding of the neural substrates of memory.”

Every day, Science Fiction becomes science fact.

Too bad more people don’t enjoy the genre.

The Church of MSM and the New Reformation

January 21, 2008 Kevin1 Comment

“You know, I wanted to sit on a jury once and I was taken off the jury. And the judge said to me, ‘Can, you know, can you tell the truth and be fair?’ And I said, ‘That’s what journalists do.’ And everybody in the courtroom laughed. It was the most hurtful moment I think I’ve ever had.” – Diane Sawyer, Good Morning America, 7/12/07

For those who’ve been reading TSM for a while, you know I adhere to the belief that the media is most definitely biased – print, radio, and TV. I am not alone in that perception, as the majority of the population agrees with me. Interestingly, however, while most believe the bias is in favor of the political Left, many on the political Left believe the bias is toward the political Right.

While I’m inclined to shake my head in wonder at that worldview, something leads them to that conclusion.

At any rate, that there is a perception of bias is undeniable, and there is strong statistical evidence. Pew Research polls of journalists consistently find that a significant portion self-identify as liberal, far more than do conservative. A May, 2004 issue of Editor and Publisher contained this commentary:

Those convinced that liberals make up a disproportionate share of newsroom workers have long relied on Pew Research Center surveys to confirm this view, and they will not be disappointed by the results of Pew’s latest study released today. . . .

At national organizations (which includes print, TV and radio), the numbers break down like this: 34% liberal, 7% conservative. At local outlets: 23% liberal, 12% conservative. At Web sites: 27% call themselves liberals, 13% conservatives.

This contrasts with the self-assessment of the general public: 20% liberal, 33% conservative. . . .

While it’s important to remember that most journalists in this survey continue to call themselves moderate, the ranks of self-described liberals have grown in recent years, according to Pew. For example, since 1995, Pew found at national outlets that the liberal segment has climbed from 22% to 34% while conservatives have only inched up from 5% to 7%.

Note the language: “journalists… call themselves.” We’ll come back to this.

But this perception received its first widespread national attention with the publication of an op-ed by CBS journalist Bernard Goldberg, which eventually became his 2002 book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, an unapologetic (and somewhat bitter) exposé. The original op-ed was prompted by a CBS Evening News segment done by reporter Eric Enberg on February 8, 1996. That piece was one of CBS’s special “Reality Check” segments, and (1996 being an election year) Eric chose to cover millionaire candidate Steve Forbes and his “flat tax” plan.

From the first chapter of Bias:

Not exactly a sexy subject. So what’s the big deal, I wondered. But as I watched the videotape, it became obvious that this was a hatchet job, an editorial masquerading as real news, a cheap shot designed to make fun of Forbes – a rich conservative white guy, the safest of all media targets – and ridicule his tax plan.

Still, blasting the flat tax wasn’t in the same league as taking shots at people who are against affirmative action or abortion, two of the more popular targets of the liberal media elites. How worked up was I supposed to get…over the flat tax?

But the more I watched the more I saw that this story wasn’t simply about a presidential candidate and a tax plan. It was about something much bigger, something too much of big-time TV journalism had become: a showcase for smart-ass reporters with attitudes, reporters who don’t even pretend to hide their disdain for certain people and certain ideas that they and their sophisticated friends don’t particularly like.

Goldberg then goes on to dissect the piece in detail. In conclusion, he says:

I don’t believe for a second that Eric Enberg woke up that morning and said “I think I’ll go on the air and make fun of Steve Forbes.” The problem is that so many TV journalists simply don’t know what to think about certain issues until the New York Times and the Washington Post tell them what to think. Those big, important newspapers set the agenda that network news people follow. In this case the message from Olympus was clear: We don’t like the flat tax. So neither did Eric Enberg, and neither did anyone at CBS who put his story on the air. It’s as simple as that.

This echoes a quotation from Robert Bartley, former editor emeritus of the Wall Street Journal from about the same time:

The opinion of the press corps tends toward consensus because of an astonishing uniformity of viewpoint. Certain types of people want to become journalists, and they carry certain political and cultural opinions. This self-selection is hardened by peer group pressure. No conspiracy is necessary; journalists quite spontaneously think alike. The problem comes because this group-think is by now divorced from the thoughts and attitudes of readers.

It’s only gotten worse. One recent poll (take it as you wish) reported:

(J)ust 19.6% of those surveyed could say they believe all or most news media reporting. This is down from 27.4% in 2003. Just under one-quarter, 23.9%, in 2007 said they believe little or none of reporting while 55.3% suggested they believe some media news reporting.

I’d call that “being divorced from the thoughts and attitudes” of the audience.

Goldberg writes:

Jerry Kelly from Enterprise, Alabama, spotted the bias in the Enberg report. Jerry Kelly spotted the wise guy and the one-sidedness. And Jerry Kelly is a general building contractor, not a newsman.

Who didn’t find anything wrong with Enberg’s piece?

First off, Enberg didn’t.

His producer in Washington didn’t.

The Evening News senior producer in Washington didn’t.

Jeff Fager, the executive producer of the CBS Evening News in New York didn’t.

His team of senior producers in New York didn’t.

Andrew Heyward, the CBS News president and Harvard Phi Beta Kappa, didn’t.

