The Rag Blog

And I’m a day late, again !! Better luck next week. Many thanks to Charlie Loving for his work. rdj

*TT = Cartoon Tuesday

New York Times article, “Left or Right, Israelis Are Pro-War”

Left or Right, Israelis Are Pro-War

Article by STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: August 9, 2006

For an honest reportage on the Israel homefront, you might be interested to read Steven Erlanger’s article in today’s NYTimes. It is too long to paste in here but you can read it at the address above if you are registered with them by username and password.

Mike Eisenstadt

Does anyone know anything about the red heifer deal? Here’s the excerpt from the piece in the Prospect:

Besides his million-dollar compensation package, Hagee has a portfolio of other ventures, including a cattle ranch in south Texas that may have religious significance. Many evangelicals believe that the arrival of a “perfect red heifer” will signal the end times. In the Old Testament, burning a red heifer and sprinkling its ashes is described as a purification ritual for priests entering the temple. Ultra-orthodox Jews believe that the birth of a modern perfect red heifer will herald the arrival of the messiah, leading to a confrontation with Muslims over the Temple Mount, where Jews believe the Temple will be rebuilt. Some evangelicals likewise regard the red heifer as a harbinger of the ultimate showdown at the Temple Mount, which they believe will be the site of the Second Coming. And they believe that time is near.

To many other observers, the advent of the red heifer threatens to provoke a violent struggle for control of the Temple Mount, with worldwide repercussions. In the late 1990s, a group of unidentified Texas ranchers reportedly bred a perfect red heifer, which generated excitement in evangelical circles until the animal sprouted some black hairs.

Six years ago, the John C. Hagee Royalty Trust paid more than $5.5 million for a 7,600-acre ranch in Brackettville, Texas, where cattle are raised in a venture with the Texas Israel Agricultural Research Foundation, a nonprofit outfit operated by the pastor. (Another part of the property is a resort hunting facility, where guests paying up to $250 for a night’s stay can also land their planes at the ranch’s private airstrip.) Last year, Hagee hired one of the top lobbyists in San Antonio, David Earl, to urge the state Legislature to exempt Hagee’s foundation from water-use regulations. A spokeswoman for the bill’s sponsor, Representative Frank Corte, whose district includes Hagee’s church, said that he introduced it on behalf of a constituent, but added that she was not authorized to divulge the identity of that constituent. (The bill stalled in committee.) Earl said that Hagee wants to “share information” to “improve” the “production of livestock,” particularly cattle, with an Israeli research project, but otherwise claimed to be unsure of the particulars. Dr. Scott Farhart, an obstetrician and trustee of the John C. Hagee Royalty Trust (and an elder at Hagee’s church), did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the director of the ranch.

Here it is.

Charlie Loving

And now let me tell you about the tooth fairy and the little elves that help Santa care for his flying reindeer. Is the point that we are supposed to give credence to these befuddled religious fanatics or that we are supposed to laugh at them?
What is the “Prospect”?

David Hamilton

I will not try to relate Charlie’s point, although I think I understand it a little. I do not believe I should take these religious fanatics lightly, no matter how much I would like to … They are having enormous, unwanted influence in powerful circles these days.

The Prospect is an e-zine:

Prospect article

That is the original article the woman wrote.

Richard Jehn

Richard,

When you mention “religious fanatics”, are you refering to Pat Robinson [sic], Jerry Falwell and George W. Bush? And would it be fair for some to regard Zionism as religious fanaticism? Does one group of fanatics spawn its antithesis?

David Hamilton

David H. wrote:

— And would it be fair for some to regard Zionism as religious fanaticism? —

Historically the Zionists may have been judged fanatics but surely not religious. Zionism is a secular nationalism dedicated to finding jews a new place to live where they were to earn their living in more normal,less parasitical professions than those they often practiced in Europe, this in view of the fact they would never be allowed to assimilate. Religious jews bitterly opposed Zionism and do so to this day. The haredim in present day Israel when sending a letter scratch off the words Eretz Yisrael on the stamp lest it should seem that they accept the notion of a jewish state not founded by Messiah. Nor will they speak Hebrew which for them is the sacred language spoken only when praying.

Subsequent to the 1967 Six Day war “victory”, in addition to the traditional haredim huddled in squalor in city ghettos, a movement arose of orthodox religious settlers who read the 1967 “victory” as God’s sign to literally recreate the Israel of the bible on other folks’ land.

This is a kind of religious Zionism but it is strongly opposed by the secular majority. That is why Sharon removed the settlers from Gaza kicking and screaming and why Olmert ran on a platform promising to do the same thing with some (not all) of the settlements on the West Bank. The settlements contiguous to Jerusalem were not on offer, not the settlements along the Jordan river which are considered militarily indispensable.

However now that Islamic fundamentalism has has apparently been endorsed by the Palestinians by the election of Hamas, so long as Israel exists, one can safely predict that the West Bank will continue to be occupied by the IDF. No rockets are being shot off from there, unlike Gaza. No-one anymore seriously suggests withdrawing from the West Bank even on the left. Peace Now as a mass movement is defunct due to this new reality.

Mike Eisenstadt

The Mess They Made by Steven LaTulippe

Jeffrey Nightbyrd

David H. wrote:

— And would it be fair for some to regard Zionism as religious fanaticism? Historically the Zionists may have been judged fanatics but surely not religious. —

After looking around for a place to take over the secular Zionists chose Palestine because they could manipulate the more religious Jews into going there. Canada, South America and Uganda didn’t have the same caché. The recreation of Zion had been a subject of European Jewish political tracts for decades before Herzl came on the scene. Religion played the major factor in choosing a site. Herzl and Vladimir Jabotinsky were not religious but many other Zionists were and are. There are many forms of delusion, religion being a big one. The idea of the state as an entity is another. Politicians will use whatever delusions that will forward their own.

The tiny group of Hassidic Jews are courted when necessary but they are of no large significance. Kind of like the Amish. Their objections are those of a small minority, their exception highlights the rule of the majority. The rule is Erets Israel, the boundaries some think of as the land given to them by God.

Alan Pogue

It was given to them by God or so they say.

Charlie Loving

Chomsky is this time out to lunch.

The “plight” of the Palestinians is something that it is not in the interests of Arab governments to resolve and they have done nothing to resolve it.

There were any number of schemes on the table during Clinton’s last minute rush to cut a deal that would have resulted in an economically viable Palestinian state. Such a state is in Israel’s best interests and I expect even the right in Israel understands that on some level.

I’m not sure where I would have stood on the creation of the Israeli state, but I probably would have been for it in light of the then-recent horrors in Europe. What an opportunity–the Jews choose to ghettoize themselves in apparently worthless desert!

However that should have gone, it’s now a fait accompli that I can see little point in trying to undo.

From the point of view of my ancestors, that would be exactly like the United States and Canada.

I realize that our post-modern condition is allegedly that “civilization” and “barbarism” represent nothing but contested discourses overlying power relationship.

Fuck postmodernist.

If you dress up teens in C4 and send them into pizza parlors to detonate, you are a barbarian. Your “reasons” for doing so are entirely irrelevant. There is no politics that justifies the cultivation of suicide in pursuit of mass murder of non-combatants.

This is fundamental. Even Bush, twisted idiot that he is, grasps this truth and tries to trade on it politically. Why we let him escapes me.

Steve Russell

— Chomsky is this time out to lunch. —

Where is he going for lunch? Can I join him?

— If you dress up teens in C4 and send them into pizza parlors to detonate, you are a barbarian. Your “reasons” for doing so are entirely irrelevant. There is no politics that justifies the cultivation of suicide in pursuit of mass murder of non-combatants. —

If you dress up 25 year olds in F16s and attack helicopters and have them bomb apartment complexes you are a “barbarian”. Your “reasons” for doing so are entirely specious unless you are totally convinced of your inherent superior being and also convinced of the lack of humanity in your target group. Then your logic is fine but you premises are still bad. There is a politics that justifies the cultivation of a rational for genocide. It has been been driving much of recorded history. Those in power in Israel at the moment are the same as those who were in power in Germany in the 30s and 40s. The same types are in power now in Washington D.C., Moscow, and Beijing.

Theodor Herzl, the Father of Zionism, was very plain spoken. He said, in speaking for the whole group(“The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl”, Rafael Patai edition), that the aim of the Israeli state was to rid the entire area of Arabs. Those who are in charge of Israeli politics wish for only a one state solution. All other talk was/is camouflage. I have been from Haifa to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron and Ramalah. I have seen Palestinian homes demolished, passive rain collectors destroyed, roads destroyed, cars run over by Israeli tanks, olive orchards destroyed, Israeli highways run through Palestinian vineyards, roads built by USAID in Hebron that only Israelis could travel on, the Israeli condo complexes that are called “settlements” within Palestinian land, and the Klu Klux Klan-like settlers themselves. I have seen a generation of young educated Palestinians languish (HOWL, Alan Ginsburg), without any hope of using their education, within the Bantustans created by the Israeli government with U.S. support. I am only surprised that as few Palestinians have blown themselves up as have done so up to this point. If the Palestinian military had been funded by the U.S. to the same level as the Israeli military then there would be no desire for C4 vests.

There is no country of Palestine. Being a Palestinian is only good for being discriminated against. The Israeli right have seen to this as part of the essential plan to drive them out, as Herzl explicitly stated in his diaries and elsewhere. There was never any plan for a viable Palestinian state. For there to be one Israel would have to repudiate Zionism. Zionism is racism. Being Jewish is not being a Zionist but the Zionists have done a tremendous PR job. There are many shades of Zionism so don’t think every Zionist is a “Sharon” or a “Natanyatu” or “Olmert” but no matter how nice a Zionist is they must cling to some degree of the racial purity syndrome/delusion.

There was a viable Israeli left in the beginning but it was undone by the Capitalist Zionists. A good account of this is in “Zion & State” by Mitchell Cohen, 1992, Columbia University Press.

The essence is the racial, cultural purity thing used as an ideological force to be manipulated by the hollow greed heads. The hollow greed heads always fight to the top because they fail to comprehend any other reason for being. Also the constant striving for power is a distraction from contemplating their own mortality. They wish to think of themselves as indispensable, those benighted bastards.

Nation states are nonsense so It is always good to be explicit when using the word “we”. Check out this for a fine analysis of American media coverage of the Palestine/Israel conflict. Lets you know how and why “we” let Bush portray the conflict the way he does. The entire
corporate media complex is at his disposal on this issue.

Web site

Norman has made a career of debunking Zionist nut cases like Alan Dershowitz. Norman covers many of the misconceptions put forward by Steve as “truths”. Norm was in Austin a few months ago but I’m sure he didn’t get an op-ed in the Statesman or an invite to the Dell Jewish Center.

And, there are many Israeli, Palestinian and Palestinian/Israeli peace groups. They get zero coverage here in the U.S.. They are mentioned only to be disparaged. You may simply Google “Palestine Israel Peace” for a long list of sane people working for peace in the area but being ignored by “our” media. The forces of the military-industrial / corpmedia-theological complex tend to drown out all others. Propaganda works.

Alan the Pogue

What page or pages in the diaries of Theodore Herzl are you referring to?

The 5 volumes of his diaries are in the UT main library.

I want to check this out.

Thanks in advance.

Mike Eisenstadt

Volume 1 of Patai’s edition, but I don’t have it in front of me. There are many editions. The one by Marvin Lowenthal is so highly edited as to be useless. The original was in 16 handwritten copy books, 1895 to 1904.

Here is the quote:

“We shall try to spirit away the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country. …expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

Part of Herzl’s genius was to realize that the European/Russian Jews could not simply buy up the land underneath the feet of the Palestinians, mostly from absentee landlords, because the land prices would go up and the Palestinians would catch on and revolt, which they did. Herzl saw that he needed a political solution. He needed some powerful countries to simply give the land to the Zionists. This would take a lot of money and careful lobbying. Herzl didn’t live to see the completion of his plan but it was his plan that prevailed.

Jordan is a transit country, completely beholden to the U.S.. Egyptian politicians are also bought off, ditto for Saudi Arabian royalty. But they can’t stand by every U.S./Israeli abuse of Arabs and stay in power so they have have to make a few statements for moderation of the destruction. There is one’s bank account and then there is public opinion. One wants to be able to live to spend the money.

Then there is China making better deals.

There is permanent narrow self interest and no permanent allies. People who love power are dealing with others who only love power so there is the realpolitik, Henry Kissinger style. Nation states have no real meaning here. No morality , of course, no greater good, no long term good. There is only the adrenalin rush of being in power now, infantilism powered by lust for power and a high enough I.Q. gives you most of today’s “leaders”. Living in the absolute moment in the absolute negative.

Alan Pogue

It began innocently enough when David Hamilton posted an article titled, “Hatred of the US is Now Universal: Osama Has Won” by Brian Cloughley (it can be found here). The conversation is pretty clearly not yet over, so these postings will go on for some days to come.

Richard J.

David has good taste, but this piece too seems unable to engage the horrors of the Middle East in a principled way.

It is, essentially, an argument for moral equivalence between dropping bombs that kill children as an unintended but foreseeable result and training children to strap on explosives and blow themselves to smithereens.

The public won’t buy it and in this the public is smarter than the intelligencia.

The reason nobody gives a rat’s ass that Israel has nukes is that we know Israel has had nukes for a long time without using or threatening to use them. We trust Israel not to turn nuclear technology over to non-state actors for the purpose of killing non-combatants on purpose, aka terrorism.

Yes, Israel was born in terrorism.

Yes, Israel’s “democracy” is such only for Jews.

Yes, Israel’s attack on the Lebanese infrastructure is indefensible but Bush blindly defends it.

But accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing by murder” in Gaza?

Israel withdrew from Gaza unilaterally. It has no more interest in occupying Gaza than in occupying Southern Lebanon.

The ethnic cleansing Israel was interested in was complete by 1950.

If this guy wants to argue that the prime Israeli sin is the fact that the state of Israel exists, he should do so out front rather than sleaze along by implication.

The US under Bush has given up any pretense of being an honest broker. This is, folks, a case where if you are not on board with the necessity to destroy the state of Israel then there really is a big BIG difference between Repugs and Dems. Both Carter and Clinton devoted time and energy and twisting Israeli arms to making peace in the Middle East. Bush ridiculed Clinton’s efforts and engaged in no efforts of his own. Now, his idea of policy is whatever the current government in Israel wants. In that sense, yes, Osama has won. He has alleged that the US and Israel are the same and Bush has made it so.

Steve Russell

Steve,
OK, it might not have been my greatest choice. But it got you to write, which ought to count for something.

Allow me to argue against one statement you make, that “The ethnic cleansing Israel was interested in was complete by 1950.”

My reading says this is an on-going process and that is what I see being attempted in southern Lebanon. For example, the following is a quote from Chomsky’s latest, “Failed States”, p.192-3.

