Reason Magazine - Staff

Who's on Second?

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:00:00 EDT

Politicians rarely give honest answers, especially during presidential election years. So rather than ask them what they think their party's chances are, you need to find creative ways to wring the truth out of them. My favorite torture implement is the veep test.

Put simply: How many likely running mates have publicly stated they're not interested? If the answer is "a lot," it's a sure bet they expect their guy to lose, regardless of what they say to the press.

On the Democratic side so far, Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) has said he's not interested in being vice president, but only after his disastrous intro of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) in Bristow, Virginia, this June. The scandal plagued—and likely baby daddy—John Edwards has also taken himself out of the running. That's about it, except for Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland's lame Gen. Sherman impression.

Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) has said he'd accept. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson double-crossed his political patrons to have his own shot, earning him the nickname "Judas" from James Carville. The senior senator from Delaware is Biden his time and waiting for that phone call from his friend Barack. Even Obama's archrival Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) would like to help out—by muscling her way onto the ticket.

Republicans are reacting rather differently. Their most likely future standard bearer, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, has publicly taken his name out of consideration. So has Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. And Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman—who might as well be a Republican—has declared himself a non-candidate. Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) economic advisor, the former snooping Hewlett-Packard CEO and political neophyte Carly Fiorina, stands a decent chance of landing the number two slot at this point—unless McCain is willing to make nice with hated rival Mitt Romney in exchange for an infusion of cash.

The veep test is only a measure of the current conventional wisdom, however, and does not necessarily herald good news for the Democrats or, for that matter, those Republicans currently telling McCain to take a hike. The great Whig statesman Daniel Webster famously refused the vice presidential nomination because he did not want to be buried before he was dead, a sentiment that cost him the presidency.

In 1968, Richard Nixon settled on Maryland Gov. Spiro Agnew after being waved off by several would-be veeps. But then the great Greek hope helped to secure key Southern states in a bruising, close election. Former President Gerald Ford effectively turned his rival Ronald Reagan down with talk of a "co-presidency" in 1980. Reagan went on to beat Jimmy Carter like a red-headed peanut farmer without him.

Especially in a tight election, the veep pick can be a much-needed wild card. But the pick doesn't always work out the way a presidential candidate might expect. In 1988, Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen turned out to be a great choice for the Democratic ticket. In fact, after he made horsemeat out of Dan Quayle in their debate, many people openly asked why he wasn't at the top of the ticket. It only made Massachusetts miracle worker Michael Dukakis look smaller by comparison.

Candidates pick running mates either to help nail down a state or to send a message. Lately, the win-a-state consideration has fallen out of favor, but maybe, in this message heavy year, retail politics will make a comeback. The parties are wisely holding conventions in Colorado and Minnesota, purple states that might go either way in the general election. All these states need is a good push. Perhaps each party's nominee will take a lesson from this in selecting their understudies.

Jeremy Lott is the author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency.

I'm OK--You're a Hypocrite

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 EST

Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, by Peter Schweizer, New York: Doubleday, 258 pages, $22.95

The leftist linguist Noam Chomsky has been a strident opponent of American foreign policy since his days protesting the Vietnam War. More than once he has called the Pentagon "the most hideous institution on this earth." He has spoken out in favor of the state's efforts to curb "corporate power" or to break up large estates by severely taxing inheritances. He's the academic equivalent of a rock star, his ideas promoted by rock bands from Pearl Jam to Bad Religion.

According to Do As I Say (Not As I Do) author and Hoover Institution hand Peter Schweizer, he is also a raging hypocrite. He once told an interviewer for National Public Radio that he didn't want to discuss "the house, the children, personal life—anything like that." According to Chomsky, "This is not about a person. It's about ideas and principles." Schweizer has a different take. He argues that Chomsky's life is strikingly inconsistent with his stated ideals, and he marshals copious evidence to back up that claim:

• Chomsky joined the faculty of MIT not as a member of the Linguistics Department but as part of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. Lab professors were blessed with lighter teaching loads, higher salaries, and extensive support staff. The only catch was that their work, reports Schweizer, "was funded entirely by the Pentagon and a few multinational corporations." The professor saw no problem in railing against the entire defense establishment while he drew a salary from same and conducted research that the generals found useful.

• The MIT mandarin often identifies with the working class and calls himself a socialist, but he acquired one home in Lexington, Massachusetts, valued at $850,000 and another estate in Wellfleet worth at least $1.2 million. The Wellfleet home is smack dab in the middle of a state park, and any further developments are prohibited by law. The radical historian Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, is one of the few neighbors who could afford to buy in.

• Chomsky is dead set against tax havens and has railed against trusts as tools for the rich to perpetuate structural inequality. And yet, "A few years back he went to Boston's venerable white-shoe law firm Palmer and Dodge and, with the help of a tax attorney specializing in 'income-tax planning,' set up an irrevocable trust to protect his assets against Uncle Sam." When questioned about this, Chomsky told Schweizer, "I don't apologize for putting aside money for my children and grandchildren."