And finally, Dan Rather, the anchorman and managing editor of the CBS Evening News didn’t.

Not one of them spotted anything wrong with a story that no one should have let on the air in the first place.

Bernard Goldberg, a guy who didn’t know Steve Forbes, who didn’t care much about his flat tax plan, a guy who had never voted for a Republican presidential candidate in his life, a journalist who had been complaining to his coworkers and bosses about just this sort of abuse of the power of journalism for years – without result – got angry. He got angry enough that he took his complaint outside CBS. He wrote an op-ed, clearly stated as such, that was published in the Wall Street Journal using the Enberg piece as an example of what he saw as an unconscious but systematic and pervasive bias in media that was a disservice to the public that the media is supposed to inform. And he signed his name to it.

He was promptly scourged.

A few hours after I faxed the op-ed to the Wall Street Journal, I got a call back from an editor named David Asman (now with the Fox News Channel.) He told me he liked the piece and that “We’re going to run it next Tuesday.”

“Be prepared,” I sighed, “to run my obituary next Wednesday.”

He wasn’t far from wrong, but it was his career that ended up on life-support.

Also published in 2002 was iconoclastic journalist John Stossel’s book, Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media Stossel’s book is much less bitter, and focuses less on bias, but he does have some interesting things to say. From Chapter 1:

I was once a heroic consumer reporter; now I’m a threat to journalism.

As a consumer reporter, I exposed con men and thieves, confronting them with hidden camera footage that unmasked their lies, put some out of business, and helped send the worst of them to jail. The Dallas Morning News called me the “bravest and best of television’s consumer reporters.” Marvin Kitman of Newsday said I was “the man who makes ’em squirm,” whose “investigations of the unjust and wicked… are models.” Jonathan Mandell of the New York Daily News quoted a WCBS official who “proudly” said, “No one’s offended more people than John Stossel.”

Ah, “proudly.” Those were the days. My colleagues liked it when I offended people. They called my reporting “hard-hitting,” “a public service.” I won 18 Emmys, and lots of other journalism awards. One year I got so many Emmys, another winner thanked me in his acceptance speech “for not having an entry in this category.”

Then I did a terrible thing. Instead of just applying my skepticism to business, I applied it to government and “public interest” groups. This apparently violated a religious tenet of journalism. Suddenly I was no longer “objective.”

Ralph Nader said I “used to be on the cutting edge,” but had become “lazy and dishonest.” According to Brill’s Content, “Nader was a fan during Stossel’s consumer advocate days,” but “now talks about him as if he’d been afflicted with a mysterious disease.”

These days I rarely get awards from my peers. Some of my ABC colleagues look away when they see me in the halls. Web sites call my reporting “hurtful, biased, absurd.” “What happened to Stossel?” they ask. CNN invited me to be a guest on a journalism show; when I arrived at the studio, I discovered they’d titled it “Objectivity and Journalism – Does John Stossel Practice Either?” People now e-mail me, calling me “a corporate whore” and a “sellout.”

Keep in mind the part I emphasized in bold.

I recently finished reading a very interesting book, by coincidence also published in 2002, The National Rifle Association and the Media: The Motivating Force of Negative Coverage by Professor Brian Anse Patrick, whom I’ve written about here before. The initial topic of the book was a study of how the NRA manages not only to survive, but thrive in an environment in which it is given nearly universally negative coverage in the media. Of course, to make a study of this topic, it is first necessary to prove that such bias exists. Bear in mind, this is a research dissertation, it is not light summer beach reading. Professor Patrick performed a rigorous statistical study, and details it with data and thorough footnotes. The basis of the research is the study of what he terms the “elite press,” differentiated from the “mainstream media” and the “local media,” and defined as follows:

(T)he serious papers and/or magazines of political-social reporting and analysis that enjoy national (or at least regional) and sometimes international status, reputations, and circulations.

These are identified as New York Times, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report. The coverage of five special interest groups was studied in detail: The National Rifle Association (NRA), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), and Handgun Control (HCI – before it was absorbed into the Brady Campaign).

The study examined multiple variables: the amount and proportion of quotations from group officials printed; amount of coverage of events staged primarily for media consumption; the use of photographs in articles; the use of proper titles of officials of the organizations; “personalization” – in which subjects are treated sympathetically or unsympathetically as opposed to straight factual reportage; use of derisive headlines; use of satire or mockery; verbs of attribution (e,g.: “said” vs. “alleged”); “democracy themes” in which stories concentrate on how special interest groups circumvent or work within the democratic process; “group intensity” themes (self-explanatory); “growth-dwindle” themes – stories that comment on the membership changes in the target group; editorial tone and semantics: labeling (“lobby” versus “special interest group or the like); and “science-progress” themes, in which some attention is paid to whether the group in question is working with or against the latest in research or recognized social progress.

That’s a pretty broad spectrum.

The results were quite fascinating.

First, the results were quite uniform. There was a definite hierarchy in coverage from most-negative through neutral (you know, “objective”) to most-positive. The rankings were as follows, from most negative to most positive:

NRA
ACLU
NAACP
AARP
HCI

The NAACP ended up neutral primarily because of the mix of positive coverage of its activities and negative coverage of its scandals. The AARP received some negative coverage due to its lobbying activities on behalf of its membership – a negative on the “democracy theme” scale, but overall it scored positively. The ACLU – acknowledged by most as a bastion of liberalism, scored noticeably negative throughout the spectrum of parameters, however. But if there is a pervasive liberal bias in the media, how can this be explained?