“The centerpiece of the Sharon-Bush programs in the occupied territories in 2005 was presented as a ‘disengagement plan’ offering new hopes for peace, but that is highly misleading. It is true that sane US-Israeli rejectionists wanted Israel’s illegal settlements removed from Gaza, which has been turned into a disaster area under occupation, with a few thousand Jewish settlers, protected by a substantial part of the Israeli army, taking much of the land and scarce resources. Far more reasonable for US-Israeli goals is to leave Gaza as ‘the largest and most overcrowded prison in the world’, in which over a million Palestinians can rot, largely cut off from contact with the outside by land and sea, and with few means of sustenance.(50)

“That the Gaza pullout was in reality an expansion plan was hardly concealed. As the plan was made public, Finance Minister Shaul Mofaz ‘met to discuss another matter: bolstering West Bank settlement blocs that are slated to be annexed to Israel in a final agreement.’ Sharon also approved 550 new apartments in Ma’aleh Adumim, informing the ministers that there is no ‘political problem’ despite assurances (with a wink) from Condeleezza Rice. Elliott Abrams, Bush’s Middle East advisor, let Israelis understand that the US was concerned about the ‘media blitz’ – but not about the projects themselves, which may therefore proceed in accord with he principle of ‘building quietly’.”

I see this as one contemporary example (among many) of decades of Zionist encroachment on Palestinian land designed to ultimately divide the West Bank, leaving three separate, economically unviable “bantustans” for the Palestinians.

David Hamilton

This applies not only to this discussion about Israeli tactics and motives, but also to the previous, brief thread titled “www.debka.com gets its scoops from inside the IDF.”

It seems relatively clear, even from some MSM reporting, that Israel has some peculiar rules of engagement. But it seems equally clear that Hezbollah is not all fair play either.

I’m with Steve – since 2000, the US has disengaged from diplomacy. Vinegar instead of honey will ruin the wine.

Richard Jehn

ISRAEL AND JERUSALEM FACTS
1. ISRAEL BECAME A STATE IN 1312 B.C., TWO MILLENNIA BEFORE ISLAM;

2. ARAB REFUGEES FROM ISRAEL BEGAN CALLING THEMSELVES “PALESTINIANS” IN 1967, TWO DECADES AFTER (MODERN) ISRAELI STATEHOOD;

3. AFTER CONQUERING THE LAND IN 1272 B.C., JEWS RULED IT FOR A THOUSAND YEARS AND MAINTAINED A CONTINUOUS PRESENCE THERE FOR 3,300 YEARS;

4. THE ONLY ARAB RULE FOLLOWING CONQUEST IN 633 B.C. LASTED JUST 22 YEARS;

5. FOR OVER 3,300 YEARS, JERUSALEM WAS THE JEWISH CAPITAL. IT WAS NEVER THE CAPITAL OF ANY ARAB OR MUSLIM ENTITY. EVEN UNDER JORDANIAN RULE, (EAST) JERUSALEM WAS NOT MADE THE CAPITAL, AND NO ARAB LEADER CAME TO VISIT IT;

6. JERUSALEM IS MENTIONED OVER 700 TIMES IN THE BIBLE, BUT NOT ONCE IS IT MENTIONED IN THE QUR’AN;

7. KING DAVID FOUNDED JERUSALEM; MOHAMMED NEVER SET FOOT IN IT;

8. JEWS PRAY FACING JERUSALEM; MUSLIMS FACE MECCA. IF THEY ARE BETWEEN THE TWO CITIES, MUSLIMS PRAY FACING MECCA, WITH THEIR BACKS TO JERUSALEM;

9. IN 1948, ARAB LEADERS URGED THEIR PEOPLE TO LEAVE, PROMISING TO CLEANSE THE LAND OF JEWISH PRESENCE. 68% OF THEM FLED WITHOUT EVER SETTING EYES ON AN ISRAELI SOLDIER;

10. VIRTUALLY THE ENTIRE JEWISH POPULATION OF MUSLIM COUNTRIES HAD TO FLEE AS THE RESULT OF VIOLENCE AND POGROMS;

11. SOME 630,000 ARABS LEFT ISRAEL IN 1948, WHILE CLOSE TO A MILLION JEWS WERE FORCED TO LEAVE THE MUSLIM COUNTRIES;

12. IN SPITE OF THE VAST TERRITORIES AT THEIR DISPOSAL, ARAB REFUGESS WERE DELIBERATELY PREVENTED FROM ASSIMILATING INTO THEIR HOST COUNTRIES. OF 100 MILLION REFUGEES FOLLOWING WORLD WAR 2, THEY ARE THE ONLY GROUP TO HAVE NEVER INTEGRATED WITH THEIR CORELIGIONISTS. MOST OF THE JEWISH REFUGEES FROM EUROPE AND ARAB LANDS WERE SETTLED IN ISRAEL, A COUNTRY NO LARGER THAN NEW JERSEY;

13. THERE ARE 22 MUSLIM COUNTRIES, NOT COUNTING PALESTINE. THERE IS ONLY ONE JEWISH STATE. ARABS STARTED ALL FIVE WARS AGAINST ISRAEL, AND LOST EVERY ONE OF THEM;

14. FATAH AND HAMAS CONSTITUTIONS STILL CALL FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL. ISRAEL CEDED MOST OF THE WEST BANK AND ALL OF GAZA TO THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY, AND EVEN PROVIDED IT WITH ARMS;

15. DURING THE JORDANIAN OCCUPATION, JEWISH HOLY SITES WERE VANDALIZED AND WERE OFF LIMITS TO JEWS. UNDER ISRAELI RULE, ALL MUSLIM AND CHRISTIAN HOLY SITES ARE ACCESSIBLE TO ALL FAITHS;

16. OUT OF 175 UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTIONS UP TO 1990, 97 WERE AGAINST ISRAEL; OUT OF 690 GENERAL ASSEMBLY RESOLUTIONS, 429 WERE AGAINST ISRAEL;

18. THE U.N. WAS SILENT WHEN THE JORDANIANS DESTROYED 58 SYNAGOGUES IN THE OLD CITY OF JERUSALEM. IT REMAINED SILENT WHILE JORDAN SYSTEMATICALLY DESECRATED THE ANCIENT JEWISH CEMETERY ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, AND IT REMAINED SILENT WHEN JORDAN ENFORCED APARTHEID LAWS PREVENTING JEWS FROM ACCESSING THE TEMPLE MOUNT AND WESTERN WALL.

THESE ARE TRYING TIMES. WE MUST ASK OURSELVES WHAT WE SHOULD BE DOING, AND WHAT WE WILL TELL OUR GRANDCHILDREN ABOUT OUR

ACTIONS DURING THIS CRISIS, WHEN WE HAD THE CHANCE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

Posted by Charlie Loving

Some of the numbered points Charlie just forwarded are misleading although not outright falsehoods. Most so far as I have researched them (as I have done continuously since November 1947) are absolutely true.

9 is the honest guess that only 32% of Arabs in the Israeli part of the partition were forced to leave by the Israelis. This fact has only recently been examined by Israeli historians in published books. Ben Gurion did in fact order the Israeli army to run off as many as possible (but not kill them as Arabs would do in this circumstance) in the course of the war which the Israelis call the war of independance and the Arabs call the Naqba (the catastrophe). In light of the corresponding fact that if the Israelis lost this war, all of them would die or be forced to leave, Ben Gurion acted on the justification of *raison d’etat*. Looking back at this from 58 years later IMO Ben Gurion was justified in so doing. As Arnold would say Ben Gurion was not a girly-man.

10 and 11 need to be precised. 1 million Arab Jews left of their own free will from Iraq, Iran, Morocco. As regards Yemen, not. There apparently the Mossad created some incidents and stampeded the Yemeni Jews to get on DC-3s and fly away. These were humble craftsmen for the most part and were DDTed on arrival and put in tents. Likewise the Moroccan jews were shuffled off to “development towns” in less interesting parts of the country and their resentment lasts to this day.

Mike Eisenstadt

End This Tragedy Now
Israel Must Be Made to Respect International Law

By Fouad Siniora
Wednesday, August 9, 2006; Page A17

BEIRUT

A military solution to Israel’s savage war on Lebanon and the Lebanese people is both morally unacceptable and totally unrealistic. We in Lebanon call upon the international community and citizens everywhere to support my country’s sovereignty and end this folly now. We also insist that Israel be made to respect international humanitarian law, including the provisions of the Geneva Conventions, which it has repeatedly and willfully violated.

This is the first paragraph of Mr. Siniora’s recent statement. Mr. Siniora is Prime Minister of Lebanon. His statement is 2 Web pages long (top page of nytimes.com). Hezbollah is not even mentioned once.

As the anti-Straussians at the University of Chicago used to ask, “Why is Allen Bloom the most important person in Plato’s Republic? Because he’s not even mentioned once.” Bob Charles told me that one.

Mike Eisenstadt

The Real Estate War by Gideon Levy
The Junkies of War By Uri Avnery
Another IDF Refusenik Jailed By Dimi Reider
The Tortured Language of War: Whitewashing Atrocities By Shamai Leibowitz

David Hamilton

The articles published in Haaretz from the Left or Peace Now viewpoint used to be convincing. Now no longer.

It may be noted that Ben Gurion, right after the 1967 Six Day war, he then in retirement and out of the government, recommended that the captured areas (the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and the Sinai) be returned forthwith. His advice alas was not followedThe Peace Now position (as you read in the articles David H. forwarded) was that if the land expropriated in the West Bank and the Golan Heights were returned, an agreement could be reached that would leave Israel at peace. I personally had long held this view.

That viewpoint is no longer tenable due to the rise of Islamist fundamentalism. Their bottom line unnegotiable position is that all lands once under Islamic rule must be returned to Islamic rule (that includes Spain by the way). Please note: it isn’t what the jews do, it is that the jews rule over what the jews call Israel (=most of historical Palestine). That this is indeed their view is always claimed by Islamic fundamentalist spokesmen (Nasbullah for example) and proved in hard fact by the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza last summer which was followed by rocket attacks (home made rockets these) on Sderot near the border with Gaza by the jihadists which continue to this day.

Olmert and Amir Peretz may be indeed by clueless but that does not mean that Israel does not face an existential threat to its continued existence. The Islamicist threat is not going away no matter what the government of Israel might do to propreciate them. Unfortunately the arguments from the few remaining Peace Activists are at this point mere wishful thinking. These were convincing arguments once but now no longer in the face of the new Islamic fundamentalism. It is impossible to believe that Nasrullah and the rest of fundamentalist Islam will ever agree to anything short of extirpating the “usurping Zionist entity” as N. so charmingly puts it.

Mike Eisenstadt

(Note: I acknowledge being an unrepentant Chomskyista. DH)

ZNet Commentary
Apocalypse Near August 08, 2006
By Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky interviewed by Merav Yudilovitch

Last week, a group of renowned intellectuals published an open letter blaming Israel for escalating the conflict in the Middle East. The letter, which mainly referred to the alignment of forces between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, caused a lot of anger among Ynet and Ynetnews readers, particularly due to its claim that the Israeli policy’s political aim is to eliminate the Palestinian nation.

The letter was formulated by art critic and author John Berger and among its signatories were Nobel Prize winner, playwright Harold Pinter, linguist and theoretician Noam Chomsly, Nobel Prize laureate José Saramago, Booker Prize laureate Arundhati Roy, American author Russell Banks, author and playwright Gore Vidal, and historian Howard Zinn.

Prof. Chomsky, you claimed that the provocation and counter-provocation all serve as a distraction from the real issue. What does it mean?

“I assume you are referring to John Berger’s letter (which I signed, among others). The “real issue” that is being ignored is the systematic destruction of any prospects for a viable Palestinian existence as Israel annexes valuable land and major resources, leaving the shrinking territories assigned to Palestinians as unviable cantons, largely separated from one another and from whatever little bit of Jerusalem is to be left to Palestinians, and completely imprisoned as Israel takes over the Jordan valley.

“This program of realignment cynically disguised as “withdrawal,” is of course completely illegal, in violation of Security Council resolutions and the unanimous decision of the World Court (including the dissenting statement of US Justice Buergenthal). If it is implemented as planned, it spells the end of the very broad international consensus on a two-state settlement that the US and Israel have unilaterally blocked for 30 years – matters that are so well documented that I do not have to review them here.

“To turn to your specific question, even a casual look at the Western press reveals that the crucial developments in the occupied territories are marginalized even more by the war in Lebanon. The ongoing destruction in Gaza – which was rarely seriously reported in the first place – has largely faded into the background, and the systematic takeover of the West Bank has virtually disappeared.

“However, I would not go as far as the implication in your question that this was a purpose of the war, though it clearly is the effect. We should recall that Gaza and the West Bank are recognized to be a unit, so that if resistance to Israel’s destructive and illegal programs is legitimate within the West Bank (and it would be interesting to see a rational argument to the contrary), then it is legitimate in Gaza as well.”

You claim that the world media refuses to link between what’s going on in the occupied territories and in Lebanon?

“Yes, but that is the least of the charges that should be leveled against the world media, and the intellectual communities generally. One of many far more severe charges is brought up in the opening paragraph of the Berger letter.

“Recall the facts. On June 25, Cpl. Gilad Shalit was captured, eliciting huge cries of outrage worldwide, continuing daily at a high pitch, and a sharp escalation in Israeli attacks in Gaza, supported on the grounds that capture of a soldier is a grave crime for which the population must be punished.

One day before, on June 24, Israeli forces kidnapped two Gaza civilians, Osama and Mustafa Muamar, by any standards a far more severe crime than capture of a soldier. The Muamar kidnappings were certainly known to the major world media. They were reported at once in the English-language Israeli press, basically IDF handouts. And there were a few brief, scattered and dismissive reports in several newspapers around the US.

Very revealingly, there was no comment, no follow-up, and no call for military or terrorist attacks against Israel. A Google search will quickly reveal the relative significance in the West of the kidnapping of civilians by the IDF and the capture of an Israeli soldier a day later.

“The paired events, a day apart, demonstrate with harsh clarity that the show of outrage over the Shalit kidnapping was cynical fraud. They reveal that by Western moral standards, kidnapping of civilians is just fine if it is done by “our side,” but capture of a soldier on “our side” a day later is a despicable crime that requires severe punishment of the population.

“As Gideon Levy accurately wrote in Ha’aretz, the IDF kidnapping of civilians the day before the capture of Cpl. Shalit strips away any “legitimate basis for the IDF’s operation,” and, we may add, any legitimate basis for support for these operations.

The same elementary moral principles carry over to the July 12 kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers near the Lebanon border, heightened, in this case, by the regular Israeli practice for many years of abducting Lebanese and holding many as hostages for long periods.

Truly disgraceful

“Over the many years in which Israel carried out these practices regularly, even kidnapping on the high seas, no one ever argued that these crimes justified bombing and shelling of Israel, invasion and destruction of much of the country, or terrorist actions within it. The conclusions are stark, clear, and entirely unambiguous – hence suppressed.

“All of this is, obviously, of extraordinary importance in the present case, particularly given the dramatic timing. That is, I suppose, why the major media chose to avoid the crucial facts, apart from a very few scattered and dismissive phrases, revealing that they consider kidnapping a matter of no significance when carried by US-supported Israeli forces.

“Apologists for state crimes claim that the kidnapping of the Gaza civilians is justified by IDF claims that they are ‘Hamas militants’ or were planning crimes. By their logic, they should therefore be lauding the capture of Gilad Shalit, a soldier in an army that was shelling and bombing Gaza. These performances are truly disgraceful.”

