Today is April 27th. On this date in 4977 B.C., the universe was created. At least, that’s what 17th century German astronomer Johannes Kepler calculated. So Happy Birthday, Universe! If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have anywhere to exist, which is the bulk of what I do. Also on this date, in 1773, British Parliament passed the Tea Act, setting in motion a chain of events that led to the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773. The protest was vastly more successful than subsequent counter-protest, Occupy Crumpets. On this date in 1791, Samuel B. Morse was born. Morse once famously said “…. .-! / — .- -.. . / -.– — ..- / .-.. — — -.-!” Truly a touching sentiment. And finally, today is National Hairball Awareness Day which may sound gross, but is a lot less so than National Hairball Self -Awareness Day, which was predicted by the Mayans. Consider this an Open Thread . Republicans prepare contempt citation against Eric Holder | CBS News “House Republicans investigating the Fast and Furious scandal have gotten the go-ahead by their party leaders to pursue a contempt citation against Attorney General Eric Holder, senior congressional aides told CBS News.” Jon Stewart Mocks N.C. Democrats | Free Beacon “Daily Show host Jon Stewart mocked the state of the Democratic Party in North Carolina Thursday, between the trial of former presidential candidate John Edwards and the ongoing sexual harassment scandal in the North Carolina state Democratic Party:” First Signs of a Real Obama Backlash? | PJ Tatler “Barack Obama, meanwhile, is oblivious to all this. He keeps on pushing government as the be all end all solution to everything. A new poll out suggests that this attitude is going to catch up with him.” Top Ten Rejected NPR Headlines | Ace of Spades HQ NPR asks, “Is Slow Growth Actually Good For The Economy?” Ace serves up a list of ten rejected NPR headlines of equal absurdity. Today’s Word of the Day comes via Merriam-Webster. patagium (puh-TAY-jee-um): noun 1. the fold of skin connecting the forelimbs and hind limbs of some tetrapods (as flying squirrels) 2. the fold of skin in front of the main segments of a bird’s wing
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Daily Links – April 27, 2012
As it becomes more and more evident that Mitt Romney will be the Republican presidential nominee, a strange thing is happening; strange as in outlandish, but not surprising. For the past year or so, the liberal media has been panting for his nomination as if they were in his employ. He couldn’t have hired more efficient hit men to belittle his rivals or besmirch their reputations. But, as we have seen many times before, this honeymoon is about to come to an abrupt end when they will turn on him faster than warm mayonnaise. This of course will be explained away by noting that Romney will be “running to the right” in the general election, and will thus be transformed from a smooth and articulate business executive into a numbskulled, knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. And without fail, he will be labeled with the most damning words in the liberal lexicon: incurious and un-nuanced. He will be subjected to various and sundry spelling and geography tests by the same folks who got the vapors over Dan Quayle’s “potatoe,” yet batted nary an eyelash over Barack Obama’s “57 states.” Yes, you can bet that the keyboards of these paragons of journalism will be working overtime reworking their Mitt bios. Which caused me to wonder: what if today’s leading lights of liberal punditry were to describe some our first presidents and apply their poison pens thusly? Come to think of it, the following blurbs can probably already be found right in your children’s history books. George Washington : A Southern aristocrat who was born to the purple yet cloaked himself in the same false humility as his namesakes in the Bush family, he was purported to be so honest as to have confessed to chopping down a cherry tree, and so athletic that he threw a silver dollar across the Potomac River. Yet our sources have revealed that it was his starving slaves who ravaged the tree, while the tossing of currency was an apocryphal example of his noted profligacy. While he was famous for promoting his own extreme religious views, as a general he launched a unilateral and unprovoked sneak attack against German immigrants sold into military service by their greedy princes, on their holiest day of the year. Best Attribute: Was said to be a prolific dancer and an able horseman. Most outrageous quote: “The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference — they deserve a place of honor with all that’s good.” John Adams : Was primarily known as the author of the Alien and Sedition Acts; the most nefarious legislation the nation had ever known until surpassed by the even more restrictive Patriot Act of 2001. Was admitted to the bar after graduating Harvard, although there is no record of his having published anything in the Law Review. His most famous case was the acquittal of three soldiers who gunned down an unarmed African American community organizer. Was also notable for having appointed John Marshall as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, who, in the famous case, Marbury v. Madison , somehow decided that the Courts should be able to decide the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress. This decision has, of course, subsequently been disclaimed by more qualified Constitutional experts. Best Attribute: Although he was self-admittedly “obnoxious and disliked,” it was