Professor Patrick concludes that a bias quite evidently exists, and it is pervasive, but it is not defined as being politically liberal. From Chapter 7:

I suggest that a larger concept lies behind all of these measures of interest group coverage. Certainly the measures all indicate, each in its own way, media bias in some discreet aspect of coverage. Bias does not stand alone, for bias in small, seemingly discreet things exists as a manifestation of something larger. Or put another way, bias exists for or against some particular thing, person, group, idea, or constellation of ideas but this bias must arise from within a frame of reference. Thus, mainstream physicians tend to despise homeopathic and “natural” medical treatments, not because physicians harbor some innate dislike of herbs or treatment through visualization, but because physicians have been trained and thoroughly enculturated in a scientific clinical positivism. Their bias is a manifestation of this deeply inculcated way of seeing (which they call examination) and interpreting the world.

So (what) do the rankings reveal about whatever may be inculcated in the interpretive heart of journalism? For one thing, it leads to the dismissal of some common explanations of elite media bias. Certainly, it is by now evident from the content analysis results alone that elite journalists who wrote the articles considered in this study do not on the whole care for the NRA or guns: there is too much evidence in the form of their own words, works, and statistical significance tests to ignore. Many would therefore ascribe these reportorial tendencies to that venerable bugaboo, liberal bias or to simple anti-gun bias, as NRA officials and many political conservatives often in fact do. Why, then, should ACLU, a “leading liberal champion” according to some of the content-analyzed articles, also find itself so often shaded by negative coverage? ACLU remains and has been since its origin, very much a left-leaning organization, with “ultra-liberal” often a term applied to it. While on the matter of guns, despite ACLU being denounced at times as constitutional rights absolutists, ACLU explicitly does not support the individual right to bear arms interpretation of the Second Amendment; they are anti-gun by proclamation. If the predominant bias of the elite press were liberal or simply anti-gun, ACLU would be highly revered. So the liberal and anti-gun bias concepts illuminate nothing here.

It is not that liberal-conservative bias does not affect coverage at times. Or that other forms of bias do not exist. One would have to be naïve to the point of addle-headedness to believe otherwise. Elite journalists tend to identify themselves with politically liberal causes, and personal idealism cannot possibly be segregated from the interpretation of events. Doubtless, too, old fashioned economic concerns have killed many a news story. Many discern in the national media, some on the basis of good evidence a conservative bias supporting economic imperialism and mindless consumerism.

Additionally, the powerful forces of personal psychological projection interact with the amorphous nature of external events that media professionals must daily interpret, in ways that allow just about everyone to see what they need or want to see in the media. The Left sees bias for the Right; Right sees Left; schizophrenics and the devoutly religious see the Hand of God, devils, or aliens at work; we could also list racism, sexism, internationalism, and the exploitation of women and girls, men, animals, and classes. There are bugs and bugaboos in the media appropriate to nearly every orientation or fixation. So bias is often not just about what affects coverage, but also what affects perceptions of coverage.

(Hmm… is Professor Patrick intimating that the devoutly religious are mentally ill?) OK, all of that leads up to this:

That elite media may be biased for or against a particular issue or topic is interesting, and this knowledge may help an interest group rally indignation or manage its public relations; however it tells little about the overall functioning of media in society. This latter concern is the broader and more important idea, with larger implications. The overall ranking results provide such an explanation.

The larger concept that lies behind the consistent ranking is a broad cultural level phenomenon that I will label an administrative control bias. It has profound implications. Administrative control in this usage means rational, scientific, objective social management by elite, symbol-manipulating classes, and subclasses, i.e., professionalized administrators or bureaucratic functionaries. The thing administered is often democracy itself, or a version of it at least. Here and throughout this chapter terms such as “rational,” “objective,” “professional,” and “scientific” should be read in the sense of the belief systems that they represent, i.e. rationalism, objectivism, professionalism, and scientism. Scientism is not the same as being scientific; the first is a matter of faith and ritualistic observance, the other is difficult creative work. William James made a similar distinction between institutional religion and being religious, the first being a smug and thoughtless undertaking on the part of most people, the second, a difficult undertaking affecting every aspect of a life. The term scientistic administration would pertain here. Note that we move here well beyond the notion of mere gun control and into the realm of general social control, management and regulation.

Does any of this sound familiar? “Central planning,” anyone?

The Editor & Publisher quote above, which notes that the Pew Research poll is based on journalist’s self assessment was plucked from an Instapundit post. A comment Glenn found worthy left at that post:

One point that can’t be overstressed is that the Pew findings are based on self-assessment. I worked in the newsroom at three large newspapers for 22 years, and many of the journalists who rate themselves as politically moderate are well to the left of center, especially on social issues. They are moderate by newsroom standards, not by the general public’s standards.

Perhaps the most pervasive way in which journalists are different from normal people is that journalists live in a world dominated by government, and they reflexively see government action as the default way to approach any problem.