You are talking first and foremost about acknowledging the Palestinian nation, but will it solve the “Iranian threat”? Will it push Hizbullah from the Israeli border?

“Virtually all informed observers agree that a fair and equitable resolution of the plight of the Palestinians would considerably weaken the anger and hatred of Israel and the US in the Arab and Muslim worlds – and far beyond, as international polls reveal. Such an agreement is surely within reach, if the US and Israel depart from their long-standing rejectionism.

“On Iran and Hizbullah, there is, of course, much more to say, and I can only mention a few central points here.

“Let us begin with Iran. In 2003, Iran offered to negotiate all outstanding issues with the US, including nuclear issues and a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The offer was made by the moderate Khatami government, with the support of the hard-line “supreme leader” Ayatollah Khamenei. The Bush administration response was to censure the Swiss
diplomat who brought the offer.

“In June 2006, Ayatollah Khamenei issued an official declaration stating that Iran agrees with the Arab countries on the issue of Palestine, meaning that it accepts the 2002 Arab League call for full normalization of relations with Israel in a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus. The timing suggests that this might have been a reprimand to his subordinate Ahmadenijad, whose inflammatory statements are given wide publicity in the West, unlike the far more important declaration by his superior Khamenei.

“Of course, the PLO has officially backed a two-state solution for many years, and backed the 2002 Arab League proposal. Hamas has also indicated its willingness to negotiate a two-state settlement, as is surely well-known in Israel. Kharazzi is reported to be the author of the 2003 proposal of Khatami and Khamanei.

“The US and Israel do not want to hear any of this. They also do not want to hear that Iran appears to be the only country to have accepted the proposal by IAEA director Mohammed ElBaradei that all weapons-usable fissile materials be placed under international control, a step towards a verifiable Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty.

“ElBaradei’s proposal, if implemented, would not only end the Iranian nuclear crisis but would also deal with a vastly more serious crisis: The growing threat of nuclear war, which leads prominent strategic analysts to warn of ‘apocalypse soon’ (Robert McNamara) if policies continue on their current course.

“The US strongly opposes a verifiable FMCT, but over US objections, the treaty came to a vote at the United Nations, where it passed 147-1, with two abstentions: Israel, which cannot oppose its patron, and more interestingly, Blair’s Britain, which retains a degree of sovereignty. The British ambassador stated that Britain supports the treaty, but it “divides the international community”. These again are matters that are virtually suppressed outside of specialist circles, and are matters of literal survival of the species, extending far beyond Iran.

“It is commonly said that the ‘international community’ has called on Iran to abandon its legal right to enrich uranium. That is true, if we define the “international community” as Washington and whoever happens to go along with it. It is surely not true of the world. The non-aligned countries have forcefully endorsed Iran’s “inalienable right” to enrich uranium. And, rather remarkably, in Turkey, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, a majority of the population favor accepting a nuclear-armed Iran over any American military action, international polls reveal.

“The non-aligned countries also called for a nuclear-free Middle East, a longstanding demand of the authentic international community, again blocked by the US and Israel. It should be recognized that the threat of Israeli nuclear weapons is taken very seriously in the world.

“As explained by the former Commander-in-Chief of the US Strategic Command, General Lee Butler, “it is dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East, one nation has armed itself, ostensibly, with stockpiles of nuclear weapons, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, and that inspires other nations to do so.” Israel is doing itself no favors if it ignores these concerns.

“It is also of some interest that when Iran was ruled by the tyrant installed by a US-UK military coup, the United States – including Rumsfeld, Cheney, Kissinger, Wolfowitz and others – strongly supported the Iranian nuclear programs they now condemn and helped provide Iran with the means to pursue them. These facts are surely not lost on the Iranians, just as they have not forgotten the very strong support of the US and its allies for Saddam Hussein during his murderous aggression, including help in developing the chemical weapons that killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians.

Peaceful means

“There is a great deal more to say, but it appears that the “Iranian threat” to which you refer can be approached by peaceful means, if the US and Israel would agree. We cannot know whether the Iranian proposals are serious, unless they are explored. The US-Israel refusal to explore them, and the silence of the US (and, to my knowledge, European) media, suggests that the governments fear that they may be serious.

“I should add that to the outside world, it sounds a bit odd, to put it mildly, for the US and Israel to be warning of the “Iranian threat” when they and they alone are issuing threats to launch an attack, threats that are immediate and credible, and in serious violation of international law, and are preparing very openly for such an attack. Whatever one thinks of Iran, no such charge can be made in their case. It is also apparent to the world, if not to the US and Israel, that Iran has not invaded any other countries, something that the US and Israel do regularly.

“On Hizbullah too, there are hard and serious questions. As well-known, Hizbullah was formed in reaction to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and its harsh and brutal occupation in violation of Security Council orders. It won considerable prestige by playing the leading role in driving out the aggressors.

“The 1982 invasion was carried out after a year in which Israel regularly bombed Lebanon, trying desperately to elicit some PLO violation of the 1981 truce, and when it failed, attacked anyway, on the ludicrous pretext that Ambassador Argov had been wounded (by Abu Nidal, who was at war with the PLO). The invasion was clearly intended, as virtually conceded, to end the embarrassing PLO initiatives for negotiation, a “veritable catastrophe” for Israel as Yehoshua Porat pointed out.

Shameful pretexts

“It was, as described at the time, a “war for the West Bank.” The later invasions also had shameful pretexts. In 1993, Hizbullah had violated “the rules of the game,” Yitzhak Rabin announced: these Israeli rules permitted Israel to carry out terrorist attacks north of its illegally-held “security zone,” but did not permit retaliation within Israel. Peres’s 1996 invasion had similar pretexts. It is convenient to forget all of this, or to concoct tales about shelling of the Galilee in 1981, but it is not an attractive practice, nor a wise one.

“The problem of Hezbollah’s arms is quite serious, no doubt. Resolution 1559 calls for disarming of all Lebanese militias, but Lebanon has not enacted that provision. Sunni Prime Minister Fuad Siniora describes Hizbullah’s military wing as “resistance rather than as a militia, and thus exempt from” Resolution 1559.

“A National Dialogue in June 2006 failed to resolve the problem. Its main purpose was to formulate a “national defense strategy” (vis-Ã -vis Israel), but it remained deadlocked over Hizbullah’s call for “a defense strategy that allowed the Islamic Resistance to keep its weapons as a deterrent to possible Israeli aggression,” in the absence of any credible alternative. The US could, if it chose, provide a credible guarantee against an invasion by its client state, but that would require a sharp change in long-standing policy.

“In the background are crucial facts emphasized by several veteran Middle East correspondents. Rami Khouri, now an editor of Lebanon’s Daily Star, writes that “the Lebanese and Palestinians have responded to Israel’s persistent and increasingly savage attacks against entire civilian populations by creating parallel or alternative leaderships that can protect them and deliver essential services.”

You are not referring in your letter to the Israeli casualties. Is there differentiation in your opinion between Israeli civic casualties of war and Lebanese or Palestinian casualties?

“That is not accurate. John Berger’s letter is very explicit about making no distinction between Israeli and other casualties. As his letter states: “Both categories of missile rip bodies apart horribly – who but field commanders can forget this for a moment.”

“You claimed that the world is cooperating with the Israeli invasion to Lebanon and is not interfering in the events Gaza and Jenin. What purpose does this silence serve?

“The great majority of the world can do nothing but protest, though it is fully expected that the intense anger and resentment caused by US-Israeli violence will – as in the past – prove to be a gift for the most extremist and violent elements, mobilizing new recruits to their cause.

“The US-backed Arab tyrannies did condemn Hizbullah, but are being forced to back down out of fear of their own populations. Even King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Washington’s most loyal (and most important) ally, was compelled to say that “If the peace option is rejected due to the Israeli arrogance, then only the war option remains, and no one knows the repercussions befalling the region, including wars and conflict that will spare no one, including those whose military power is now tempting them to play with fire.”

“As for Europe, it is unwilling to take a stand against the US administration, which has made it clear that it supports the destruction of Palestine and Israeli violence. With regard to Palestine, while Bush’s stand is extreme, it has its roots in earlier policies. The week in Taba in January 2001 is the only real break in US rejectionism in 30 years.

“The US also strongly supported earlier Israeli invasions of Lebanon, though in 1982 and 1996, it compelled Israel to terminate its aggression when atrocities were reaching a point that harmed US interests.

“Unfortunately, one can generalize a comment of Uri Avnery’s about Dan Halutz, who “views the world below through a bombsight.” Much the same is true of Rumsfeld-Cheney-Rice, and other top Bush administration planners, despite occasional soothing rhetoric. As history reveals, that view of the world is not uncommon among those who hold a virtual monopoly of the means of violence, with consequences that we need not review.”

What is the next chapter in this middle-eastern conflict as you see it?

“I do not know of anyone foolhardy enough to predict. The US and Israel are stirring up popular forces that are very ominous, and which will only gain in power and become more extremist if the US and Israel persist in demolishing any hope of realization of Palestinian national rights, and destroying Lebanon. It should also be recognized that Washington’s primary concern, as in the past, is not Israel and Lebanon, but the vast energy resources of the Middle East, recognized 60 years ago to be a “stupendous source of strategic power” and “one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”

“We can expect with confidence that the US will continue to do what it can to control this unparalleled source of strategic power. That may not be easy. The remarkable incompetence of Bush planners has created a catastrophe in Iraq, for their own interests as well. They are even facing the possibility of the ultimate nightmare: a loose Shi’a alliance controlling the world’s major energy supplies, and independent of Washington – or even worse, establishing closer links with the China-based Asian Energy Security Grid and Shanghai Cooperation Council.

“The results could be truly apocalyptic. And even in tiny Lebanon, the leading Lebanese academic scholar of Hizbullah, and a harsh critic of the organization, describes the current conflict in “apocalyptic terms,” warning that possibly “All hell would be let loose” if the outcome of the US-Israel campaign leaves a situation in which “the Shiite community is seething with resentment at Israel, the United States and the government that it perceives as its betrayer.

“It is no secret that in past years, Israel has helped to destroy secular Arab nationalism and to create Hizbullah and Hamas, just as US violence has expedited the rise of extremist Islamic fundamentalism and jihad terror. The reasons are understood. There are constant warnings about it by Western intelligence agencies, and by the leading specialists on these topics.

“One can bury one’s head in the sand and take comfort in a “wall-to-wall consensus” that what we do is “just and moral” (Maoz), ignoring the lessons of recent history, or simple rationality. Or one can face the facts, and approach dilemmas which are very serious by peaceful means. They are available. Their success can never be guaranteed. But we can be reasonably confident that viewing the world through a bombsight will bring further misery and suffering, perhaps even ‘apocalypse soon.'”

Posted by David Hamilton

While we’re looking to the Mideast, there’s a new uprising going on down South, with so far, a few disappearances, one assasination, and lots of excited and so far, successful folks taking over parts of the government.

I’ve been getting news via someone I don’t know who’s sent out info from there for quite a while. He recommends The OSAG website is at

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/oaxacastudyactiongroup/

To subscribe write to

oaxacastudyactiongroup-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

I subscribed today, and will monitor it, but if you want your own, then you can also do that. I hesitate to forward things to you.

Another recommended source of info (which may duplicate the OSAG) www.narconews.com

This column comes in the immediate aftermath of the news that Britain and the U.S. just escaped a major terrorist scrape. Therefore, it is necessary to qualify it with “if things are as they currently appear.” When the Brits shot down a man for nothing more than being scared of pistol-waving loons, they showed themselves capable of The Big Lie. And of course The Big Lie by the Bush Administration put us in the middle of the (allegedly nonexistent) Iraqi civil war. So relying on first impressions from these governments is always chancy.

While no airplanes have been blown out of the sky, the convenience of air travel has taken another major hit, as have airline stocks. Such is the terror value of close calls. In my life experience, the convenience of air travel is fairly new, so I have a long term view.

I grew up in rural Oklahoma, where travel was Tulsa in one direction and Oklahoma City in the other and the most common method was hitch-hiking, a means of transport that remained a habit for me until it dies of interstate highways and crime paranoia.

Naturally, I traveled by air when in the Air Force, but there was no bureaucracy involved. A superior pointed at which plane and I got on. I remained ignorant of commercial air travel.

When I graduated from UT and became a judge, I started an offensive against domestic violence in the Austin criminal justice system, bringing in the women who had put together one of the first women’s shelters in the country to advise on the many places where the system was failing battered women. When the changes in Austin got media notice, I began to get invitations to speak around the state. These came with plane tickets, and I began to learn the drill of flying.

In the nineties, my wife got a job with Southwest Airlines and one of my daughters got a job with Delta. I had free flying privileges on two airlines, and I became an expert at navigating the “non-rev” (non-revenue=empty seats) universe. There are many tricks to predicting which flights will have empty seats and, of course, when you are non-reving you are not bound by published itineraries and you can get somewhere with splendidly roundabout flights. I wonder how that is done now, when you can no longer just walk up to the gate, flash a pass, and get on? You can’t even get to the gate without a ticket, and flying with no luggage gets you the hairy eyeball.

My wife quit Southwest on September 10, 2001. I consider us lucky the FBI never came to ask about that. On September 11, my daughter who worked for Delta was in Finland. It took her quite a while to get home and she got her corkscrew confiscated, something she carried only for her flight attendant duties. Non-reving on Delta got more complicated, as you had to make a reservation, understanding that if all the seats sold you would not get on. Standing around the airport waiting for an empty seat became pretty impractical, given the bureaucracy.

I’ve come the full circle now. I avoid flying whenever I can. When I can’t, I need a Valium. Not for fear of flying, but for having to silently endure all the indignities that go with flying these days. You don’t dare call the idiots idiots. They will bury you under the jail. Which brings me to the new (as of yesterday) protocols.

Nothing liquid, because the terrorists finally figured out that you can make boom with a chemical reaction and it does not take much boom to depressurize an airplane.

Comment from my mother-in-law: “They took all the expensive stuff and left the cheap stuff!” This from an elderly Republican woman.

Comment from a CNN reporter who does travel news: “I lost $125 worth of stuff.”

Comment from a terrorism consultant: “They are looking for things, not threats.”

The protocol is akin to the assembly line. Students of labor history will recall how production became efficient by breaking the process down into tiny tasks that required little training. It no longer took a craftsman to make a serviceable automobile. Medical protocols are designed to avoid obvious mistakes even if they sometimes result in wasted motion. On my last visit to the Veteran’s Administration Clinic, I was asked whether I had sexual relationships with other service members when I was on active duty and whether any of those relationships were traumatic? “I was seventeen years old. What do you think?”

The terrorism protocols at airports are designed to be used by minimally educated people, who are all Homeland Insecurity will get for what they are paying. To avoid claims of racial profiling, the people on the ground have little discretion and elderly Republican women lose their cosmetics. To avoid public condemnation when the next strike hits, protocols get redesigned to take in what is publicly known about prior attempts. Therefore, we get to take off our shoes in honor of Richard Reid.