nonetheless rumored that most of his pre-presidential decisions were made by his wife. Most outrageous quote: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion… Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.” Thomas Jefferson : Best known as the author of the Declaration of Independence through which he established the separation of Church and State. And although he was a notorious enemy of a strong federal government, he nonetheless expanded U.S. power by seizing nearly one million square miles of land that was rightfully the property of Native Americans, via the so-called Louisiana Purchase. Best Attribute: His record of speaking against slavery while owning hundreds of slaves himself, was greatly mitigated by his marriage to his household slave Sally Hemings, with whom he had six children; subsequently freeing all of them and providing for them in his will. Most outrageous quote: “But with respect to future debt; would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare in the constitution they are forming that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself can validly contract more debt, than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19 years?” Note: All biographical content is the responsibility of the anonymous authors, although any inaccuracies may well be accounted for on next week’s New York Times Corrections page.
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Past Presidential Punditry
Apparently the soaring national debt and the threat of a nuclear Iran are not enough to occupy the government’s time, because the Obama administration is pushing to force Westchester County, N.Y., to create more low-income housing, in order to mix and match classes and races to fit the government’s preconceptions. Behind all this busy work for bureaucrats and ideologues is the idea that there is something wrong if a community does not have an even or random distribution of various kinds of people. This arbitrary assumption is that the absence of evenness or randomness — whether in employment, housing or innumerable other situations — shows a “problem” that has to be “corrected.” No speck of evidence is considered necessary for this assumption to prevail at any level of government, including the Supreme Court of the United States. No one has to show the existence, much less the prevalence, of an even or random distribution of different segments of the population — in any country, anywhere in the world, or at any period of history. Nothing is more common than for people to sort themselves out when it comes to residential housing, whether by class, race or other factors. When there was a large Jewish population living on New York’s lower east side, a century ago, Jews did not live at random among themselves. Polish Jews had their neighborhoods, Rumanian Jews theirs, and so on. Meanwhile German Jews lived uptown. In Chicago, when Eastern European Jews began moving into German Jewish neighborhoods, German Jews began moving out. It was much the same story in Harlem or in other urban ghettoes, where blacks did not live at random among themselves. Landmark scholarly studies by E. Franklin Frazier in the 1930s showed in detail how different neighborhoods within the ghettoes had people of different educational and income levels, with different male/female ratios and different ways of life living in different places. There was nothing random about it. Within Chicago’s black community, the delinquency rate ranged from more than 40 percent in some black neighborhoods to less than 2 percent in other black neighborhoods. People sort themselves out. None of this was peculiar to blacks or Jews, or to the United States. When emigrants from Scotland went to Australia, the Scottish highlanders settled separately from the Scottish lowlanders. So did emigrants from northern Italy and southern Italy. Separate residential patterns that are visible to the naked eye, when the people are black and white, are also pervasive among people who physically all look alike. Charles Murray’s eye-opening new book, Coming Apart , shows in detail how different segments of the white American population not only live separately from each other but have very different ways of life — and are growing increasingly remote from one another in beliefs and behavior. None of this matters to politicians and ideologues who are hell-bent to mix and match people according to their own preconceptions. Moreover, like many things that the government does, it does residential integration more crudely than when people sort themselves out. Back in the days when E. Franklin Frazier was doing his scholarly studies of the composition and expansion of black ghettoes, he found the most educated and cultured elements of the black communities living on the periphery of these communities. It was these kinds of people who typically led the expansion of the black community into the surrounding white communities. By contrast, government programs often take dysfunctional families from high crime ghetto neighborhoods and put them down in the midst of middle-class neighborhoods by subsidizing their housing. Whether these middle-class neighborhoods are already either predominantly black or predominantly white, the residents are often outraged at the increased crime and other behavior problems inflicted on them by politicians and bureaucrats. But their complaints usually fall on deaf ears. People convinced of their own superior wisdom and virtue have no time to spare for what other people want, whether in housing or health care or a whole range of other things.