Professor Patrick continues:

This administrative control bias is the manifestation of a hermeneutic that could be termed “the administrative gaze,” honoring the style of Michael Foucault. This interpretive view organizes, manages, objectifies, implements, and looks downward in such a way as to beg administration or clinical-style intervention. Too, it is a basic power relationship, or an attempt at one, for such is the nature of all management….

—

In illustration of how the administrative control bias plays out in the national news coverage of interest groups and social action, imagine a valence scale with a neutral midpoint, anchored at one end by a pro-administrative control position, and at the other by an anti-administrative control position. The interest groups figuring in this study can be situated along this scale in exactly the same order as they embody or align with the idea of administrative control; and this ranking precisely matches the ranking of their respective average scores on the content analysis measures.

Of the five groups, NRA necessarily anchors the negative end. The very existence of the potential for uncoordinated violence represented by guns is a threat to an administrative control hermeneutic. Guns simply invite administration.

—

Next up the administrative control scale is ACLU, which because of its mission must often position itself “athwart the road” chosen by administrative ambition. While not flaunting the administrative control hermeneutic to the same extent as NRA with its inherently dangerous firearms, ACLU often confounds administrative attempts to implement efficiently rational, scientific policies in educational settings, workplaces, law enforcement interactions, prison environments, and other social institutions. Accordingly, the underlying theme of much of its coverage is ACLU frustrating rational democratic administration by its pursuit of abolutist visions of constitutional rights of individuals and groups. That ACLU is also a well-known champion of the First Amendment – which embodies a principle that is in the self-interest of journalists to endorse and understand – is doubtlessly helpful in ACLU receiving more favorable treatment than NRA.

—

At the top of the scale, HCI represents the essence of the administrative hermeneutic. It stands for scientific management or rational control and regulation of a problem quite often framed as a general public health concern.

—

Although this study deals with five interest groups, this result generalizes to elite news coverage of other interest groups. In the form of a proposition, then: an interest group will in the long term receive negative, neutral, or positive coverage in elite media in accord with how well the group aligns with the administrative control hermeneutic.

This proposition could be put to a larger test, but it applies to any number of interest groups or interest group-generated issues common to elite news.

He then mentions a few: environmental groups, anti-smoking, anti-drug, and anti-drunk driving (and alcohol) groups.

If Professor Patrick is correct in his assessment (and I believe he is), journalists see themselves as the clergy in the Church of State:

Previous to objective journalism, baldly partisan news media were the norm; under objectivity news became a scientific tool of social progress and management. The elite press continues also to serve this function, connecting administrators and managers not only ot the world they seek to administrate but also to other managers with whom they must coordinate their efforts. So in this sense social movement-based critiques have been correct in identifying a sort of pseudo-pluralism operating in the public forum, a pluralism that is in reality no more than an exclusive conversation between elite class subcomponents – but this over-class is administrative in outlook and purpose.

We should not think of this way of thinking and interpreting reality as an entirely deliberate process. We are dealing here with the diffusion of a hermeneutic that accompanies an organizational and cultural style, a scientific management method of proven effectiveness, with wonderful social benefits and also terrible side effects. Journalists, like everyone else, steep in this hermeneutic throughout their education and upbringing; moreover they work in and serve organizations that arose in response to administrative needs. High-level journalists especially have survived a rigorous selection process that favors those who are most suitable and effective for this environment. Journalists are probably no more conscious of the hermeneutic that fish are conscious of the water around them.

And here I will disagree with the good professor.

It is often said that “the exception proves the rule.” One exceptional exception, the aforementioned John Stossel, credits his journalistic iconoclasm thusly:

In retrospect, I see that it probably helped me that I had taken no journalism courses.

Thus preventing him from being steeped in the journalist mindset that Robert Bartley (you remember Robert? Quoted near the beginning of this essay?) spoke of.

But unaware of it? Not exactly. They’re aware of the bias, absolutely. Of the reason for it, possibly, even probably not. From Bias, after warning CBS News president Andrew Heyward of the upcoming Wall Street Journal op-ed and its contents:

When Heward called me in it was obvious that steam was coming out of his ears. What I had done, he told me, was “an act of disloyalty” and “a betrayal of trust.”

“I understand how you feel,” I told him, trying to diffuse a bad situation. “But I didn’t say anything in the piece about how even you, Andrew, have agreed with me about the liberal bias.”

Instead of calming things down, my comment made him go ballistic. “That would have been like raping my wife and kidnapping my kids!” he screamed at me.

—

This is how self-centered the media elites can be. These are people who routinely stick their noses into everybody else’s business. These are people who are always telling us about the media’s constitutional right to investigate and scrutinize and a lot of times even embarrass anyone who winds up in our crosshairs. These are the people who love to take on politicians and businessmen and lawyers and Christians and the military and athletes and all sorts of other Americans, yet when one of their own writes an opinion piece about American Journalism, then you’ve crossed the line . . . because taking on the media is like raping their wives and kidnapping their kids!

Or nailing up 95 Theses to the door of the New York Times.

Heward’s response isn’t isolated either. Here’s what Professor Patrick had to say about attempting to interview journalists for his book:

Although I had accurately anticipated the reluctance of NRA officials in releasing information about the activities of their organization, I did not anticipate a general reluctance and the outright refusal of some journalists to explain their activities. Most of the journalists would not return calls when they were contacted and asked to participate in the study. Callbacks did not help. Neither did assurances of anonymity help to reverse the refusals. The non-response rate, thus defined, is almost 95 percent.