El Al, the Israeli airline that would be a highly prized terrorism target, takes a more specialized approach. You practically have to have your head shrunk to get on, given the depth of the interview, but once you get on you can cut your meat with a knife. I don’t know which is more surprising—that El Al allows knives or that they still serve food.

The Brits, in addition to banning all liquids in the hope of avoiding the reactants, are also aiming at ignition sources. Therefore, no ipods, cell phones or other electronic devices. In one previous attack, the ignition source was a Casio watch, but I am not informed whether they are banning watches.

The downside to these protocols, besides mass inconvenience to people highly unlikely to pose any threat, is that terrorists can learn over time to game the protocols. Overtly profile Arabs and the next strike will be by non-Arabs. Train the dogs to sniff nitrates and the task becomes to identify non-nitrate explosives.

The safer method is the one El Al uses, but U.S. and British carriers have a lot more flights than El Al. There has been some experimentation with allegedly foolproof identification for frequent flyers, but that has yet to catch on. There is somebody named Steve Russell on the terror watch list, making flying even more of an adventure for me. A quick Google search will demonstrate that there are many Steve Russells inconvenienced by one of us. While my views are anti-government, they are also non-violent and quite public for my entire life. Since I have to fly a couple of times a year and I can demonstrate to anybody with a brain that I pose no terrorism threat, there ought to be some way for me to just get on and off the damn airplane. There isn’t.

I have sworn off flying short of dire necessity. So have many others. Flying is just too much trouble and likely to remain so as long as our government puts the public relations of random stops over the practicality of, for example, screening cargo. The purpose of the protocols is currently not to identify threats but to show the public that the government is on the ball in terms of known threats. Therefore, the terrorists can continue to ratchet up the inconvenience factor at will and harm the airline industry at very little cost. If things are as they currently appear.

Steve Russell

A Greek-Style Menu (29 May 2004)

This was a try at something interesting to celebrate a visit from Mom over the weekend. It turned out very well !!

For timing the meal: (1) prepare the lamb chop marinate to get the process going; (2) start cooking the beans; (3) while the beans cook, prepare the roasted feta dish, cover and refrigerate; (4) have a rest, then finish chopping other vegetables for the salad and set up the baking dish for the roasted tomatoes; (5) complete the menu by preheating the oven to 375° F. and roasting the lamb chops, tomatoes and feta while you mix the bean salad.

A Salad of White Beans and Vegetables

1/2 cup dried cannellini (or white navy) beans, rinsed
2 bay leaves and a teaspoon of oregano
Water

Cover the beans with 2 inches water, add the herbs, and bring to a simmer. The beans will require 2-1/2 to 3 hours to become tender. Ensure the water never entirely evaporates in this process.

1/2 cup fresh Italian parsley, chopped
1/2 a large red onion, finely chopped
1 medium red pepper, chopped
1/4 medium poblano chile, finely chopped
1 tablespoon Coleman’s mustard powder
Juice of 1 to 1-1/2 lemons, strained
4 tablespoons capers
1/2 teaspoon cayenne chile powder
Salt and fresh-ground pepper to taste
Extra virgin olive oil

When the beans are tender, drain them well removing the bay leaves, place in a bowl and add the parsley, red onion, and two chopped peppers. Briefly toss. Emulsify the mustard powder in the lemon juice, then add all remaining ingredients excepting oil. Toss again to mix, then add just enough olive oil for your personal taste, tossing carefully once more. Serve with Kalamata olives and Daktyla on the side.

Marinated, Roasted Lamb Chops and Balsamic Tomatoes

Juice of 1 lemon, strained
1/3 cup olive oil
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon each, dried marjoram and oregano
1/2 tablespoon dried rosemary
2 thick-cut lamb chops

Whisk first 5 ingredients in a bowl large enough to accommodate chops, add chops, cover and refrigerate for 3 to 4 hours. When you’re ready, roast the chops for about 20 to 25 minutes at 375° F. to desired doneness.

2 large, ripe tomatoes, halved
Olive oil
Balsamic vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste

Lightly oil a small baking dish and add the tomatoes, cut side up. Just before you will roast them, drizzle a little balsamic vinegar on them, then season to taste. They should be roasted with the feta and chops for about 20 to 25 minutes at 375° F.

Spicy Roasted Feta

4 to 5 ounce block of feta cheese, sliced 1/4-inch thick
Olive oil to coat baking dish, plus a bit to drizzle
1/4 teaspoon cayenne chile powder
1/2 teaspoon pasilla chile powder
Dried oregano to taste
2 tablespoons fresh Italian parsley, chopped

Coat a small baking dish lightly with oil and lay cheese slices in it, then drizzle a bit more onto the cheese, followed by all the spices and herbs. Bake for 15 or 20 minutes at 375° F. until cheese is just beginning to melt.

Longtime friendships are the most important thing you have that makes your life worthwhile, excepting your Family. Value them as you would your life and the love of your life.

* FF = Foodie Friday

I know it’s Wednesday. We’ll try to get it on schedule for next time. rdj

In the discussion about self-interest you are bogged down by an unproductive methodology. You are looking at self-interest on too atomic a level in trying to find the prime motivations of self-interest at its base. But Mother Theresa’s and Mother Bloor’s transcendance of their core biological self-interest is not THAT uncommon. We are all to act as though imbued with the highest Kantian ethical principles. But that is not an argument to be addressed to the w.p.

Of course if a w.p. challenges us to justify the higher morality, we are up the creek.

Mike Eisenstadt

No one said anyone ever abandons self-interest. Nor has anyone said we should all become altruistic. My contention was simply that self-interest, as opposed to group interest, is a poor principle around which to organize collective action. Sweet Jesus.

I guess I would disagree, though, with your contention that “At the end of the day, basically everything we do is founded in selfishness — no matter that it may be prettily dressed up as moral or ethical.” There’s a trivial sense in which this contention is true. Even if one does something entirely altruistic, like jumping on a live grenade, sacrificing one’s life to save one’s comrades in a platoon for instance, anyone can comment that this is simply self-interested behavior. It reveals a high preference for outcomes that further the goals of the platoon, and is thus self-interested.

The trouble with this is that it’s tautological. One can attribute absolutely ANY act to self-interest on this perspective. The trouble with tautologies, of course, is that they’re vacuous. Because it explains all behaviors, it doesn’t explain any. Consequently, this perspective is entirely unhelpful.

David Pratt-Hamiton should not read the rest of this. Here’s a citation.

Gavan Duffy

You say that some of us don’t know that we’re dealing in nonsense. You cite the below as an example of something that we’d attribute to self-interest, when it is not:

“There’s a trivial sense in which this contention is true. Even if one does something entirely altruistic, like jumping on a live grenade, sacrificing one’s life to save one’s comrades in a platoon for instance, anyone can comment that this is simply self-interested behavior.”

Are you older than me? (I am 59.) On reading your post, I recalled the grenade example, from my childhood in the 50s!

And then I said to myself, “when did that really happen?” I’m not sure that it ever did.

If it did:

1. The soldier threw himself upon a grenade because if he did not not, he, too would have died. He was a hero, which is better than being simply dead. If we’re all going to die unless someone makes a sacrifice, the person with the most concern for his memory, as it’s called, will throw himself upon the grenade.

2. The sacrificing soldier was saving a general or someone more useful to the war effort. Same argument as above.

3. The sacrificing soldier was saving a bunch of cowardly, pot-smoking, women-abusing scoundrels who were a disgrace to the uniform. Now that would be altruism! Jesus did that, the myth says, sacrificed himself for a bunch of rabble, namely us.

Without commenting on the motives of Jesus, I would say that the soldier may have been tired of life, or some such.

I’d also say that he hurt the war effort by destroying admirable human material to save shoddy human material. That’s not to be admired!

In any case, if that soldier existed and is to be taken as a model for us, we should look towards the skies — that’s where Jesus is, no? — or the Muslim world for leadership.

Dick J. Reavis

I said a bit ago that things happen and then there are the stories we make up to explain what happens. No better example of this than in our individual stories about the fate of the new left.

I must say I really appreciated Dick’s description of the fate of what he calls the Leninists — certainly much more than some of the more “theoretical” postings of recent days. It is that kind of reflection coming from Dick and many others on this list that keeps me reading.

Naturally, my “story” of that time — and what has happened since — is a bit different. I left Austin in 1970, after I was purged in the great Erwin purge that wiped out John Silber and Norman what’s his name, the President of UT. My sin was protesting ROTC and getting arrested for it. Couldn’t have me polluting the student body as a teaching assistant any longer. But, truth be told, I was ready to leave. I had become disillusioned with academia and was convinced that there was a “real world” out there that was different.

I didn’t give up on politics — or organization — however. I went on to Houston and Space City News, then off on a Venceremos Brigade expedition to cut sugar cane (got me on a FBI list for four years, an early precursor of what we can expect from the Patriot Act). Then there was the organized antiwar movement that built up to and followed the May Day protests in Washington. I moved to Atlanta, became an editor of the Great Speckled Bird, helped organize the New American Movement (NAM), which later merged with DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), was a founding editor of the national weekly In These Times (in Chicago) and later, after I moved to the DC area, worked with Citizen Action, the multi-state organization that was created by what Dick would call the old “right wing” of the new left.

These were all organized initiatives that worked to mobilize people around the values and vision that motivated us all in the ’60s and ’70s. So to say that organization disappeared with the fall of sds in 1969 isn’t quite accurate. In fact, the organizational legacy of the new left continues to exist all across the country in a multitude of forms. To be sure, it isn’t spouting the rhetoric of armed revolution, but it is working in hundreds of thousands of ways to change the fabric of the world in ways most of us could support. And it continues to have a very real and positive impact.

We may have been naïve to think back then that a mass movement would somehow magically emerge out of our efforts that would somehow fundamentally transform the structure and organization of our society. That clearly didn’t happen. Nor could it, in truth, because we didn’t have any idea of what kind of society we really wanted.

And when we thought we did, I fear it was not the kind of society most of us would want to have today. To me, that was the problem with those that chose the “Leninist” model Dick was talking about — those who went into PLP, RCP, CWP, SWP, etc. I have worked with many who took that path over the years. My little town of Mt. Rainier, a nice, traditionally working class community on the edge of Washington, seems to have attracted representatives from all of them. They are great people. Many continue to do good work. But the Leninist model never offered a vision of a society that could be sold to the people who live and work around them. And that’s why most of them gave up the “struggle” years ago.

But the movement that began in the ’60s continues. I have spent the last two days at a conference of several hundred people working in state legislatures around the county. Mostly elected leaders, they included many veterans of the new left. Men and women, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, gay and straight, from almost every state, who continue to fight to change things. They are part of a very real movement that carries on the kind of battles that motivated the Rag.

We underestimated the nature of the problem in the ’60s. There’s nothing new in that. It seems to be the lot of most revolutions. But the battle is not over when it comes to creating a better, more humane and more just society. I spent part of this afternoon, for example, listening to a panel of people outline how we will turn around the battle over the right for people to marry those they love regardless of sexual orientation. They acknowledged the defeats we have suffered, but they are also learning from them and are figuring out — precisely and strategically — how we can win people to our side by defining the issue in terms that people can understand and by applying our organizational resources effectively.

Last night, another panel talked about how the right wing has changed the nature of the debate in our nation over the last 20 years, deliberately and systematically by out organizing us and by doing a better job of telling their story of reality. We can bemoan that, but that leads nowhere. The challenge is to regain the initiative.

Another panel applied those lessons to question of how we organize people around global issues — the role of the US in the world and things like the war against Iraq. Building on real data and a serious examination of how people process information, it pointed to strategies we need to begin to use when it comes to explaining our positions to people who don’t necessarily agree with us — but could — the “persuadables” in other words.

I know from my personal experience that this kind of discussion is going on across the country in hundreds of thousands of communities, involving tens of thousands of people, working in a multitude of organizational contexts. That’s the legacy of the ’60s.

Doyle Niemann

At the risk of reviving what has been an over-extended discussion of “self-interest,” I have been pondering this question during my daily drive back and forth to work and have concluded that we have missed the real issue. It isn’t whether people are motivated by some kind of “self-interest” or not, but how they go about defining what their “interests” are. How they decide what is important to them.

This is a question amenable to scientific analysis. I certainly claim no unique expertise, but I have spent more than enough professional time in the world of mass communications to know that we know a lot about how other people think and how they organize information.

Market researchers, pollsters, brain researchers and others have spent a lot of time examining these questions. I’m not talking about the kind of research and polling in which you ask people what they think so you can parrot it back to them. Rather, it is the process of getting below the surface to see what is really going on in people’s minds. The folks who do high end market research are way ahead when it comes to this. They do in-depth interviews, continuing polling, long-term focus groups, brain wave and other physical reaction analysis, semantical analysis and a host of other techniques – as well as the analysis of decades of practical, measurable experience – to dig deep. They focus not on what people say they think about things, but how they respond and how they act.

They have found, for example, that people do not treat information the same. There is simply too much of it to process. Rather, each of us has developed a set of conceptual frameworks that we use to interpret and process data. We process and sort it and put it into pre-defined categories we have created (or inherited) so that we can understand it. We organize it in definable and relatively predictable ways.

To borrow some terminology from Landmark Education, I like to think of these frameworks as “stories.” For example, by now, most of us have a “story” about each other and how we all fit together. In the recent debate on this list, for example, we see a posting by Dick and we immediately try to fit it into the “story” we have made up about Dick, who he is (and was) and what he thinks. When it’s from Gavin, we fit it the “story” we have for him. When someone new says something, we place them in relationship to the “story” we have created for the entire discussion – or our “story” about the Rag and the left and the years gone by.

This is way too simplistic, but the point I want to get at is that the framework – the “story” – controls how we interpret what is said and done. We fit facts and information into it. If there is a conflict between the story and the facts, all-too-often the facts are discarded.

Translating this into the political arena, the right is far ahead of us when it comes to understanding this and using it to their advantage. They have spent decades crafting a series of messages – using issues, organizations, actions, strategies, personalities, campaigns and much more – to redefine the way much of the American populace thinks about a whole host of issues.

We, on the left, have been way behind the curve. We’ve tried to fight the battle with facts in a world where facts, alone, don’t count for much. Or we have promoted conceptual frameworks – stories – that haven’t had much popular appeal. Rather than figuring out how to get out point of view across in the conceptual terms that the people we were trying to organize actually use, we have, far too often anyway, insisted that they abandon those conceptual frameworks and adopt ours. It didn’t work. Surprise.

It’s not this bad, of course. But there is no question that to win the critical battles we confront for peace, justice, environmental sanaity, civil liberties and more, we have to get smarter. We have to learn to make our case to people in ways that move them to act with us.

Here’s a good example, borrowed from one of the workshops I attended this weekend. The right has been using gay marriage as a wedge issue. It cost John Kerry Ohio and guaranteed that George Bush would have four more years to screw up the world.

Eleven states passed bad ballot measures this year, including Texas. While we have won victories for equality, they have been few and close. So it is important for us to find ways to change the way people process this issue.

The Human Rights Campaign is in the middle of an intensive effort to figure out what messages work with people when it comes to gay marriage. To do that, they have spent a lot of time using the latest tools in conceptual research. While not complete, the messages they are crafting offer real hope when it comes to redefining the issue and winning rather than losing battles.