But just what is it that Günther Grass, the most famous living German novelist, thinks “must be said”? The closest he comes to clearly saying what must be said (what he says must be said) appears to occur here, toward the end of a poem he published a week ago and which already has stirred up a storm of controversy: I’ve had enough of Western hypocrisy [Grass writes] and I wish that many will want … a permanent, freely-accorded control of Israel’s nuclear power as well as Iran’s nuclear installations… Even for German verse, you have to admit it is heavy handed; thus the original: …weil ich der Heuchelei des Westens Uberdrussig bin; zuden ist zu hoffen, Es mogen sich viele vom Schweigen befreien […] dass eine unbehinderte und permanente Kontrolle des israelischen atomaren Potentials und der iranischen Atomanlagen durch eine internationale Instanz von den Regiereungen beider Lander augelassen wird. All right, Goethe it is not, nor Remarque, nor indeed is it any good against any measure of comparison. For some reason, Mr. Grass, who one would think would know better, feels compelled to put into prosaic “verse,” better suited for political platforms or resolutions written by committees, a demand that both Israel and Iran submit their nuclear weapons and installations to international inspection and control ( eine internationale Instanz ). On its face, nothing controversial. It is sort of silly, and sort of embarrassing for a man of Grass’s moral stature to descend into such stupid polemics, but on the surface, let us think like liberals for a moment, like Grass, and consider: Why not call for international controls, or at least inspections? As a concept? As an abstract idea relative to the pursuit of a world at peace? Indeed why not? We, the United States, proposed this sort of thing in the early years of the nuclear age. We offered to bury the nuclear hatchets and all, proposed an international atomic control commission ( ja, eine Instanz ). Who would not have? We knew what we had unleashed, and we wished we could do something to control it. Observe that, at the time, it was because we understood the morality of using the bomb to end the war with Japan — we understood what an awful choice we had made, the destruction of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them civilians, against the destruction of even more hundreds of thousands of people, at least a hundred thousand American fighting men and far more Japanese, including civilians, than were doomed by the attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. That would have been the price of an amphibious invasion of Japan. This is what happens in wartime. You do not choose between the good and the bad. You choose between the bad and the worse. Men hardened, but not corrupted morally, by such choices, could suggest, in all sincerity, that the best next thing to do was invent an international nuclear regime that would pre-empt such awful choices in future conflicts. At the suggestion of that great original, Bernard Baruch, the Truman administration offered an international nuclear-energy control regime in the late 1940s, but the international communist movement led by Stalinist Russia rejected it. They said we were trying to prevent them from having the bomb, which we already had. They smelled an imperialist plot. But their olfactory organs deceived them; more exactly, their ideological organs deceived their olfactory organs: they could not conceive of a regime — in their minds the bourgeois-liberal, formally democratic U.S. — offering such a deal because it was so outside their concept of what you do with power and the instruments of power. This is the origin of the long and dreary history of arms control negotiations, wherein we kept trying to understand why the totalitarian communistic enemy refused to see things as we did and proceeded to negotiate with ourselves into a position of weakness. Fortunately, it ended well because there were persons in positions of responsibility, including notably Ronald Reagan and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who kept their nerve and saw the essential im morality to which the arms-control “process,” culminating in the aptly named doctrine of mutual assured destruction, had brought us. It was immoral, as the political philosopher Albert Wohlstetter pointed out very simply, because it said, “We’ll let you kill our people but then we’ll kill your people.” But the story did not end there, just as it had not begun with the nuclear age. The problem of arms negotiations, whether the arms in question are battleships or sling shots, concerns primarily regimes, not arms. This is something a certain mindset peculiar to liberal-democratic regimes finds difficult to grasp, because it refuses obstinately to view regimes as