—

The journalists contacted had no tolerance whatsoever with a survey research-style questionnaire, however short and to the point. Based on their reactions, my impressions are, first that the subject of the survey – journalists and interest group coverage – is a sensitive area for journalists, as well it should be considering the inevitable tension that must exist between journalistic professional standards (and pretensions) and the journalistic dependence for material on interest group pseudo-events and news sources. To use an old but apt idiom, in this case asking specific questions concerning their attitudes on the groups they covered seemed to hit them where they lived; they became very cagey very quickly. At this point almost all withdrew their consent, though they had to this point seemed comfortable with the general idea of the survey.

Second, they seemed hypersensitive to what ends the survey might be directed, and did not like the fact that they were not being told everything up front. In the words of one journalist, “Where are you going with all of this? I need to know before I can continue.”

After all, they might find out they were appearing on a TV show asking if they practiced either objectivity or journalism. In fact, they feared that Professor Patrick might be (metaphorically) planning on raping their wives and kidnapping their children.

Back to Journalists as clergy:

Journalists acquire importance in the mass democratic system precisely because they gather, convey, and interpret the data that inform individual choices. Mere raw, inaccessible data transforms to political information that is piped to where it will do the most good. Objective, balanced coverage becomes essential, at least in pretense, lest this vital flow of information to be thought compromised, thus affecting not only the quality of rational individual decision-making, but also the legitimacy of the system.

Working from within the perspective of the mass democracy model for social action it is difficult to specify an ideal role model of journalistic coverage other than a “scientific objectivism” at work. An event (i.e., reality) causes coverage, or so the objective journalist would and often does say. Virtually all of the journalists that I have ever talked with regard coverage as mirroring reality.

“Mirroring” being an particularly apt description, as author Michael Crichton describes much of journalism as being made up of “wet streets cause rain” stories.

They truly seem to believe this, that they have access to information to which philosophers and scientists have been denied. I spoke once to a journalist who worried out loud about “compromising” her objectivity when covering a story.

You mean like this?

The claim being advanced here, by assumption, is that journalists can truly convey or interpret the nature of reality as opposed to the various organizational versions of events in which journalists must daily traffic. The claim is incredible and amounts to a Gnostic pretension of being “in the know” about the nature or reality, or at least the reality that matters most politically.

An ecclesiastical model most appropriately describes this elite journalistic function under mass democracy. Information is the vital substance that makes the good democracy possible. It allows, as it were, for the existence of the good society, a democratic state of grace. Information is in this sense analogous to the concept of divine grace under the pre-Reformation Roman Catholic Church. Divine grace was essential for the good spiritual life, the life that mattered. The clergy dispensed divine grace to the masses in the form of sacraments. They were its intermediaries, who established over time a monopoly, becoming the exclusive legitimate channel of divine grace.

No wonder Diane Sawyer felt hurt when she was laughed at by an entire courtroom.

Recollect that the interposition of intermediaries, the clergy, along a vital spiritual-psychological supply route was the rub of the Reformation. The clergy cloaked themselves in the mantle of spiritual authority rather than acting as its facilitators. Many elite newspapers have apparently done much the same thing, speaking and interpreting authoritatively for democracy, warranting these actions on the basis of social responsibility. Of course, then and now, many people do not take the intermediaries seriously.

Sorry, Diane.

It is not accident, then, that the pluralistic model of social action largely discounts journalists as an important class. In the same way the decentralized religious pluralism generically known as Protestantism discounts the role of clergy. This should be expected. Pluralism and Protestantism share common historical origins. American pluralism particularly is deeply rooted in the Reformation’s reaction to interpretive monopoly.

Journalists, particularly elite journalists, occupy under mass democracy this ecclesiastical social role, a functional near-monopoly whose duty becomes disseminating and interpreting the administrative word and its symbols unto the public. Democratic communication in this sense is sacramental, drawing its participants together into one body. We should not overlook the common root of the words communication, community, and communion.

Not to mention communism.

What might be termed as the process of democommunication has aspects of transubstantiation an interpretive process by which journalists use their arts to change the bread and wine of raw data into democratically sustaining information. Democracy is a kind of communion. Objectivity and social responsibility become social necessities, legitimating doctrines much like the concept of papal infallibility, which had to emerge to lend weight to interpretive pronouncements.

In this light, even the laudable professional value of objectivity can appear as a nearly incredible claim. Both claims, objectivity and infallibility, function to lend credence, authority, and an impeachment-resistant moral/scientific base to organizational or professional products. Both are absolute in nature. Both also serve the quite necessary social function of ultimately absolving from personal responsibility or accountability the reporter, whether ecclesiastical or secular, who is, after all, merely duty-bound to report on the facts. As it is in heaven, so it will be on Earth; and as it is on Earth, so shall it appear in The New York Times.

So it isn’t just gun control. And, as with gun control, it isn’t about guns, it’s about control. When Bernard Goldberg nailed up his version of the 95 Theses, he was ostracized. When John Stossel started questioning the efficacy of administrative control, he absolutely “violated a religious tenet of journalism.”