A few message suggestions based on their preliminary work:

* Love and commitment deserve protection. Many gay and lesbian couples stay together for years, sticking by each other through good times and bad. They are committed to each other and deserve protection.

* It’s not for me to judge. I may not believe in gay marriage, but that doesn’t mean it should be illegal. It’s not for me to judge other people.

* It’s not the government’s business. If two people want to get married, it’s not the government’s business to tell them they can’t – just like it’s not the government’s business to tell us what to read or think or do in the privacy of our homes.

* This is just another stop towards a more just society. We have made real progress towards ending discrimination and reducing prejudice. Good people support ending discrimination against gays and lesbians because that is the right thing to do if we want to have a just and fair society.

None of these is the magical bullet that will turn everything around, but they do appeal to concepts that reside deeply inside the conceptual frameworks that Americans use to interpret events and activities. As part of a comprehensive strategy that combines protest, legal action, lobbying, and mass communications, they offer hope when it comes to turning the tide of popular opinion.

There are other examples, but, once again, a short message has turned into a long one. Please excuse me for carrying on.

Doyle Niemann

Re: Gavan’s remark: “This is probably because I have no earthly idea what he means by “the scientific method. There’s way too much serendipity in science to speak of any scientific method.”

The scientific method is a method of evidence-based argument, not a method of discovery. Scientists indeed discover things by a serendipitous ad-hoc mixture of work, luck, insight, imagination (even dreams!), and fortunately-correct biases. But these processes produce wrong or useless answers almost all of the time — the trick is how to eliminate the chaff to find the very occasional new truth.

The critical feature is agreement that science consists of systematic observation and explanation. Since observation is central, assertions must include reports of the data on which they are based, including enough description of how the data was acquired to make it feasible for others to look for alternative explanations (and preferably to be able to acquire similar data). You can get your ideas from dreams, but not your data.

The authority structure of science is anarchic, with scientists deciding for themselves who and what to believe. The occasional data fakers, professors who tyrannize their graduate students, or national academies that install an orthodoxy pretty quickly get outrun by events. The result is an accumulation of theories (i.e., systematic explanations) that are better established than anything else in human experience (although still incomplete — perhaps with big holes in some areas).

I see this as quite relevant to political work. It is in our interest to urge people to critically assess the information they are given and to consider alternative explanations. That is, to think for themselves. We should enlist the prestige of science in this subversive task. The long association of socialism and science is no accident.

Note that American right-wingers have correctly identified this danger, and are mounting a broad attack on science. Of course, they have their knives out for artists as well, so we are in good company.

Hunter Ellinger

David Sonenschein asks: “With respect to your discussions about science and method, do y’all have any opinions of Paul Feyerabend’s anarchistic approach (would it be called “chaos theory” these days?)?

I do.

Paul Feyerabend’s critique of Imre Lakatos is on target. Since research programs can be falsified only in long hindsight, defenders of the program under attack can always ask us to wait a little longer. Lakatos thus offers no rational standard for selection among alternative research programs (and thus fails to save falsificationism from Kuhn’s critique).

Feyerabend celebrated this and advanced the view that, since falsificationism has failed, there are no such rational standards. This is unacceptable to lots of people because it implies that science is an irrational pursuit and that the theories and research programs that dominate do so as a consequence of the force of its adherents. Notice also that it denies any scope for reason.

In my view, Feyerabend’s compelling critique of Lakatos in no way implies the absence of any rational standard. Neither Feyerabend nor Lakatos adequately consider the pragmatic criterion of theory choice advanced by Pierre Duhem, W.V.O. Quine, and Hilary Putnam, among others. Invoking Quine’s expression, we accept (always provisionally) those theories as true that maximize the global coherence of our knowledge.

We typically make adjustments at the periphery of our knowledge to accommodate recalcitrant observations. Unless and until excessive disorder accumulates at the periphery, we avoid reformulation of knowledge as we move from the periphery toward the core. We wouldn’t want to reformulate our conception of physical law, for instance, in order to bring order to our knowledge of economics.

Feyerabend’s theory isn’t chaos theory, by the way.

Also, for evidence of sexism’s influenced the academy before the feminist successes of our generation, see the correspondence between Lakatos and Feyerabend, reproduced in Before and Against Method (U of Chicago Press).

Gavan Duffy

OF COURSE there are independent observers, with apologies to my PoMo pals.

Maybe a better term would be “disinterested,” but that doesn’t really capture the idea. Interested enough to squander an opinion but not interested enough to have a dog in the fight.

I am reminded of being interviewed by a Texan reporter about a farm worker strike (because I had just returned from the Rio Grande Valley and the Texan could not send a reporter to the Valley because the travel budget was earmarked for the College World Series–Hook ’em!).

She asked “How many workers are on strike?”

“Well, the union says about 3,000, and the growers say nobody is on strike.”

“You mean one of them is lying?!!?”

LONG PAUSE

“No. They’re both lying.”

And it was downhill from there in terms of getting the situation reported…

Steve Russell

There’s more to come … rdj

— Mariann talks about “getting it back.” We won’t. She’s right. …

I am not so interested in what has failed to work. I face that everyday and become mired in it if I watch the news. I am interested in experiences people have had that worked – that fostered dialogue and change …. What are your thoughts? Alice —

Alice – as usual – asks the key questions about the once-and-future sds/Ragstaff members. Here is my contribution to add to Mariann’s and Dennis’ earlier postings.

First – what happened 30 to 35 years ago? We had an impassioned and educated movement started. Then it disappeared. I remember various discussions with Doyle, with Greg and Carol, with Howard and Barbara, with David, and with others wherein we declared that we were in the struggle for the long-term. Yet most of us settled our strike and went back to work. Few of us who refused to settle tried to maintain a presence in any kind of organizational framework; we went off on our private missions.

And there are plenty of reasons: Cointelpro was effective (you’re not paranoid, if someone is actually trying to get you); the ideological and political struggles in sds looked more like bull shit than teen spirit; we did not have the best support system imaginable, as Bill Meacham implies in his Memoir; and, frankly, we were kids – privileged, middle-class kids at that.

Most of us drifted into some variant of normal middle-class life: job, mate, kids, and related joys, frustrations, responsibilities, extravagances. I’m not apologizing, and I don’t expect anyone else to do so. The opportunity that we missed, however, was to try to maintain and build some kind of organization. No kidding. It could have been a Tuesday night sewing circle or a debating club, but we screwed up when we let each other drift away.

And I dislike giving PLP credit, but that was exactly what they were telling us in 1968-1969. They told us (those of us who would still talk with them) to pair off, get jobs, burrow into the community, but keep the study group – if not the party membership – going. Of course, it’s as easy as shooting an armadillo in a culvert to point out that they failed to take their own advice, but nonetheless their line was correct – at least the part about keeping contact in a political context.

We split up, and here we are – hopefully, getting back together – but, only after letting the Genie back out of the bottle. And he is a Mad Genie – in both senses of the word. Well – better late than totally senile.

So much for preface – the last part of Alice’s posting above asks about the current national mood regarding the war in Iraq. How did we get here? Blogs have been important; but I suggest that there is a strong – but relatively quiet – residue of knowledge and opinion from the Vietnam era. Maybe as many as 60% of our population feel that that war was somewhere between a mistake and an imperialist adventure. Due to reticence imposed by concerns related to job security, by residual paranoia, and by a desire to avoid the turbulence that we once embraced, we – by and large – left the baddies and the crazies in the field all by themselves.

I don’t know how it is/was where you are/were, but out here in the Pacific NW it didn’t take long for us to get back into this fight. Nor did it take long to win the fight. OR and WA are blue (and green) states in the best sense of the expression. (What do you say about that, Mariann? David told me that you were out here for some fairly long period of time.) Somebody wrote to The Oregonian yesterday that the count in Letters-to-the-Editor for the last so many months was 103 against Bush and his war vs. 3 for …. Is that an important statistic? I think so.

Let me tell you how I think we got there, because it speaks to the earlier portions of Alice’s posting. Maybe it’s the water, but out here we think that we can practice democratic principles, such as discussion of political theory and policies, and screw you if you can’t take a joke. We’re all doing the job, mate, kids, etc. thing; we almost all like life and the world; generally speaking, we like people. Is that different from where you live? If it is, maybe some of us should be migrating to certain chosen locations to maximize our strength – gerrymander by migration rather than by changing boundaries.

If not – if your area is similar to my description of this area – then it’s simple. Live life per the kinds of principles that we all know and respect; know and respect as many of your neighbors as you can; say your piece with well-researched data and modest tone when the opportunity arises; write and submit your piece occasionally to the local newspaper or …. (One thing additional related to the first two lines of Alice’s piece – most kids are easy to involve, even if you dislike their music and their attitude. Does take patience – no doubt about that. [Best thing about us males getting older is diminishment of testosterone levels. Helps with the patience thing.])

After that, the only missing piece is organization. We screwed up last time. Are we ready to rectify the situation? sds anyone?

Paul Spencer

I have read some pretty thoughtful posts on this line about the New Left and what became of it–and of what that might mean today–and I hope to read more of them. I need leadership today!

It occured to me that I could contribute to the discussion by telling what happened to PL types. I know the fate of most of those who were in Leninists circles at UT. In general, I think we became Leninists because we saw that there was more to be done than ending the war in Vietnam — and that the Movement wasn’t going to end that war, either. We saw graduation coming and we saw the need for years of protest, resistance, struggle–call it what you will. We threw ourselves into the Leninist parties, looking for a structure and a tradition that the New Left didn’t have, something that would sustain and guide us for the rest of our lives. Marxism convinced us that only a revolt by the working class, spurred by economic motives, would give anything decent a chance. Though the parties defined the w.c. too narrowly, I do not know of any ex-Leninist in the UT crowd who has repudiated that idea, except for a half-dozen former Spartacists who became neocons. Most of us still believe that.

The test of the idea was to go into factories and try to organize the w.c. The plan was to restore the Left unionism of the late 30s and the 40s. It didn’t work. The w.c. didn’t listen. We were disillusioned.

In PL — I won’t speak of the other groups, because I know less — the response was to blame the failure on ourselves. The workers didn’t rebel, the internal discussions decided, because “you didn’t sell enough copies of Challenge.” We blamed the failure of our movement on each other. It was a I’m-more-moral-than-you game.

By the mid-seventies, people who had gone the Leninist route were peeling out of the parties, though usually, we went from one party to another. In all of them, I believe, were found an arrogant power structure. We began to dislike that structure that one had once sought. It had its advantages–efficiency–but it had its drawbacks.

By the start of the 80s, I’d say, none of wanted to go back to SDS formlessness and none of us wanted to stay in the Leninist orb. I know of only one person who stayed in PLP, one who stayed in the SWP, and one who is still with the Sparts. This is out a universe at UT of maybe 100.

Old enmities lived on among us and between us and those whom we once called the “right wing” of SDS, i.e., most of the early Rag crew. But more than anything, I think, we felt defeated. In wanting to transform the nation, we had bit off more than we could chew.

I don’t think that many of us started taking smaller bites. Very few of the ex-Leninists became Democrats or signed-on to the “act locally, think globally” point of view. We instead began lives of daily by minor resistance, and we continue like that: separated, alone, skeptical of everything.

There’s an Argentine movie, “Common Ground,” in which a character says something like, “Marxism is only a private moral attitude, suitable for deployment in the kitchen.” Any Marxist would protest the idea of “moral,” in theory, but the line is pretty accurate.

The fall of the Soviets disturbed a lot of us, but convinced very few of us that socialism is a bad idea. Most of us still believe in something that we’d call “socialism,” though the definition of that word would not be the same as it was, for anybody. Were we together again, I don’t thnk we’d agree about what “socialism” would mean.

I speak of the ex-Leninists, not for them.

I can’t draw many lessons from all of this, except one: we were born at the wrong place, in the wrong time. As a professor I have come to know various students who are retracing the footsteps of all of us New Leftists, “right-wing” and Leninist. My heart goes out to them, but I have not been able to provide good advice. In any case, like most student radicals, they don’t seek any advice. They are young and are going to change the world!

Dick J. Reavis

I’d rather not be so stand-offish. After all, my blood flows in your veins, in a manner of speaking.

In Texas (Longhorn Machine Works, Economy Furniture, Farah), labor laws take forever to get enforced. If you break the strike, you will have a good job with benefits exceeding those of the person whose job you took for four or five years and maybe permanently (because a lot of union members get starved out).

If I can’t appeal to you on the basis of your class interests, then all I’ve got is the short-sight argument that the union will eventually win–something that is not at all clear as a matter of fact now, with Repugs appointing the NLRB, the hearing examiners, and the judges.

Steve Russell

But by not being specific enough, I think you limit our options for thinking, but…

If you’re talking about a strike today at one of the plants that you mention, it seems to me that you could win by convincing a scab that other jobs exist and that he could survive in the interval–if the union would insure him a job when it won/wins the strike. You could tell him that it’s in his long-term interest that the union win.

If the union could not guarantee a future job, I´d say that you’d have to talk to the union. The problem is that unions are unions in some sense against the unemployed. They can only win the loyalty of the unemployed if, through other initiatives, they are representing the unemployed.

An analogy is this…during the Black Panther era, a lot of police departments tried to hire a lot of informers. They did find too many. But hundreds of people refused the role because though they were not Panthers, they sympathized with what the Panthers were trying to do and with their general social vision.

As far as I know, the AFL-CIO has always lobbied for the interests of the unemployed. But as far as I know, ever since the McCarthy period, the AFL-CIO has not agitated for the interests of the unemployed — or for else. Unions must have aims beyond that of higher wages and benefits and better rules for their members, or they lose. They have to represent the short- and long-term interests of the whole of the working population, not just the membership.

Dick J. Reavis

Re: self-interest vs. reason and other higher order motivations.

I think I know where Brother Reavis is coming from – the proletariat – loosely and globally speaking. Check out his description of San Pablo Macquiltianguis “high in the pine forests of Oaxaca’s Juarez range” where “(n)early half of the town’s children died before the age of 5, usually of infectious diseases, malnutrition, or dehydration, and . . . people lived in dread of droughts, which inevitably came.” (In “Conversation with Moctezuma”, Wm. Morrow & Co, 1990, pp. 235-8) Dick spent some time in this obscure and remote village where the first language is Zapotec. He wrote a lot about such places during the several years of his career he spent as a journalist on the back streets of Mexico. His subjects were very often blocked from higher order motivations by the continuous intervention of material self-interest in its most intense form – physical survival.

On the other hand, some of us have had the luxury of contemplating the relative quality and political correctness of various philosophical motivational frameworks while ensconced in ivy-covered buildings. But, Gavin, as you said, “It pays the bills around here”. That sounds pretty self-interested.

Good to see a little testosterone still flowing out there, but I don’t think this is an either/or situation. Inevitably, most people are going to be primarily motivated by self-interest, religious fundamentalists notwithstanding. It’s hardwired in us all to a large degree. By fortune and talent, others will marginally transcend such considerations. We must just hope that those with the prerogative to transcend, us among them, will provide good leadership to those who are trapped in the mundane and perspective to those who are not.