motivated by the pursuit of power. It insists that all regimes fundamentally want to share power, not grasp it and monopolize it. This leads to the fallacy, and some would argue corruption, of “moral equivalence.” The sure sign of the moral-equivalent man is his sanctimonious tone. Here is an example: If my country sells one more submarine to Israel one capable of delivering nuclear warheads on [targets] where there is no evidence of atomic weapons … I say what must be said Again, if the leaden verses interest you, a few lines may be perused: Jetz aber, weil aus meinem Land das von ureigenen Verbrechen, die ohne Vergleich sind, Mal um Mal engeholt und zur Rede gestellt wird wiederum und rein geschaftsmassig, wenn auch, mit flinker Lippe als Wiedergutmachung deklariert ein weiterest U-Boot nach Israel geliefert warden soll, dessent Speziallitat darin besteht, allesvernichtende Sprengkopfe dorthin lenken zu konnen, wo die Existenz einer einzigen Atombombe unbewiesen ist, doch als Befurchtung von Beweiskraft sein will, sage ich, was gesagt warden muss. Yes, I say what must be said — despite the weight of the crimes my country committed, etc., I say what must be said about our selling Israel nuclear subs ( U-Boot nach Israel ) because we are mixing up business deals and “reparations” guilt ( Wiedergutmachung ) — and nothing satisfies the moral-equivalent man more than wallowing in his own guilt. Dubious as poetry, is this at least sensible as an idea? He is stating that one more sub sold to Israel will be one too many for him, and he will have to “say what must be said.” But why would one be one too many? Israel is not party to the non-proliferations regimes that the U.S. and other nations have promoted over the years, and there are good reasons for this. Israel developed a nuclear deterrent quite a few years ago to counter the possibility that eventually its enemies would develop military power capable of annihilating it. Meaning, of course, not just the hardware but the strategic know-how. Israel always has been outgunned and out-numbered, and has relied on superior strategy, ultimately resting on a will to live that is stronger than its enemies’ will to kill, to win the several wars it has fought for survival since the liberation war of 1948-49. But Israelis, including — especially, perhaps — its tough and arrogant generals, know that in war you can never assume anything. Indeed, this lesson was learned the hard way during the 1973 or Yom Kippur war, when an excess of self-satisfaction, or complacency, gave the encircled country a scare it would not soon forget. Israel’s policy makers grasped what ours did in the 1950s, namely, that it is precisely the side least likely to use the ultimate deterrent weapon that most needs it, precisely because it is the other side that is prone to use whatever advantage it may obtain. But, pace the dangerous fallacies inherent in our years-long arms-control obsessions, it is also because we ultimately recognized how morally abhorrent it is to base a strategy on an exchange of hostages involving the entire populations of several nations that we always sought to stay ahead strategically and tactically: the idea is to be able to keep fighting and winning without having to resort to ultimate deterrents. Günther Grass is being harshly criticized in both Israel and Germany as a lousy poet and a shoddy thinker. He is a fine writer and a man of moral stature, one of the generation that grew up under Nazism (in the Polish city of Gdansk, called Danzig by the Germans) who knew he had to say what had to be said about his country and his neighbors. His youthful enlistment in the Waffen-SS has been held against him, but he was scarcely out of childhood then, and what is more peculiar, and arguably reprehensible, is that he hid this biographical fact until late in his life. However, he is a writer not a celebrity, and he felt, one supposes, that what he wrote was what mattered. What does matter more, though, is what Grass’s stance says about his view of Israel, more broadly of the problem of defending oneself in a world gone badly and irredeemably wrong. This problem — the problem of evil — is scarcely new, and since Grass knows this, one is forced to consider that he thinks Israel is different from other nations, and ought to deal with the eternal problem of evil differently from other nations, to wit, by not taking measures to ward it off. Israel is different, very obviously so, from the nations in its region. It is a democracy, a welfare state (one that works pretty well), a place of freedom where children are loved and nurtured and taught to be doctors and musicians, not suicide bombers and haters. Grass in his poem suggests this nation is more dangerous, is more likely to kill innocents and bring on a world