Author: earlofhuntingdon

photo: scotti16ape via Flickr

David Brooks has become Deputy Dawg, protecting us from change. His metaphor for why change today should be slow, steady and restrained is “Humble Hound”. Naturally for Bobo, Humble Hound is a woman, protecting us, as it were, from her “opposite”, the boardroom lions:

They are superconfident, forceful and charismatic. They call for relentless transformational change.

Bobo uses that false choice in order to have us step away from a leader, a Democrat, of course, who might be too comfortable with risk, who sees the great things that need to be done and who swings for the centerfield wall in order to get them. Such leaders are too fond of acquisitions (of power or companies), of shifts in direction and changes in strategy.

Bobo fails to tell us that it was a Republican president and his usurping vice president who gave us eight years of high risk policies that have failed miserably. Impliedly, he tells us that it is Mr. Obama who is too fond of risk, who believes his own campaign rhetoric – all evidence to the contrary – and that he really means to impose noble changes.

In Bobo’s mind, the most likely place that would lead us is not into a better future for Middle America, a goal he could not seriously claim to advocate, but into the land of excessive tax burdens on the wealthy and excessive regulation on the businesses they control. Those are actions he does oppose with consistency and fervor.

What sort of leadership ought we to have instead? A cautious, plodding Humble Hound, who can’t chew her gum and walk at the same time without constantly going off balance and correcting herself.

She spends more time seeing than analyzing. Analytic skills differ modestly from person to person, but perceptual skills vary enormously. Anybody can analyze, but the valuable people can pick out the impermanent but crucial elements of a moment or effectively grasp a context. This sort of perception takes modesty; strong personalities distort the information field around them. This sort of understanding also takes patience. As the Japanese say, don’t just study a topic. Get used to it. Live in it for a while.

Throughout, Bobo uses the feminine pronoun for his preferred Democratic leadership style. He might claim he did it for “balance” (an abused Beltway fetish), or because his source used it. What seems more likely is that he is playing a Freudian gender game and slamming the female stereotype, an act his patrons’ base seems to enjoy, while poking a stick at Mrs. Clinton (who lost her bid to be president) and Mr. Obama (who won it, but doesn’t know what to do with it).

The absurdity of Mr. Brooks’ arguments is usually plain. It is especially so here, along with his not so tongue-in-cheek slam at women.

The caution we should avoid is proposing too timid solutions to our long term economic woes and too timid responses to an opposing political party that no longer wants to govern America wisely, only to dominate it exclusively. The change we should fear is not adequately changing our health care and insurance industries, which are bankrupting Americans emotionally, morally and financially. The risk takers we should fear are those who govern Wall Street, and those who would throw out the Constitution because they have convinced themselves that they can wear the Ring and use it wisely. The only thing we need fear from from Mr. Brooks is that someone listens to him.

Pope Benedict (photo: migul via Flickr)

As reported in the Guardian and the New York Times, the Holy Mother Church thinks that exposing and criticizing the church’s cover up of decades of predatory sexual abuse by priests – involving the rape and abuse of children, men and women – is comparable to the Holocaust. That’s the comparison made in a Good Friday sermon by the pope’s personal preacher. The church later denied that his views were “official”, but then published them in the official Vatican newspaper.

The church made that astonishing comparison – that exposing its priests’ crimes and their cover up was comparable to the murder of six million Jews – and nailed it to the cathedral door with the claim that the observation was first made by an anonymous Jew. That would seem to substitute one traditional scapegoat for another in a way that honors neither. The comparison was immediately assailed by representatives of child abuse victims and world Jewry.

The enormity of that comparison seems designed to distract from the church’s longstanding cover-up – and enabling – of the crimes of its priests (and presumably those higher in the hierarchy). Tristero and Digby develop that argument. It is such a whip-and-lash, cross-on-your-back PR defense that the church must expect that worse revelations will quickly follow. They are probably right.

On its first day, an abuse hotline in Germany received 4500 calls. Abuse scandals are widening in Austria, Brazil, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The US-based predatory sexual abuse scandal, which the Boson Globe covered in award-winning detail several years ago, continues to smolder. There are appeals for an end to enforced celibacy and for this pope to step down, an act of humility and contrition not seen in the Vatican since Gregory XII resigned in 1415. But that was over the politics of who should be pope, not about the abuse of his flock by the shepherd.