David Hamilton

If an unemployed black man in Oakland refuses to snitch on the Panthers for cash, hasn’t he just referred to some value beyond his immediate self-interest?

There is a degree of abstraction you can adopt in referring to “self-interest” that makes the concept useless for discussing tactics, kind of like the law & economics nerds who take such a broad view of “costs” and “benefits” that they can make their paradigm fit everything but at the same time it fits nothing. I mean, Gandhi would say he was pursuing his self-interest when he starved himself and went to jail. My own colorful arrest record, of which you are probably aware, was nothing so noble: I was darn well aware that I was getting hurt but was willing to put up with it for the cause, not because I thought it was somehow in my interest to suffer.

So, if you mean “self-interest” in the sense of an individual who is engaged in building the kind of society he or she wants to live in, then we do not disagee about anything significant. I take it you do not turn your considerable talents to writing romance novels because you do not consider producing romance novels to be the highest and best use of your talents? In making that judgment, you are without a doubt referring to some value you are ranking above “standard of living.”

I doubt that you and I are better people than the ones we want to bring along. I think everybody wants to believe that there are times when it’s right and necessary to sacrifice self-interest to some greater good. Indeed, the chicken hawks running US foreign policy had for a while convinced most Americans of exactly that. We call them “chicken hawks,” of course, because the sacrifice they demand always comes from other people.

Steve Russell

I expect that, if my survival were constantly at stake, I’d be self-interested in all matters, just like the people of San Pablo Macquiltianguis.

My point was that self-interest is a poor principle around which to organize collective political action. This is especially true for peoples so utterly oppressed that their survival is constantly at stake. How do you engage in collective action when finding something to eat is far more imperative?

Finally, David, where you write “some of us have had the luxury of contemplating the relative quality and political correctness of various philosophical motivational frameworks while ensconced in ivy-covered buildings,” you engage in ad hominem attack. You should address my argument, not my job.

I’d expect something like this from Bill O’Reilly, not from you. You disappoint me.

Gavan Duffy

I think we’re defining self-interest too narrowly here — as meaning something that will necessarily exclude or conflict with the interests of others. That is how self-interest gets expressed in a young child, but as we mature we take on more sophisticated approaches. We begin to understand that continually trying to maximize our self-interest is frequently counter-productive. (Mom sends us to our room, or we’re shunned by our friends, or we wind up in jail.) And so we turn to strategies for optimizing rather than maximizing our self-interest.

This usually takes the form of mutually beneficial actions, e.g., sharing rather than stealing. But sharing doesn’t mean abandoning our self-interest. To the contrary, it’s likely to give us a better net benefit than the alternative. Over time this strategy is extended beyond our families and close friends to larger and larger groups. This is a positive thing. It works for us personally, and it works for society at large.

Through socialization, personal experience, critical thinking, the influence of groups, adopted belief systems, etc., many of us continue to refine this optimization strategy. I may move from being simply law abiding to a more abstract respect for justice for all (which could include a refusal to obey unjust laws). It begins to look like I’m adopting some unselfish attitudes. Again, this is positive. But, again, this is not at the expense of my self-interest. It’s just another step forward in the optimizing thing. It also expresses my learning that feelings, and not only “things,” are valuable to me. I adopt a value system based on my more sophisticated understanding of mutually beneficial behaviors. When I conform to that value system, I feel good. If I make some unusual sacrifices that are consistent with that value system, I may feel very good indeed. And if I violate my values, I feel bad. It is not in my self-interest to violate my values.

People tend to call an act “selfish” if it opposes their own value system, and “unselfish” if it accords with their value system. At the end of the day, basically everything we do is founded in selfishness — no matter that it may be prettily dressed up as moral or ethical. But, hey, this can be okay. Let’s try to keep ramping up those mutually beneficial acts.

And, meanwhile, if we’re willing to recognize our essential selfishness, maybe that recognition will take some of the edge off that dangerous self-righteousness.

Dennis Fitzgerald

Dennis and Dick seem determined to deny any virtue in their social (as distinct from individual) interests. But it seems to me that calling everything people want just an extension of self-interest dodges the question of how to deal with this issue rather than explaining it.

In each individual, and in each society, there is an interplay (a dialectic, if you will) between selfish and social impulses. At this time, the social impulses need support — we should not let concern about self-righteousness keep us from acknowledging and celebrating altruism when it emerges from the muckpile of fear and greed.

Part of the weakness of contemporary American-liberal rhetoric is that it is so busy arguing that being good is in everyone’s self-interest that it reinforces the selfishness that it is trying to cure. To many, gated communities will seem safer and cheaper than remaking society so that everyone succeeds. This may even be true for most Americans (that’s the neocon analysis).

While there are several important enlightened-self-interest arguments to be made (e.g., global warming), they will have much more political impact when they are made by people like bankers (who have a broad but selfish view since they own part of everything), not by weirdo commie/hippie intellectuals, even if that’s who did the research that uncovered the problem.

Of course, even in America there is still plenty to do in organizing and supporting the working-class interests that Marx accurately identified as the primary opportunity for egalitarian political action. But Marx was not himself from that class (nor were my union-organizer parents, nor is ragstaffer/union-organizer Glenn Scott, or historical social-impulse heroes such as Shaw and Ruskin). Even the effective organizers who come out of the working class have broadened their vision well beyond narrow class interests.

These people have an impact because they convey the altruistic “hunger and thirst after justice” (Ruskin) that shows the people they interact with that such a broader vision exists. Or, as Gavan puts it, that they have higher impulses. That these impulses can lead to the more rewarding and authentic life Alice mentions is true (although they also can lead to a firing squad), but that does not keep them from being higher. We should wave this flag, not apologize for it.

Hunter Ellinger

One sentence from Ellinger’s post is especially of interest to me:

“Part of the weakness of contemporary American-liberal rhetoric is that it is so busy arguing that being good is in everyone’s self-interest that it reinforces the selfishness that it is trying to cure.”

Perhaps it is only a matter of a careless word choice, but I would say that I hope that I am not trying to “cure” the “selfishness” of other people, because that would put me in the position of wellness, or of a doctor.

Other people are not stupid and probably have good reasons for not regarding me as their superior; I take it that everyone on this list would agree to that!

The gated communities point is a sharp one, I agree. But I’d say that Ellinger, as have others on the list, regards self-interest in the terms that the System has taught us, i.e., immediate self-interest, I’ve got mine Jack, to hell with you. I think that the System defines self-interest in pretty short-sighted way, as benefits those who run in.

I do not live in a gated community and wouldn’t want to. The idea that extremes of wealth should create societies in which some people need guards and bodyguards is repellent to me, not because I am moral, but because I don’t like to feel distanced from people. I would argue with people who live in gated communities than we have accepted a society which imprisons them, too.

Circumstances could exist in which I would live in a gated community, and in a sense, we all do: the United States is gated today. We don’t feel that we’ve chosen to live here, but what about immigrants who come here? (I am thinking of a student of mine whose mother won’t let her return to Trinidad for fear of crime. Am I regard her mother as immoral or as a mother who worries about her child’s safety?) Is their morality to be questioned? The point is that gated communities are not long-term solutions to the problems of human coexistence.

Two considerations underlie everything I say on this issue:

1. I have for years watched activist movements and participated in them. At some point and in some campaigns, I began to feel humiliated. I would today not, for example, sign a petition asking Bill O’Reilly to do anything. That seems like begging, to me. Bill O’Reilly is clearly not a friend of my interests. The only thing in my interest is that he be discredited or removed, somehow brought low.

If I ask Bill O’Reilly to do something decent, I am only showing my weakness. I’d rather spend my time developing the strength to remove him. When we have enough strength, we don’t have to ask for anything.

2. Perhaps those of you who never defended the Soviets do not have this problem, but it seems to me that the great horror of the Soviet Union was that crimes were committed in the name of the people, so much so that the very idea of socialism is now discredited.

Let each person speak for himself/herself, I say! If we can sell some sort of future socialism on personal or self-interest grounds, it won’t become tyrannical like the Soviets did.

Everybody who plays games has no choice but to accept their rules. The rules are that you look out for yourself and your own team and when your team wins, that’s hard luck for the losers. If you lose, it is bad form to complain that the referees were unfair, or that the other team had superior advantages, and one sure doesn’t ask the other team to share its advantages. We are not going to get any social justice by expecting our enemies to adopt “reason” or “truth” or altruistic motives.

We are going to have to outplay them on the field of politics.

Dick J. Reavis

To be continued … rdj

Like Gavin, long ago, I shouldn’t have time for this. But, sucker that I am…..

Things happen. Then there are the stories we make up about what happens. Some of those stories more accurately describe what happened than others, although we can never precisely and absolutely know which. For those stories we trust the most — usually because they predict future events — we call them science.

Arguably, that’s the nature of our “reality,” which is limited by our perception.

The practical question is which of the made-up stories to choose. And choose them we do, through one mechanism or another — personal choice, socialization, brainwashing, indoctrination, etc., etc.

I vote to choose those stories that most reflect the “reality” I see.

That’s easy for many things. That’s where much of what is “science” comes in. But if you follow the debate on evolution/intelligent design/creationism, you can clearly see that others “choose” differently.

When it comes to people, politics, society, the choices get harder. Although it has an important role, “self-interest” doesn’t do it for me. It is, after all, the fundamental concept behind capitalism and other “territorial-based” ways of thinking. It can be and is used to justify every abomination imaginable.

“Reason” is a little better. It at least posits that there is some “higher” framework that should guide our actions. Like advancing the better good, doing what makes the most sense for the most people, etc.

While not my personal choice necessarily, religion and faith are another options. In that world view, God (or something like God) requires us to act in certain ways. In the best examples, to promote peace, harmony, justice and doing unto others as we would want them to do unto us.

I can’t say that one is better than another. But I do know and have seen the power that the stories or explanations we choose have.

As important as the mass protests and personal bravery of the civil rights era were to winning the gains of the last few decades (such as they were), we should never discount the power of the vision that was articulated by Dr. King and many others. It has changed things. When the leading advocate of the right in the Maryland House of Delegates co-introduces a bill to name BWI airport after Thurgood Marshall and the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate is an African American, who is also the current Lt. Gov., you have to admit there has been a change in the collective consciousness. Yes, the reality of much of the black community remains bleak, but the terms of the debate have changed and the lives of many individuals are better for it.

I guess I am speaking for the power of the idea — the power of a vision of a better world. Far beyond self-interest, I believe that is what motivates people. That is what moves them to put their lives and futures on the line and to challenge power. It is no accident that the words of the Declaration of Independence (or similar expressions about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness or the right to freedom of belief, thought and action) have shown up time and again in revolutionary documents.

I do believe the challenge we face is to create our own “story” or “stories” of reality — as accurate and predictive as we can, but also as uplifting, inspiring and motivating as we can make them.

And now I really am late to work.

Best all

Doyle Niemann

As per the below….It seems to me that “false consciousness” occurs when the working class, or any subordinate class, adopts the world view of the bourgeoisie. Marx mentioned that as a problem. He did not define “false consciousness” as a confusion between individual and class interests–and I have not been convinced that he thought such a thing possible.

In the broadest terms, what Marx said about ideology was that small groups had put forward their interests as representing those of all humanity, the biggest possible political group, or of the nation. It seems to me that, given this history, we should be skeptical of anybody’s claim to represent group interests, including class interests. We can, however, trust people who claim only to represent themselves; we can trust them to look out for Number One First.

I therefore think that the most honest policy is for me, for example, to claim to represent myself, leaving to Jesus or somesuch the interests of all humanity. If you, for example, think about your interests, and they run close to mine, we can form a class of two, which, in time, may become a class of four, etc. Pretty soon we might be speaking in the interests of the petty bourgeoisie or some other class–but to be honest, we have to say, “I’m doing this for myself.”

What gets dropped out is the figure who claims to sacrifice himself/herself for the greater good, i.e., Jesus and his imitators.

What gets saved is the wisdom of the 60s, which was that social liberation is inseparable from personal liberation.

Dick J. Reavis

I’m having a deliciously lovely time reading all that’s been written in the past few days. Gavan, you have a more interesting stream-of-consciousness writing style than I had suspected you were capable of. I’ve pondered, giggled, belly-laughed, and enjoyed. I think Paul deserves the lunch Lori offered.

Brother Bill: your posting reminded me of two other ringing phrases to throw into the mix: winners write the official report of a conflict (which is how Julius Caesar could get away with dissing the Druids) and “history is a distillation of rumor” (Thomas Carlyle said that).

A lot of the rhetoric sounds muchly like what y’all were going on and on about 35 years ago, but it’s still interesting. As we said then: What goes around comes around. My assumption is that it has a lot to do with lessons needing to be learned; my faith is that sooner or later it’ll happen.

Kate Braun

My point about promoting human flourishing did not concern political action. It was proposed (by Wittgenstein, not me) as the best underlying norm to motivate scientific inquiry.

Anyway, I fail to see how a class can have a consciousness or adopt a world view. This seems quite anthropomorphic to me.

It is certainly true that some people can only act on the basis of self-interest. Kohlberg called them stage 2 moral reasoners. At stages 3 and 4, people act on the basis of social role expectations. At even higher stages, they act on the basis of principles.

So, I read you as saying that you are an exemplar of arrested moral development. With self-interest as your guide, you can easily justify all kinds of heinous behavior. You free yourself to manipulate others, or even kill them, so long as doing so serves your self-interest.

I hope someday you develop a principled social consciousness.

Gavan Duffy

At the first meeting of a multi-stakeholder group I was involved in a few years ago, the facilitator put rolls of toilet paper on the table in front of everybody’s chairs. She said that as part of our process, we were all encouraged to speak freely and to disagree with one another. But, Rule #1 was to treat each other respectfully. If we thought somebody was getting out of line, we were supposed to toss our roll towards the offending party (but… not “at” them).

It was a pretty fun idea and it really did work well. Nobody wanted to be shamed by having a big stack of tp in front of themselves at the end of the meeting. Even the redneck logger seemed a bit embarrassed after his reference to effin’ greenies earned him almost every roll at the table. (Oh, yeah, and to avoid the negative impacts of self-interest, we weren’t allowed to keep any of the rolls tossed our way.)

So, sorry, Duffer, but this is coming your way. Lighten up a little bit, boy.

Dennis Fitzgerald

In the post … you say “I’m starting to realize that you’ve been conflating self-interest with group interest.”

Could it not be that you’ve been separating self-interest from group interest?

(I notice that I usually address my arguments to you in the conditional, whereas you speak to me in the declarative. I say “I think” or “it could be”; you declare what’s what–in a manner appropriate to your academic status? Is not some hierarchy in forms of discourse evident here?)

My feeling is simply this. The System has for years taught us self-deprecation. We must sacrifice our desires before God, Morality, Nation, the Economy, Marriage, the Family, etc. The people who speak for all of those capital letters usually turn out to be tyrants.

To turn that game around and put capital letters on Class, Humanity, History–or Morality, the Nation, etc.–may in some ways improve life for the rest of us, but if really successful, leads to another Soviet state.