nuclear war, than the other country in his poem, Iran, which is run by men who have repeatedly promised to rain fire on Israel and destroy it utterly. What really must be said, or asked rather, is whether Günther Grass represents a trend toward Israel-hatred in European literary and intellectual circles, or whether his is an isolated case; or again whether this is a form of acquiescence toward the power of Islamic radicalism somewhat, or somehow I should say, comparable to the attitude toward the Soviet Union many in Europe took a few years ago, when they felt they had no alternative but to compliantly accept the communist tyranny’s mastery of the continent if not the world. It is surely observable that there has been some of both lately, acquiescence and hatred. You see and hear it in European universities that banish Israeli colleagues, for example, and in European countries’ “soft” diplomacy toward the hard problems of the Middle East. You see it in the self-censorship that prevents many in Europe from speaking truly about the various threats, some in the own midst, some outside their borders, to their survival as a distinct civilization composed of specific, if complex, national cultures. On the other hand, you also see the horror provoked by the most flagrant and savage flashes of these threats, such as the recent murders in Toulouse that targeted Jews (and especially Jewish children), as well as (I presume) apostates, young men of Islamic background serving the French state in its military. What must be asked today is whether the shock that followed this atrocity will bring with it a view of the kind of world we live in that will predominate, in the old world, over the view represented by the Nobel Prize winner and German man of letters, Günther Grass.
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The Grass Affair: Thinking Clearly in Our Times
No one had heard of Eric Hoffer until he published The True Believer (1951), a set of reflections about mass movements and those attracted to them. He was also known as the Longshoreman Philosopher. From 1943 to 1967 he worked under Harry Bridges, the labor boss on the San Francisco waterfront. After The True Believer he wrote a number of books, mostly short, consisting of his articles or aphorisms. He became an adjunct professor at U.C. Berkeley at the time of the Free Speech movement and was interviewed by Eric Sevareid for CBS. He died in 1983, his age probably 85. But we know very little about his life before the mid-1930s. That is where the mystery comes in. We know that he moved to San Francisco soon after Pearl Harbor and rented a room in a low-rent district. There he wrote The True Believer , using a plank for a desk. Before that he was a migrant worker in California’s Central Valley—stoop labor picking fruit and vegetables. In 1934 he showed up at a federal homeless shelter in El Centro, California, close to the Mexican border. A trucker drove him there from San Diego, where he was so hungry that he ate cabbage “cow style” at a wholesale food depot. Where was he before San Diego? I believe there is great uncertainty. It may be that he had crossed the border from Mexico. Hoffer never married but about a decade ago his long-time lady friend, Lili Osborne, made his papers available to researchers at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. In summer visits to Hoover, I went through those papers and now my book, Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher is out ( published by the Hoover Institution Press). It includes photographs and some unpublished writing by Hoffer. Earlier, I interviewed Hoffer himself; both shortly before Ronald Reagan’s election and then a few months later. I also interviewed some of the few who knew him well, including Lili Osborne and her son Eric. Another close friend was Stacy Cole, a professor at a community college in Fremont. He was associated with Hoffer over a 15-year period. Also featured is Lili’s husband, Selden Osborne. He and Hoffer worked together as longshoremen and Hoffer called him a “true believer.” He was in the room with Hoffer when he died. Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at Hoover, was interested in Hoffer and compiled an index to his books. Once he asked me if I was writing a biography of Hoffer. I said that if you don’t know much about the first 35 years of a man’s life, “biography” may be a misnomer. Three books about Hoffer were published in his lifetime. The first, by Calvin Tomkins, was based on a New Yorker profile in 1967. Tomkins told me that when he interviewed Hoffer, “the things he said about his early life did sound quite shadowy, but he was a great talker and he made it all seem authentic.” James D. Koerner, with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, wrote a second book ( Hoffer’s America , 1973). Hoffer “plainly dislikes talking about his early life,” Koerner wrote. In fact, “quite a bit of it is simply unknown to him.” To a doctoral student, Hoffer said: “I am uninterested in my distant past. I have probably told everything worth telling.” Hoffer said he spent the first 20 years of his life in the Bronx. But everything he said could fit onto two pages. Nothing can be confirmed. He never gave his Bronx address, never went to school, identified no friends. He said he went blind for eight years, hence no school. Then he recovered his sight. Ancestry sites have turned up nothing and when Lili’s son Eric once told Hoffer that he felt like “hiring a genealogist in New York to look up your father,” whose name was Knut, Hoffer replied: “Are you sure you really want to know?” Like there was some dark stuff.…I don’t know. There’s stuff happened that he didn’t want anybody to know. He had a real casual and dreadful way of letting something slip. “Are you sure you want to know?” Hoffer spoke with a strong German accent. He told people that Knut came to New York from Al-sace-Lorraine. But young Eric went there, too, and found that their lilting accent was quite unlike Hoffer’s more guttural Bavarian. He tried looking through the “Ellis Island stuff” but could find no trace of Knut Hoffer. In a late notebook Hoffer wrote that young Eric believed him to be his father. Stephen Osborne, Eric’s older brother, agreed. But when I asked Eric Osborne himself for a comment at the time of Lili’s funeral, he said: “I guess I had better leave that unanswered. Both of those guys [Selden and Hoffer] are a part of me and I loved them both.” Young Eric agreed that Hoffer’s account of his early life didn’t add up. He thought Hoffer’s case might be comparable to that of B. Traven, the mysterious German author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , whose identity is still unknown. (B. Traven was a pen name.) But most significant was the response of Lili Osborne. She could be intimidating, and I worried that she might throw me out when I expressed skepticism about Hoffer’s early life. Instead she welcomed the idea and said she had always thought of him as an immigrant. She had no definite knowledge. She did say that “all we know about his early life is what he told us.” She also said that, although she had known Hoffer for 30 years, she never once met anyone from his earlier (pre- True Believer ) life. TO ME, THE CLINCHER CAME with a discovery about “Martha,” a German woman who supposedly came with Hoffer’s parents from Europe to the Bronx. As a child he slept in her bed, and when he went blind she guided him about. But in Hoffer’s early accounts of his life, for example in The Reporter in 1951, there is no Martha. She appears in 1957, in an article by Eugene Burdick, who later co-authored two best sellers, The Ugly American and Fail-Safe . Then Martha becomes a fixture in Hoffer’s later accounts. I believe she was a later invention. Lili also told me that when The True Believer manuscript was written but before publication, he submitted it to Rabbi Saul White in San Francisco for his approval. He was told “that he should proceed.” The fate of Israel became an obsession for Hoffer. The indications that he was Jewish are discussed in my book. One of the most striking is that he could speak Hebrew. He claimed that he learned it “on skid row in Los Angeles.” He was also familiar with German textbooks on botany and chemistry, and these, too, he studied on skid row. That is hard to believe. Stephen Osborne said that more important than the puzzles about Hoffer’s life is “what he wrote.” That is true. But we all like a mystery. The True Believer was not seen as a conservative book. But by the 1960s-especially after his Berkeley experiences-he became what we would call a neoconservative. Read any of Hoffer’s books (most are available from Hopewell Publishers in New Jersey). Hoffer took enormous trouble over his writing, sometimes rewriting ten times or more. The disappointment is that he never finished his book on intellectuals. He worked on it for years. But some of his thoughts are assembled in my chapter 8. A couple of examples: The intellectual knows with every fiber of his being that all men are not equal, and there are few things that he cares for less than a classless society. No matter how genuine the intellectual’s altruism, he regards the common man as a means. A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual’s sense of worth as an automated economy is a threat to the worker’s sense of worth. Any social order…which can function well with a minimum of leadership will be an anathema to the intellectual.
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The Mystery of Eric Hoffer