The New Reformation is coming about because the populace is sick and tired of op-eds written as straight news. We’re tired of being fed bullshit and being told it’s steak. More and more of us are aware we’re being lied to – and you know what? The Left is being lied to, too. I’d venture to guess that the nature of their objections is more along the lines of things not happening fast enough, but their most recent objections were to the media’s complicity in the ramp-up to the Iraq war – and they were right to object. The media wasn’t being “objective” – they were advancing the administrative control hermeneutic.

Viewed from that perspective, it all makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?

ORIGINAL JSKit/Echo COMMENT THREAD Thank you, John Hardin!

November 6, 2007 KevinLeave a comment

No Urge to Post,.

…even though I’m a finalist in the 2007 Weblog awards. I’ve got a piece in the back of my head on Fred Thompson that just won’t come out (been there since about the middle of last week), but I’m currently reading a fascinating book, Walter Russell Mead’s God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, and I’m about halfway through it.

Sorry for the lack of content. Blame ennui.

Women and Wars

September 20, 2007 KevinLeave a comment

At the Emmy Awards apparently Sally Field said something stupid. Rachel Lucas has (for Rachel) a rather long and worthy comment on it. Please go forthwith and read.

Back already?

I was reminded of a discussion I’ve had several times with my wife, who works at a children’s shelter, and has also worked in call centers doing international long-distance service, and roadside assistance, with many, many people, often from different cultures. She’s told me on more than one occasion that she prefers dealing with boys at the shelter and schools for the same reason she disliked working with women at the call centers: women compete. Pettily. Viciously. Constantly. They form cliques for the purpose of deliberately excluding others. They are simply mean and nasty to other women for no discernible reason. Boys tend to cooperate.

Quoth Rachel:

It starts in about 4th grade, when girls start engaging in what can only be called a war of attrition via emotional abuse. They form evil little cliques and set about utterly destroying each other’s self-esteem and pride.

—

Then you move on to the nightmare-scape called junior high school, where the females carefully hone their craft and the sabotage is raised to a whole new level of hate… Sneaky and manipulative. At least when boys pick on you, it’s all out in the open. Girls? Oh god no. They use subterfuge and reconnaissance. Girls will pretend to be your best friend just to discover your weaknesses, which they’ll then employ to bring you down.

One of the books I read last year was Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man. Ms. Vincent, a lesbian author, dressed herself up with the proper clothing and make-up and passed herself off as a man in numerous situations, some of them long-term. Her first foray into being a man was joining a bowling league. She was quite surprised at some of the things she discovered, based on her lifelong experience of being female.

Girls can be a lot nastier than boys when it comes to someone who stands in the way of something they want. They know where to hit where it’ll hurt the most, and their aim is laser precise. I went to a tennis camp in New Jersey that catered largely to rich princesses and their male counterparts. Most of them couldn’t really play tennis on more than a country-club level. Their parents had sent them there to get rid of them. They just stood around most of the time posing for one another, showing off their tans. But I’d had a lot of private coaching in tennis by that time, and my strokes were fairly impressive for my age. I took tennis pretty seriously.

As for posing, I looked like I’d been raised by wolverines.

The instructors used to videotape each of us playing, so that they could go over the tapes with us and evaluate our techniques. One day, my particular class of about twenty girls was standing around the television watching the tape, and the instructor was deconstructing my serve. He’d had a lot of negative things to say about most of the other girl’s serves, but when it came to mine he’d raved unconditionally, playing my portion of the tape over and over again in slow motion.

One of the prettiest girls in the group, no doubt exasperated by the repetition, said, loudly enough for everyone to hear: “Well, I’d rather look the way I do and serve the way I do than serve the way she does and look the way she does.”

Now that’s female competitiveness at its finest.

But with these guys and with other male athletes I’ve known it was an entirely different conflict….

These guys’ attentions were like that: fatherly. And it really surprised me coming from members of opposing teams, since this was, after all, a money league. But they seemed to have a competitive stake in my doing well and in helping me do well, as if beating a man who wasn’t at his best wasn’t satisfying. They wanted you to be good and then they wanted to beat you on their own merits.

Here’s one excerpt from that chapter that popped immediately to mind when I read Rachel’s rant, and that drew me to pick up the book and write this post:

So much of what happens emotionally between men isn’t spoken aloud, and so the outsider, especially the female outsider who is used to emotional life being overt and spoken (often over-spoken), tends to assume that what isn’t said isn’t there. But it is there, and when you’re inside it, it’s as if you’re suddenly hearing sounds only dogs can hear.

I remember one night when I plugged into that subtext for the first time. A few lanes over, one of the guys was having a particularly hot game. I’d been oblivious to what was happening, mourning my own playing too much to watch anyone else. It was Jim’s turn, and I noticed that he wasn’t bowling. Instead he was sitting down in one of the laneside chairs, just waiting. Usually this happened when there was a problem with the lane; a stuck pin or a mis-set rack. But the pins were fine. I kept watching him, wondering why he wasn’t stepping up to the line.

Then I noticed that all the other bowlers had sat down as well. Nobody was taking his turn. It was as if somebody had blown a whistle, only nobody had. Nobody had said anything. Everyone had just stopped and stepped back, like in a barracks when an officer enters the room.