I don’t think we should don’t deny self or self-interest at the start of our fight or our negotiations with life. I think we ought to stand up for our own “selfish” interests, along with everything else. The selfish interests of the bourgeoise may cause great harm to the rest of us, but the selfish interests of us commoners–I count you as one!–might be really healthy for the species!

Dick J. Reavis

Yes, I agree. I haven’t conflated self-interest and group interest, whereas you have.

Saying “I think” and “it could be” is a way of speaking conditionally. You yourself say “Could it not be” in the sentence that precedes your declarative parenthetical sentence beginning “I notice that I usually address….” “I think” implicates that “I could be wrong.” So I’m not addressing you any differently than you address me and any hierarchy you find in my discourse just isn’t there.

Of course, you consistently refer to me formally as “Mr. Duffy,” which indicates that you want to establish some sort of hierarchy. But, in any event, you seem to do this in an effort to portray yourself in some sort subaltern position in which you feel most comfortable. That doesn’t bother me so much, but please don’t attribute to me any intention to place you in that position. It’s your pomo delusion, not mine.

My perspective does indeed differ. I think that The System encourages us to conceive ourselves as individuals who pursue goals in a self-interested manner. To the extent that we buy into this “false consciousness” (writers more recent than Engels call it “the colonization of the lifeworld”), we fail to see our group interest and our group solidarity is undermined.

I would agree that we should stand up for our group interests, but these are hardly selfish.

Gavan Duffy

So it the glass on self-interest/group interest is half-full, not half-empty,–or is it the other way around?

I do not address Mr. Duffy as “Mr.” because I want to imply any gradation of superiority: to accept anybody as my superior in such discussions would go counter to my self-respect. It’s just that if I knew Duffy, I don’t remember him. We haven’t, as the Brits would say, been properly introduced, to my memory, at least. In any case, I don’t think I’ve seen a post addressed to ‘Gavan,’ and Fitgerald’s “Duffer” seems to be a name of affection. Such affection I will not feign, though I would not say that I will forever regard Duffy as a stranger.

Mr. Duffer–is that any better?–says: To the extent that we buy into this “false consciousness” (writers more recent than Engels call it “the colonization of the lifeworld”), we fail to see our group interest and our group solidarity is undermined.

I don’t know to what “writers” or concepts he refers, so all I can say: What ‘we,’ Lone Ranger?

Dick J. Reavis

I suppose there’s nothing “wrong” with pursuing the ethics of egoism, “self-interest,” if you in fact recognize no higher interest than your own.

But in that pursuit, you lose the chance of bringing anybody with you who is not identical in a lot of categories we have always tried to organize across.

I am thinking that a scab can make a great self-interest argument, and the only sensible reply would be to call the scab short-sighted.

It’s OK to have interests and necessary to be out front about what they are. But if that’s all you have, I don’t trust you to govern yourself in a manner that does not impinge on my interests. Let alone trust you to govern others.

Steve Russell

This material was originally posted on 31 July, but continuing discussion (most recent response from Steve Russell) prompted me to update the posting date to 6 August. rdj

I thought you might be interested in this email, which I just sent to 5,000 voters in the 47th District. Someone already responded to remind me that I forgot to mention I also introduced legislation that would have given the Juvenile Court more authority over truant children where the parents are not able to exercise control. It did not pass because of squabbles within the Prince George’s delegation, but (hopefully) I will be able to reintroduce it next year.

Doyle Niemann

Keeping Kids in School – Fighting Truancy

Last year, 6,500 students were absent from school for more than 25 days without excuse.

These were days not spent learning. As a Prince George’s County prosecutor, I also know there is a good chance many were also involved with daytime crime, drugs and underage sexual activity.

Holding parents accountable

Parents are legally required to see that their children attend school until the age of 16. The first step, then, is to hold parents accountable. Easily said; not so easily done.

It takes a high degree of cooperation between the school system, the Department of Juvenile Services, the State’s Attorney’s Office, and the Juvenile Court, and for a long time that cooperation hasn’t been there.

But that is changing. Over the last year, I have played a critical role in bringing all these groups together to focus on truancy.

A step-by-step approach

Working together, we have identified a four-part process:

(1) Schools, drawing on regional school resources, identify truant students and do their best to address any problems affecting attendance.

(2) Habitually truant students are referred to an interagency group that includes school representatives, juvenile justice officials, social workers and prosecutors for further screening.

(3) Parents are then summoned to appear before a Juvenile Court Judge, where they are informed about the law and its penalties (up to 10 days in jail and hefty fines). They are asked to sign an agreement that they will make sure their child goes to school. A social worker is present in case there are problems where outside help can make a difference.

(4) If attendance continues to be poor, truancy charges are filed against the parent.

Progress this year

This year, we summoned parents of truant students from Northwestern, Bladensburg and Laurel High Schools to come to court – with good results. Attendance improved.

Formal charges have been filed against more than 15 parents.

Looking ahead to the new school year, we plan to expand this endeavor to middle and elementary schools and to act quicker and more aggressively.

Mobilizing the community

We are also working to mobilize the larger community. Borrowing from successful efforts in Bowie and Laurel, we will be asking local businesses to not serve school-age children during school hours and to report truant students to local police.

Municipal and county police departments are being asked to pick truant students up and take them back to the school. Adults who encourage and assist truant students can also be charged with a criminal citation for aiding and encouraging truancy. This includes businesses that serve underage students.

School reforms

Getting the child back in school is the first step. But then, we need to confront why the child is truant and to help him or her make up for lost time.

In many cases, all that is required is more parent attention. That is what our legal initiative is aimed to encourage.

In other cases, however, more serious educational and family problems must be confronted. That is where we expect the school system and our social service agencies to step forward with remedial services and other forms of help.

An opportunity for adult interaction

In addition to school programs to help students catch up, community involvement and support are critical. Our schools can’t change attitudes and long-term habits alone. That’s where mentoring and other programs that involve our children and give them a chance to interact with adult role models are critical.

I wish I could say exactly what can and must be done in these areas, but specific steps must still be worked out in partnership with everyone involved.

I can promise that I will be involved and will do whatever I can to move the process of reclaiming our children forward.

Doyle Niemann

Doyle, your approach to truancy gave me the cold shivers, as I was a chronic truant and the burden of enforcement would have fallen on my elderly grandparents. The only thing that will slow down truancy is to make school a positive experience, which it never was to me until I arrived at the University of Texas.

If I understand the history of truancy laws, there were two purposes. To allow the cops to pick up kids who were hanging around when school was in session and to sanction parents who were obstructing public education by insisting on putting the kids to work (part of a package of child labor laws).

I tend to agree about the hanging around part. The place where I chose to hide was the public library.

Child labor does not appear to me to be a major social problem right now outside of farm workers. I hope I’m right about that.

But it seems to me that the major crusade against truancy would have to happen in schools. Until it does, I’m on the side of the truants. I quit for good in the ninth grade and my only regret was I didn’t quit sooner. The only thing I learned in school that was useful was typing, and that only took a couple of weeks.

Steve Russell

Truancy?

Brother Doyle, our very own Ragamuffin legislator and prosecutor,

I accidently spent more than 20 years in the Austin ISD as a special education teacher and counselor working with delinquent adolescents. In those capacities, I saw a lot of truancy offenders and worked on a continuous basis with school truant officers, parents, courts, et al. I also had a willful daughter who took a lengthy, unilateral and unscheduled sabbatical during high school. Besides, I personally spent many lovely days learning about such esoteric concepts as jazz in Mr. Murray’s record shop that would have otherwise been squandered being brainwashed at Highland Park High School.

My problem with your approach to this is that your initiative seems to place its ultimate emphasis on the stick, not the carrot. It’s also a one-size-fits-all approach. You may have been a prosecutor too long. Who were the 15 adults who had truancy charges filed against them? I would be willing to bet a sizeable sum that they were poor, single, unemployed, uneducated, unhealthy, possibly addicted or mentally ill and very largely dysfunctional for even their own care to begin with. Often the kids have far stronger personalities than these parents. Another large group of truants, often off the radar, are the teenage daughters of undocumented workers from underdeveloped countries where girls from poor and traditional families are sent to school for only a few years, if at all. Regardless of these parental shortcomings, the judge usually sees no improvement in the child’s situation by throwing his or her offending parent in jail. If they did, the state might have to assume full responsibility for the kid and they usually don’t have sufficient facilities. So, the criminal penalties are usually a toothless threat. What’s the point of fining somebody $200 a day when they don’t have money for rent or food or medical care or crack? And, as I am sure you are aware, the police on the beat are inherently less willing to devote their donut-eating time to messing around with adolescents skipping school who are especially hard to convict of anything, given the nature of juvenile courts.

I also wonder what are the long-term stats on truancy. I might be wrong, but I would hypothesize that as a social problem, truancy has a very long, consistent and persistent history, and the long-term trends are downward. Public education continues, as it has for decades, to partially educate, or at least supervise, an ever broader quotient of the general population. Most of those dropping out of its coverage are the rich going to private schools, who don’t want their kids fraternizing or being in a system burdened with special needs kids.

Problems with truancy are more effectively approached by helping failing parents meet their basic needs and by making schools more valuable and exciting places to be. Are the schools in Prince George’s County centers of adult education or community recreation programs when not in use by regular students?

Which leads to the question of why you latched on to truancy as a political priority. Is it really spiraling out of hand there? Might I also use this opportunity to suggest that while you are prioritizing, you devote some energy to countering the immeasurable social damage and impetus to crime that are the conspicuous results of the “war on drugs.”

In struggle from the easy chair,

David Hamilton

There are exceptions to every situation, Steve, and your situation may describe one. On the other hand, in our system, where a majority of students are poor and minority, few are hanging out at the library. Instead, what we have is a dropout culture of dead-ends that feeds on itself.

At some sociological level, it is all a symptom, perhaps, of the bankruptcy of modern society and the continuing reality of class structure, but that is a meaningless exercise in academic rationalization when it comes to figuring out what to do with a school system and 135,000 individual students, each of whom deserve as good an education as possible.

There is plenty of evidence that truancy breeds lack of opportunity, as well as continuing poverty and lack of opportunity. The truants, of course, don’t see it that way, but that is the reality at the end of the day for the vast majority. It is not good for them and it is not good for everyone around them who become the victims of wayward acts.

Yes, schools need to do a better of job of figuring out how to motivate and reach students who are being lost. We have 3,000 permanent ninth graders, for example. They are just putting in time till they drop out. But it is not that school leaders here (and in most places) are unaware of the problem. One of the positive things (and there aren’t many) about things like No Child Left Behind is that for the very first time, the reality of this is finally being measured. For decades, it was simply swept under the rug. Out of sight; out of mind.

It is all easy to talk about and incredibly hard to do. How do you motivate students whose entire life experience leaves them unresponsive? There are plenty of isolated examples of success, but when they are analyzed in any systematic way, it usually comes down to the quality of the people involved and their ability to motivate and inspire. Charisma is not a skill easily taught, however.

Holding parents “accountable” is not a magic solution. It won’t even work in many cases. But our experience so far shows that it does make a difference in a lot – maybe even the majority – of cases. That’s because it takes on the “culture” of truancy – the acceptance of it among students and parents. More than that, the rationalization of it.

In the end, no matter how we may want to romanticize it, 13-, 14-, 15-year-olds have little sense of the world and their role in it. These are the ages when habits are formed and when decisions are made – by young people caught up in incredible changes – that determine their future in very real and practical ways.

I still believe it is better for them to be in school – even in a less than perfect environment – than hanging out on the street.

Doyle Niemann

— There is plenty of evidence that truancy breeds lack of opportunity, as well as continuing poverty and lack of opportunity. The truants, of course, don’t see it that way, but that is the reality at the end of the day for the vast majority. It is not good for them and it is not good for everyone around them who become the victims of wayward acts. —

Evidence? The research I’ve seen sets up schooling as a proxy for education. It’s as valid as the proxy. I was one of five high school dropouts in my top tier law school class. I run into dropout professors often enough that I no longer feel special.

— It is all easy to talk about and incredibly hard to do. How do you motivate students whose entire life experience leaves them unresponsive? There are plenty of isolated examples of success, but when they are analyzed in any systematic way, it usually comes down to the quality of the people involved and their ability to motivate and inspire. Charisma is not a skill easily taught, however. —

Indeed it does turn on the quality of people. And the numbers will tell you that education students (I was one, you know) are bottom feeders. Starting salaries for schoolteachers will tell you why.

One really bad consequence of opening the professions to women in the 70s was that women started going into the professions. I jest, sorta. In the old days you had really bright women becoming school teachers for lack of opportunity. Now they are doctors and lawyers and engineers and various kinds of researchers. Most of my grad students are women. That is good, but schoolteachers still get “women’s wages.” And we get what we pay for.

— Holding parents “accountable” is not magic solution. It won’t even work in many cases. But our experience so far shows that it does make a difference in a lot – maybe even the majority of cases. That’s because it takes on the “culture” of truancy – the acceptance of it among students and parents. More than that, the rationalization of it. —

I still say truancy is as rational as the public schools are irrational. My daughter the high school dropout computer nerd makes very good dough.

— In the end, no matter how we may want to romanticize it, 13, 14, 15-year olds have little sense of the world and their role in it. These are the ages when habits are formed and when decisions are made – by young people caught up in incredible changes – that determine their future in very real and practical ways. —

On the contrary, kids of that age have highly developed bullshit detectors. As anybody with your New Left history knows, the first step to knowing what you want is knowing what you don’t want.

— I still believe it is better for them to be in school – even in less than perfect environment – than hanging out on the street. —

Doyle, my friend, I would absolutely agree with you if those were the choices.

Also, have you considered that the burden of enforcement, should there be enforcement, falls on single mothers who are told with the other side of the government’s mouth that they have to work rather than parent to get public assistance? And the grandparents like mine and the uncles and aunties who have tried to be the village it takes to raise a child?

May I make a very primitive suggestion? Primitive as in New Deal. The Civilian Conservation Corps. Put them to work doing fairly hard labor with booklearning on the side for those so inclined.

The problem is not “out of school.” The problem is crappy schools and lack of options. I created my own options. I guided my kids by not handing them bullshit. “If you want to drop out, that’s fine, but I want you to have a plan.”

Paul went back and got a diploma so he could get in the Marine Corps (!!!). Mary never did go back.

But I know lots of folks besides myself who are living proof of the irrelevance of schooling to education. Schools babysit. They keep kids off the streets. That is a good, but it’s far from a good that justifies punitive measures to maintain the monopoly on babysitting.

Steve Russell

There will be a little more. rdj

In re: the Science & Objectivity debate — has it never occurred to you that the whole of Marx could be reduced to the statement (not his) that, “The self-interest of the working class is the best hope of humanity?”

And if that’s fair — when did Marx ever speak in behalf of either “reason” or altruism? — why should you say that I “sound” like a YAFer? (Actually, I sound like a Texan, that being my accent.)

I suppose I could cite you various writings on Waco, but the principal one is “The Ashes of Waco,” Simon & Schuster 1995, Syracuse U. Press, circa 1998.