Scandal has come close to this pope in several ways. As Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict was chief enforcer of the faith from 1981-2005, and it would have been his office that dealt with predatory sexual abuse claims against priests from around the world. One of these was the abuse case of Father Murphy in Milwaukee. His brother, Georg Ratzinger, spent three decades as director of a choir school in Germany that is now involved in a physical abuse scandal. And Benedict was archbishop of Munich when a paedophile priest was reinstated in his parish there.

It will take more than a letter to abused Irish Catholics to clean this church’s stables and restore its credibility as a spiritual guide and as an influence for moral good. The work of thousands of its faithful and dedicated professionals and the hopes of its millions of parishioners and the communities they live in hang in the balance. One act of contrition, symbolic of the season, would be for this pope to step down and let his successor clean house.

We are like chameleons, we take our hue and the color of our moral character, from those who are around us.

— John Locke

On another thread, we had a heated discussion about the merits of David Margolis’ tenure as the DoJ’s top civil servant and chief fixer, its Atticus Finch or its Winston Wolf, depending on your grasp of the facts and your perspective. It focused on his role in neutering a much anticipated and long-delayed OPR report, one that heavily criticized the work of John Yoo and Jay Bybee, which gave the BushCheney administration the legal cover it sought for its program of torture.

That post is part of a well-documented series, in which Marcy Wheeler analyzed the politicization of the DoJ, and its continuing to shield itself and its former lawyers from their wrongful acts. In my opinion, that series also demonstrated the potential corruption of the Department of Justice, from chief law enforcer for the people of the United States to chief criminal defense law firm for the executive branch.

The narrow question about David Margolis’ role in limiting the impact of the OPR report was whether he was being “partisan” (in a GOP vs. Democratic way). Alternatively, was he simply protecting his agency from potentially grievous criticism, regardless of whether it came from the left or right? Or was he corrupting the standards government lawyers should be held to and enabling the corruption of our laws and our government?

There is a chorus of non-FDL responses to those questions. Jack Balkin’s, Justice Department Will Not Punish Yoo and Bybee Because Most Lawyers Are Scum Anyway, is a good primer, as is Dahlia Lithwick’s, Torture Bored: How we’ve erased the legal lines around torture and replaced them with nothing. For more pointed criticism, there is, The Margolis Memo, by Scott Horton; David Margolis is Wrong, by David Luban, and The OPR Report: this era’s “Hiroshima”, by James Fallows.

The linked sources cite to the Margolis memo itself, to the lengthy OPR report, and to criticism in support of it. Marcy Wheeler’s, We all benefited” from Margolis’ tenure, cites the most recent praise for Margolis: a letter from “a bunch of former DOJ bigwigs”, most of whom were involved with or benefited from (obtained lucratively non-DoJ employment or stayed out of jail) Yoo and Bybee’s authorization of torture and Margolis’ “reserve” in characterizing its consequences.

But this is Sunday. It’s time for the comics section, or at least the tradmed’s talking heads. They are often funnier if less informative than Jon Stewart. So here, with apologies to Yes, Minister, is my caricature of Mr. Margolis – and his peers at other federal agencies:

The Art of the Master Bureaucrat

The art of being an apolitical master bureaucrat – Bureaucratus maximus, a species similar to but which does not interbreed with Cheney gofuckyourselfis – is to be apolitical.

Bureaucratus‘ chief attribute is to be able to read the tea leaves, anticipate the tide, forecast the approach and direction of the political storm and to go with the flow as if another priority, a contrary practice or a set of facts never existed and could not possibly exist.

As with other highly adaptable species – such as the Partner romanticus that means absolutely, positively everything they say (just not for very long) – Bureaucratus anticipates what their bosses want and provides it with glee, leaving the limelight to others. It avoids the highest offices and formal rewards, preferring the underbrush and the leavings of top predators. Change the boss or priorities and its glee remains, but Bureaucratus produces different droppings, as if an elk had become a goose, a trait that makes tracking them through their dense habitats frustrating.

Bureaucratus is a master of the informal and the arcane. It knows by heart the paths others follow (without themselves being aware of it) and the associations they make as they travel, mate and forage or hunt. It can see the connections as if they were lit threads, which makes its own tracking ability formidable.