Then I realized that there was one guy stepping up to the lane. It was a guy who was having a great game. I looked up at the board and saw that he’d had strikes in every frame, and now he was on the tenth and final frame, in which you get three throws if you strike or spare in the first two. He’d have to throw three strikes in a row on this one to earn a perfect score, and somehow everyone in that hall had felt the moment of grace descend and had bowed out accordingly. Everyone, of course, except me.

It was a beautiful moment, totally still and reverent, a bunch of guys instinctively paying their respects to the superior athleticism of another guy.

The guy stepped up to the line and threw three strikes, one after the other, each one met by mounting applause, then silence and stillness again, then on the final strike, an eruption, and every single guy in that room, including me, surrounded that player and moved in to shake his hand or pat him on the back. It was almost mystical, that telepathic intimacy and the communal joy that succeeded it, crystalline in its perfection. The moment said everything all at once about how tacitly attuned men are to each other, and how much of this women miss when they look from the outside in.

One of the clichés of war movies (or other conflict-oriented media) is the character who relishes having an opponent “worthy of them.” Patton relished besting Rommel, for instance, because Rommel was the acknowledged best at what he did. But when the competition is over between men, at least in most cases, it’s over, and they can set aside the conflict. The end of the Civil War is perhaps the strongest example of this.

But women? From what I have seen, Sally Field might be right. If women ran the world there wouldn’t be any more goddamned wars.

Because the first one would end in a scorched-earth policy that neither side would survive. And it would start over something petty.

I can strongly recommend Self-Made Man. It’s a damned interesting read.

UPDATE: Dr. Helen has an opinion on Ms. Field’s comment, too.

Indoctrination

November 19, 2006 KevinLeave a comment

A couple of posts below I linked to An Infuriating Man, an essay by Leo Rosten about economist Milton Friedman. In the post between this one and that one, I mentioned that I fairly recently read the book Conversations with Eric Sevareid: Interviews with Notable Americans. It so happens that Leo Rosten was one of Mr. Sevareid’s guests, and that transcript was one in the book. Taped on August 24, 1975, Sevareid introduces Rosten:

“Wisdom,” according to Leo Rosten, “is only the capacity to confront intolerable ideas, with composure. Most men debase the pursuit of happiness by transforming it into a foolish pursuit of fun. But where was it promised that the purpose of life is to be happy? To me, the most important thing in life is to matter, to count, to stand for something. In short, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.”

—

Leo Rosten has taught at Yale, Stanford, Columbia and the University of California. In addition to all else, he’s an astute economist trained at the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. He belongs to an interesting intellectual mutation. He was a New Deal liberal in Franklin Roosevelt’s day; today he’s a neo-conservative. From old liberal to new conservative is paradoxically a function of aging and changing society. Neo-conservatives don’t believe that education or government can determine the total picture of American society.

This is the earliest reference I have seen of the term “neo-conservative.” I was a little surprised that it dates back to at least 1975.

The interview begins:

Rosten: We didn’t assume thirty years ago that the schools could solve all our problems. We never assumed that politics could solve them. In fact, this country was based on the commanding idea that the politicians should do and what the government should do is make it possible for people to pursue happiness. Now the disenchanted say, “Make me happy!” Schools can’t make anyone happy.

Sevareid: What happened? Some of the Supreme Court decisions, some of the rules from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, from the federal government, are going to instruct every high school in every local community what boys and girls can do, what sports they can play at together, and what can or can’t be done in the locker room. (Title IX passed in 1972.) This would have made Alexander Hamilton and Ben Franklin turn in their graves. Why shouldn’t local communities have something to say about how children are educated?

Rosten: I think the tide has to turn. The story of the growth of federal power is one of the most lamentable in American history. I think historians of the future will mark 1932 as one of the black years of American history – not that Roosevelt was a bad President, not that he didn’t do extraordinary things. His greatest talent was that of a politician. He cemented a society that was falling to pieces in very ugly ways. But what he did was start the pattern by which instead of fixing your community’s bridge you wrote to your Congressman and asked him to get Congress to appropriate $28,000 for your bridge – a pattern by which everything is taken care of by federal money. What’s wrong with this is that it prevents the most powerful engine mankind has ever known, the free market, from working.

I think we are now beginning to learn that it is foolish to assume that people in Washington know better how to run Alameda County that the men who are farming in Alameda County.

I don’t think the lesson stuck.

Rosten on the press:

Sevareid: A long time ago, during the 1930’s, you wrote the first real sociological study of the Washington press corps. A lot has changed since then. It’s now a vast herd of people. The tone has changed. The press has itself become a great controversial issue. What’s the big difference now?

Rosten: The decline of newspapers, the decline of local papers, the pabulumized news leads me to read weekly journals more than ever because they at least put things into perspective. The kind of person who now goes into journalism may also be different.

Now even the weeklies are pabulum, and the dailies are dying from decreasing readership.

Sevareid: The Watergate adventures have something to do with it. Press people have been lured and forced out of their normal roles to a degree. They’ve become actors in the play themselves. They’re writing about each other. There also is a new level of howling monkeys at news conferences. They’ve given the press a pretty bad image with lots of people. Some reporters seem to think they’re prosecuting attorneys at every encounter with officials. They don’t understand that civility is not the enemy of freedom; it’s an ally.

Rosten: I have the feeling that the editorial pages of this country, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal, are repeating the cliches of the 1940’s and 1950’s. “If a government program fails it’s because not enough money was put into it. Let’s put more money into it!” And more and more money is poured down the rat hole.