Dick J. Reavis

The main problem I see with the evolution versus inteligent design debate is that it’s all based on an “either-or” premise, when what’s really going on is an “and” situation. Evolution happens. Kammerer’s study of the midwife toad clearly shows the adaptability of a species to environment and mutations in various species can become part of that species’ DNA. But the question then arises, “Why evolution”? My answer is that it’s part of some plan created on a level we humans don’t grasp yet. I think that we’re experiencing the presence of the divine and the effects of evolution simultaneously. I also think that experiencing the divine is not confined to the limits of organized religion.

So now we come to the conflict within the parameters of Public Education about what constitutes religion and how the policy of separation of church and state factor into the mix and how do children learn, anyway, and how are they being taught? I see it as having a lot to do with fear. Fear that some more powerful entity will cut public school funding and cost principals and teachers their jobs. Fear that a child being kept back a year so he can really learn some basic, necessary tools for life (like reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic) will be permanently damaged and forever friendless by being stuck with some sort of negative label. Fear of job loss on the part of teachers if their classes don’t make the right scores on TASS and the other standardized tests that purport to measure learning. (How does one measure learning anyway? People learn different things in different ways. If I’d been taking an Algebra I class under today’s system, I’d have failed and been labelled “dumb in math” forever after). Fear adds yet another reason to dumb down the curriculum and get all in a knot over the ID v. Evolution debate. Fear should play no part in education. When students fear their teachers, they won’t ask questions, and if they don’t ask, they won’t learn. When teachers fear their principals, they become a force of negativity within the system. When parents bow to the “higher knowledge” of teachers and principals, they opt-out of being an alternative influence on their children and teach their children to accept whatever the established authority pronounces. As far as I’m concerned, if the subject is taught well, scoring well on the wretched test should be a piece of cake. (I had an innovative Algebra I teacher and after getting a D on the first report card went on to earn A’s thereafter).

So now it’s the loudest voice that carries the greatest weight, urging schools to take the appeasement route, purchase factually-incorrect textbooks loaded with misinformation, and allow teachers and principals to be god, rather than partners in the enterprise of learniing. Public schools are still using a “one-size fits all” approach to education and tend to dumb down the curriculum so that no child (or parent) feels discriminated against. Then there is all the resultant hoo-hah, because not only can Johnny not read, write, spell, punctuate, or know enough math to balance his checkbook, but he’s being done out of a college scholarship because all the Asian kids busted their butts in high school and made better grades! Teachers “teach the test” because the scores matter more than the information. It’s sick and loathsome!!!

When I was in public school in the days of yore, there was such a thing as an “excused absence.” Mom wrote a note to the teacher saying her child had the chicken pox or a strep throat or a broken leg or whatever, and there was no penalty. No such thing anymore. Have a cold? Too bad. Better come to class anyway because you’re allowed only five days’ absence per semester or your grade automatically drops. I bet this rule doesn’t apply to high school football players! This rule forces sick kids into the classroom, where they can infect the whole class. This rule turns kids into automotons who will carry over the lesson into the workplace and infect lots more folks with ever-more-resistant flu germs (they mutate/evolve, too). Our children are learning some Really Bad lessons from their public school experiences.

Not everyone can have a Greenbriar or some other alternative education experience. The next-best thing is for parents to get involved with their children’s education. Check the homework. Visit with the teachers and principals. Listen to what your kids have to say about school, teachers, homework, etc. Let the education demi-gods know that you care and that you’re watching. Give your kids books and access to more books. Make Rules And Enforce Them. And don’t automatically take the teacher’s word over your kid’s. There are bad teachers who have tenure/seniority and aren’t going to be fired no matter what. There are stupid teachers who take the easiest route until they’re entitled to retire with a miniscule pension. Parents have to be willing to fight for their kids’ rights to a good education. This path isn’t always the easiest path, but it’s a good path.

I spent the most intense 15 years of my life working with and for Greenbriar School. It’s the most political thing I’ve ever done. I served on every committee except the finance committee; I taught; I was one of the transportation gang; I vetted potential teachers, helped create publicity, was the in-town phone number for years. I saw kids develop a love of learning and the self-disciplinary tools to help them keep on learning for a lifetime. I saw kids develop respect for their teachers, not fear or derision. I saw kids grow into self-assured (not uppity)people who could work comfortably with those who had power over them. They’re out in the world right now, working, earning, making a difference because they see the world differently.

This is, sadly, not the case in public schools nowadays. Students (and their parents) expect to be promoted from grade to grade whether they merit it or not. Because of the directive to teach the test, school becomes all about what I call “regurgitation education,” where he who parrots best gets the best grade. What are these poorly-trained kids going to do if they do get into college and run into someone like Dr. Malof, who taught the American Literature class I took at UT a lifetime or so ago? Dr. Malof would come into class each day and scrawl a word on the chalkboard and that word was the focus of discussion. And he was looking for original thoughts. The rule was to not repeat anything anyone had said in class. Not Dr. Malof, not yourself, not any class member. Not from any discussion in class or from anything written in a paper or on a test. New ideas. New thoughts. Every class meeting and every test. I found it a fun challenge; today’s public school high-schoolers coming into such an environment probably will not. I feel sorry for them.

There is an outcry about the Asian influnce. It seems to take the position that by being successful in the public school reality, Asian students are denying non-Asian students their god-given right to promotion, honors, college scholarships, etc. What a delusion. It’s all about commitment to excellence, insistance on regular study-time, parental involvement, expectations, and leadership.

I’m really glad I don’t have children in the public school system. I’m worn out from meetings and the challenges inherent in making sure my kids grew up to be good people. If time rolled back, I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat, however.

And now I’ve nattered on enough. For those of you who have heard me say “don’t get me started on education”, this is what I meant.

Kate Braun

Most, but not all, of the research on complex adaptive systems has focused on ecological systems and, yes, it’s been an orgy of mathematical modelers spawning stuff that’s not real helpful to community organizers. But there are some gradually-emerging and fascinating parallels that do provide insights into the workings of human systems (social, economic, political.) What are the characteristics in those systems that promote adaptability to changing circumstances, resilience, a critical level of stability, creativity, etc.?

The folks associated with Santa Fe Institute are often ground zero for a lot of this thinking, but if you’re looking for clues about its possible political applications — and if you’re a non-technical, generalist schmuck, such as myself — I’d recommend reading “Panarchy,” edited by Lance Gunderson and Buzz Holling. It’s a pretty accessible read and makes some cool points. And I think the emerging hypotheses about what seems to work best are pretty consistent with the values that most of us hold.

Dennis Fitzgerald

No, Marx would not have said that “the self-interest of the working class is the best hope of humanity.” He might have said “the interest of the working class is the best hope of humanity,” but this is different. Group interest and self-interest are not equivalent.

Whether Marx ever spoke on behalf of reason is irrelevant, as he certainly used reason. I don’t see what altruism has to do with any of this. I’m not arguing for altruism.

OK, you REASON like a YAFfer, then. I was speaking loosely. But, if you are laboring under the illusion that self-interest and group interest are the same thing, I take it back. In that case, you are just confused.

I will look for your book. BTW, do you have access to the transcripts of negotiations between Koresh and the FBI?

Gavan Duffy

Where do you live? I gave my transcripts to the Texas Writers Collection at Texas State University, San Marcos (the former Southwest Texas State.) You can look at them there. I think audio tapes are floating around, maybe available on the net.

Some people hear things in them that the transcribers–and my ears–don’t discern. I think I’m the only journalist who ever read the transcripts, and none that I know of listened to the tapes.

Now, tell me: where does Marx distinguish between self-interest and group interest? It seems to me that even as early as the German Ideology, he says that the driving force of history is that we have to eat to live.

It’s individuals who have to eat. Groups can’t eat for them.

Dick J. Reavis

In a remarkable display of brevity others might emulate, Dick summarizes his position with the quote, “The self-interest of the working class is the best hope of humanity?” Please explain how that constitutes a “throwback to PLP?”

Incidentally, Dick wrote a cool book about Mexican political culture called “Conversations with Moctezuma,” which I recommend.

David Hamilton

Who said anything about a “throwback to PL?” I admit that PL threw me out, but there aren’t enough soldiers in any army to throw me back.

Dick J. Reavis

Geez, don’t y’all remember anything from the old days? Reality is those illusions which stay put!
On a more serious note, I am intrigued by Dennis’s statements:

“In the overall scheme of things, what’s best for us is best for me (or, at least, for the collective me’s, if not necessarily and always me personally) and, by implication, vice versa.”

“… it is a failure of reason not to recognize that the decimation of Africa’s population (to cite just one example) is not in my long-term, flourishing self-interest. And it is a failure of reason not to recognize that an inequitable distribution of power (i.e., the potential for exercising force) is not in my long-term self-interest.”

It would be very pleasant to believe these things. On what basis, Dennis, do you assert them? What’s your reasoning?

Bill Meacham

Here’s one quote from another of Dick’s postings: “I insist that what I want is, ipso facto, what’s best for humanity, and further, that if everybody respected himself or herself in the same way, the world would not be run by Halliburton.” The first clause is PLP tactically, if not philosophically. The rest of the quote is idealistic at best.

Beyond that, Dick’s earlier discussion of “brute force” is exactly where I draw the line. Maybe I am misreading, but it sounded like pre-emptive war to me, and it certainly sounded — again — like PLP tactics. The end does not justify the means. A means is an end in itself, whatever the later results. A means must be engaged only if it is consistent with (our) reasonable principles. Self-defense is the only allowable violence. Otherwise, we have met the enemy, and it is us.
As to the particular quote in your message above, you know that I agree with that. Want to talk about the details?

Paul Spencer

I live in New York, upstate and down.

A few years ago, I found someone who claimed to have tapes, but my messages to him went unanswered. I may not be able to resurrect the old mail, as I think it’s on a long-dead computer.
I don’t know that Marx ever explicitly distinguished self-interest and group interest, but I doubt he was ever sufficiently careless to conflate them.

I recognize (without citation to chapter and verse) that Marx wanted workers to develop class consciousness, or to take as their own the interest of their class. True enough. That he recognized the existence of “false consciousness,” seems to me, indicates that he recognized the distinction between self-interest and group interest. In the intervening century and a half, at any rate, we’ve learned a lot more about identification than was available to Marx. We know, for instance, that people are capable of identifying with multiple groups simultaneously. At one and the same time, one can identify oneself with one’s class, one’s religion, one’s ethnicity, one’s alma mater, one’s favorite baseball team, etc. You yourself have identified yourself as a journalist, a member of the working class, a Texan, etc.

So you have a personal identity that differs from these various group identities and thus a personal interest that differs (at least sometimes, like when they clash) from the interests of these groups. Anyway, because so very few can so completely identify themselves with a group that they cannot distinguish between the group’s interest and their own, I’m unwilling to give up the distinction.

Bill, you forgot these…
Reality is a mescaline deficiency.
Reality is a policy phased out in the Eisenhower administration.

Gavan Duffy

I thought somebody might challenge that. Right on, Bill!

To save everyone else the hassle of scrolling to the bottom of this, I previously wrote “… it is a failure of reason not to recognize that the decimation of Africa’s population (to cite just one example) is not in my long-term, flourishing self-interest. And it is a failure of reason not to recognize that an inequitable distribution of power (i.e., the potential for exercising force) is not in my long-term self-interest.”

Then Bill replied, “It would be very pleasant to believe these things. On what basis, Dennis, do you assert them? What’s your reasoning?” So, okay, what’s the reasoning behind such grandiose expansions of my self-interest? Brace yourselves! BUT, before we start, understand that I and even that selfish Dick guy are far too selfless and enlightened to be moved by any of this.

These are simply arguments you can use with Republican yahoos. As I said, I think the rapid and likely unstoppable expansion of globalization is a critical factor in the expanded reach of my self-interest. The net results of globalization may thus far have served mainly to bolster my privileged economic position, but can I reasonably expect that I and my children and my grandchildren (assuming my two picky daughters eventually find mates) will continue to be immune to the catastrophic difficulties “over there?”

Epidemics such as AIDS are now global issues. The pace of international travel means that massive epidemics in one place constitute a threat in every place. And don’t count on a magic vaccine to save us. Those millions of HIV-positive Africans are generating mutated strains of the virus faster than medical science can run.

Combating such epidemics not only makes good sense from a defensive self-interest standpoint, it can also yield some surprising benefits. For example, I saw a news report recently about the discovery of two long-time African sex workers (Sudanese, I think) who not only did not have AIDS but who, alone among all their co-workers, were shown not to be HIV-positive – despite having had unprotected sex with probably hundreds of infected men. Researchers were very excitedly trying to find out whether there was an antibody or something else in the women’s chemistry that was giving them immunity.

This is potentially the human variation of the benefits we have historically derived from ethno-botanists’ research into the medicinal uses of various plants in far-away places. Bottom line: that’s not just a bunch of poor black people over there, that’s a storehouse of ancient genetic diversity that could benefit all of us in ways we can’t even imagine. Saving them is in my self-interest.

Then there are the issues of poverty, starvation and government corruption. Not my problem? Those conditions create ideal breeding grounds for drug, crime and terrorist syndicates. Anyone can recognize that it would be dangerous if a neighboring state were taken over in some way by organized or disorganized crime, but it ought to be clear even to Republican reasoning that today all the world is, potentially at least, our neighbor.

Is it reasonable to assume that only Muslim Africans might be inclined to terrorism? Can we reasonably assume that none of the rest are ever going to violently object to the fact that the US appears willing to bomb people but not to feed them? Poverty is the ultimate systemic threat facing humanity. Even the former head of the IMF, Michael Camdessus, has been quoted as saying that the widening gaps between rich and poor nations are potentially socially explosive. If the poor are left hopeless, he said, poverty will undermine societies through confrontation, violence and civil disorder. People will not fade away quietly, and in one way or another we will all be sucked into their despair.

Finally, there is the economic aspect. The self-interest case may be a bit weaker here, but it’s legitimate and likely to become more significant in the near future. Even excluding South Africa, U.S. agricultural exports to sub-Saharan Africa reached almost $600 million between 1990 and 1996 – well above the total to all of Central and Eastern Europe. More significantly, Africa is also an important source of strategic minerals and other natural resources, and an important supplier of oil to the U.S. (projected to increase to 25% by 2015). It would be no simple job maintaining access to those resources in the midst of civil chaos and terrorist strikes.

Africa’s real economic potential, however, lies in its human resources – as producers and consumers. With some other countries, notably China, emerging as economic powerhouses, US exports are going to be facing increasingly stiff competition. The US already is grappling with a growing and unsustainable trade deficit. The prospects for larger African markets may look pretty weak today, but growing rather than diminishing prosperity there defintely would be in our future economic self-interest.

Ah… it’s past midnight, I’m running out of steam here, and I haven’t even got to the second part – the inequitable distribution of power thing. It seems logical to me that a broad and equitable distribution of power tends to create a far more stable and resilient system than does a concentration of power. (The bigger they are, the harder they fall.) And it logically would seem to be in my self-interest that the institutions I rely on be stable and resilient. I would also reason that that this is true whether you’re talking about political, economic or military power – or at least I would try to reason that out if I weren’t so tired. How about if we let one of our comrades tackle the reasoning on this one? And if nobody agrees with me, I’m going to take steps to revoke every one of your Wobbly memberships.

Dennis Fitzgerald