The crisscross and doublecross are Bureaucratus‘ usual means of interaction with others, but never with the boss, an exception most bosses confuse with direct and honest dealing. Its habitat is any large bureaucracy or other jungle. Unlike a host of endangered species – examples of Attorney honestus and Congresscritter competentus have not been spotted near the Beltway for several seasons – Bureaucratus‘ population is flourishing.

Bureaucratus maximus, especially its expression in Addingtonitis davidicus, has a remarkable ability to memorize the law, without ever learning what it means. To wit:

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.

– John Locke

Tags: David Margolis, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, OPR, Torture

Howard Zinn (photo: Left~Lens via Flickr)

Labor advocate, historian of the unprivileged, author and activist Professor Howard Zinn is dead at 87. The New York Times covers it here.

His book, A People’s History of the United States, is a multi-million copy best seller. The Times is quick to characterize the book as a “leftist alternative to mainstream texts”. It certainly challenged capital’s comfortable myths in a way that school textbooks, which have to pass muster with rightwing Texas housewives and fundamentalists, and their collegiate analogues often do not.

It introduced millions to the economics of slavery, how the American economy North and South depended on it since the 17th century and how it lasted a hundred years after the American Civil War. Columbus Day was never the same once you knew that within decades of his landing on Hispaniola, the island’s native population was gone owing to disease and European predation.

The book also introduced them to the Trail of Tears, one of many immense dislocations of the American Indian and an example of how the United States government violated every treaty it has ever signed with them. It made explicable a tagline on a t-shirt, showing Geronimo and a small armed band: “Fighting Terrorists Since 1492.”

Howard Zinn introduced his readers to the economics of waging war, never more appropriate since the start of the current “Global War on Terror”. War is America’s and mankind’s most profitable industry. Mr. Zinn put into historical context such things as the agony of First World War poets, such as Wilfred Owen and his Dulce et Decorum Est, and double Medal of Honor winner Marine Major Gen. Smedley Butler’s characterization that “war is a racket” and his allegations of a Wall Street plot to overthrow FDR’s administration.

Finally, he introduced his readers to the history and propaganda of the American labor movement. Howard Zinn was a longshoreman, a bombadier in the Second World War, a lecturer at historically black liberal arts Spelman College in Atlanta in the 1950’s, and a tenured professor of history at Boston University. He brought his experience as well as insight and scholarship to a subject most Americans are indoctrinated to ignore.

He opened his readers’ eyes both to Andrew Carnegie’s famed libraries and Endowment for Peace, as well as the brutal strike-breaking techniques used at his Homestead, PA, steel mill. They were routine. John D. Rockefeller and his son used even more brutal methods, including machine guns, to suppress silver mine strikers in Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914.

Like his contemporary, medievalist Norman F. Cantor, it would be fair to say he practiced “advocacy history”. Dr. Cantor, who died in 2004 and whose best known book was Civilization in the Middle Ages, once criticized a dearly departed colleague, calling him,

“verbose, disorganized, and often erroneous,”…a “tedious Brit” whose “lavish patronage of Marxists and British and French cronies” was a disgrace to the discipline.

Likewise, the Times’ death notice attempts to bracket Dr. Zinn with this quote from Kennedy family advocate and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.:

Even liberal historians were uneasy with Professor Zinn, who taught for many years at Boston University. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once said: “I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.”

The Times gives Mr. Zinn this rebuttal:

“There’s no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete,” Professor Zinn said. “My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times.”

I think he would also agree with Norman Cantor’s response to criticism that his remarks about his departed colleague were undecorous:

“There are a million copies of my medieval books in print, but I regard myself as a cultural critic as well as a historian. I’m particularly concerned with the training of historians, and who trains them, and how that impacts on the general culture.” Later,…he offered a more personal explanation of his acerbity: “The best writing, for me, comes . . . when I have sustained an unpleasant shock . . . or insults and abuse from a group of academic colleagues. Then I write to affirm my own dignity, humanity, and autonomy.”

Howard Zinn challenged orthodoxy, he challenged comfortable perspectives and asked awkward questions. More importantly, he made YOU ask “Why?”, something many of us stop doing after the age of three. His model for doing so made it too uncomfortable to accept a simple, parental-like dismissal of, “Because I said so.” If that makes Wall Street and would be friends like Mr. Obama feel uncomfortable, it should. I think a man who believed that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” would be proud of that legacy. I hope he is. Goodbye, Howard.