Or, as Steven Den Beste put it, cognitive dissonance leading to “escalation of failure.”

And, finally, Leo Rosten on education:

Sevareid: Leo, you’ve written about everything, thought about everything, studied everything. You’re a great generalist, which is not much in fashion any more. What’s happened to the knowledge industry? Sociologists, economists, psychologists, psychiatrists, seem rather bankrupt. Have we overburdened the human mind with too many facts? Vocabulary seems to have outrun knowledge, which has outrun wisdom. Where do we turn?

Rosten: We’ve always gone on the assumption (a good one) that education will liberate the human mind or the human spirit. There’s a second assumption that’s forgotten. Some people are meant to be educated and to learn and to enjoy the uses of the mind. Some people are meant to paint. Some people are meant to draw castles in the sand and make them into sculpture. Some people love to prune trees and gardens. What we have done is assume that everyone can potentially become an intellectual. We’ve confused learning with schooling.

It’s absolutely absurd that in this country today there should be seven million youngsters going to college. There are not seven million people who want to read Plato or Aristotle or Montesquieu. And there’s no reason why they should. We have failed to see that there aren’t enough jobs for those who learn esoteric things. For a while there was a big fling on learning Swahili in New York. Lots of kids were studying it because it was part of the Black movement, the idea of Black identity, Black liberation. It so happens that Swahili was the language of the Arab slave traders. In any event, what good does it do to know Swahili? I don’t mean “good” simply in terms of economics. What sort of good does it do?

When you’re young, when your mind and spirit are like a sponge, there is no better time to learn certain things and there is no worse time to learn certain things. I would abolish the study of some courses except for students aged thirty and above.

I was lucky as a child of the depression. I couldn’t get a job for three years. I was lonely and miserable. At the end of those three years, because I was desperate, I went back to school. I was older than my classmates, I had learned something. I had learned how hard it is to walk all day long, trying to earn a dollar. I had learned how important it is to save, to appraise people, to figure out if this or that guy can be trusted or not trusted. This is what life and the world are about.

We’re practically using the colleges as a dump into which to put youngsters we do not know what to do with. There are today 45 million people between the age of roughly 7 and 24. Their parents don’t know what to do with them. They want them to go to college and they often think that they’re being trained for jobs. But they’re not getting training for useful employment.

Someone has said that education is what remains after everything you’ve learned is forgotten. The purpose of educating young people is not only to illuminate their spirit and enrich their memory bank but to teach them the pleasures of thinking and reading. How do you use the mind? As a teacher, I always was astonished by the number of people in the classroom who wanted to learn as against those who just wanted to pass. I took pride in my ability to communicate. Generally “communicate” meant one thing. Now the young think “communicate” means “Agree with me!”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

But here’s the kicker:

Rosten: The student rebellions of the 1960’s exposed the fact that our entire educational system has forgotten the most important thing it can do prior to college: indoctrinate. I believe in the indoctrination of moral values. There’s a lot to be said for being good and kind and decent. You owe a duty to those who have taken care of you. You owe a duty to whatever it is that God or fate gave you – to use your brain or your heart. It’s senseless to whine, to blame society for every grievance, or to assume that the presence of a hammer means you have to go out to smash things.

The young want everything. They think they can get everything swiftly and painlessly. They are far too confident. They don’t know what their problems are, not really. They talk too much. They demand too much. Their ideas have not been tempered by the hard facts of reality. They’re idealists, but they don’t sense that it’s the easiest thing in the world to be an idealist. It doesn’t take any brains. This was said by Aristotle 2300 years ago. Mencken once said that an idealist is someone who, upon observing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, assumes that it will also make better soup.

To some extent, Rosten sounds like all elders complaining about youths:

Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders, and love chatter in places of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers. – Socrates

I am ambivalent on the topic of “indoctrination.” My problem is with what that indoctrination entails. Rosten objects to the failure of the educational system to indoctrinate moral values. I’d say it still does. It just doesn’t indoctrinate goodness, kindness, and decency anymore. It indoctrinates “multicuturalism,” “tolerance,” “sensitivity,” “fairness,” “socialism,” and “self-esteem.” It fails to instruct in history, civics, ethics, mathematics, English, or for that matter, job skills. The education system receives “young skulls full of mush” and processes them right on through, sending them into the world with what Ayn Rand described as “a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears.”

The reasons for this are myriad. Diane Ravitch puts part of the blame (convincingly) on the textbook companies who are loath to put anything in a text that someone, anyone, might find offensive. I put a large part of the blame on the influx of socialist True Believers into the ranks of educators since the time of John Dewey. As far as public schools are concerned, we’ve abandoned the idea that education can liberate the human mind or human spirit. Schools are now warehouses, run by administrators terrified of lawsuits and too many teachers who are literally tyrannized by their charges and their parents. Indoctrination still goes on, though. Read this lovely little op-ed by Mark Bradley, a history teacher from Sacramento. I bet his classes are popular!

It would seem that if you want some good indoctrination, your only choices are homeschooling or private – often ecumenical – schools.

Indoctrination of children is not necessarily a bad thing, but somewhere along the line we stopped paying attention to what was and what wasn’t getting poured into their heads, and it started long before 1975.