The author replies with what becomes a well worn refrain by the end of the book: that Chomsky "offered no explanation for why he condemns others who are equally proud of their provision for their children and who try to protect their assets from Uncle Sam."

It's trite but true: If you go looking for hypocrisy, you'll usually find it. Moralists and moralizers of every stripe make for particularly plump targets, because they often fail to live up to their creeds. This should not be surprising, but Schweizer often treats liberal hypocrisy as though it is shocking. A little subtlety would have made Schweizer's argument more appealing, if not more persuasive.

An introductory chapter ("The Do-As-I-Say Liberals") and a conclusion ("The End of Liberal Hypocrisy") serve as bookends to 11 character studies of influential left-wing thinkers, activists, and politicians, from "Gloria Steinem: Hopeless Romantic, Dependent Female, Serial Monogamist" to "Ralph Nader: Bourgeois Materialist, Stock Manipulator, and Tyrannical Sweatshop Boss." Like many prosecutors, Schweizer is willing to take the let's-see-what-sticks approach, in which a) you shape the facts to play to the jury and b) you lump questionable charges together with more rigorous assertions to bolster the overall case in the minds of impressionable readers.

In the case of the lefty filmmaker Michael Moore, the back cover of the book features the orotund sage from Flint's pious declaration that "I don't own a single share of stock." Below the quote is an official looking financial disclosure form that appears to cast doubt on the statement. Shares in a number of companies are listed, including Eli Lilly and Company, Lucent Technologies, and Boeing. The 50 shares of Halliburton stock are highlighted in yellow, as is the signature of "Michael Moore." Intended message: Michael Moore is a liar.

Moore may well be lying about his own financial dealings, but this form doesn't prove that the author of Downsize This! owns a single share of stock as part of his private holdings. The allegedly damning document isn't a list of Moore's assets—they're the assets of a tax-exempt foundation established and maintained by Moore and his wife Kathleen Glynn. As Schweizer explains inside the book, "The foundation allows them to donate funds tax free, make money on their investments, and give the proceeds to any cause they see fit." In other words, it's a vehicle to donate money to charitable causes and to roll up that money while it's idling. What it's not is money that Moore could use to buy groceries.

Granted, Moore does derive some indirect benefits from his bread and circuses routine. Schweizer studied the Fahrenheit 9/11 documentarian's charitable contributions and found a few interesting patterns. Apparently, Moore is indeed flinty, as in cheap. He routinely gives away just enough of the foundation's funds to satisfy the IRS's requirements to maintain its charitable status. Publicly, he likes to brag about the foundation's support for first-time filmmakers, women's shelters, soup kitchens, and similar causes. But the actual grants tend to be either mad money for friends or donations to organizations that advance Moore's interests.

In 2000 Moore gave $4,500 to the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York and $1,000 to the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Both held events to promote his anti-gun documentary Bowling for Columbine. In 2002 he gave $25,000 to the American Library Association, a donation that Schweizer labels "particularly interesting given that Moore credits ALA members with getting HarperCollins to reconsider a decision to cancel his anti-Bush screed Stupid White Men after 9/11." Sometimes philanthropy can be very good for business.

Schweizer huffs that Moore's "hypocrisy runs so deep and the contradictions are so glaring that they border on the pathological." Here's a working-class Man from Flint who actually lives on a large estate on Michigan's Torch Lake and owns a penthouse in New York; a noisy advocate of affirmative action whose own hiring practices are bleached white; a populist down-home Midwesterner who makes millions providing Europeans and America's coastal elites with fuel for their anti-hick instincts. There's plenty of material for Schweizer. He doesn't need to add any exaggerated claims about Moore's assets.

Schweizer claims throughout the book that while accusations of hypocrisy are routinely leveled at conservatives, liberals tend to get a free pass. One can only wonder, Has the man ever listened to talk radio? Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, and hundreds of other right-wing squawkers all over the dial long ago incorporated criticism of liberal hypocrisy into their normal routines. Hypocrisy accusations are a staple not just of left-wing rhetoric but on the right as well. Turn on Fox News and listen to Fred Barnes or Bill O'Reilly damn those inconsistent liberals. A Google search at the end of last October for the joined terms "liberal" and "hypocrisy" produced 2,570,000 results.

There is a practical reason why conservatives have picked up the "you're a hypocrite" hammer: If your opponent is defending his integrity instead of his ideas, you're winning the debate. If Noam Chomsky has to spend time and resources reconciling his paychecks with his politics, those are time and resources that he can't expend attacking the Iraq War. If Ralph Nader has to square his consumer activism and his stock portfolio, then he might not be able to have the next Corvair recalled.

But it used to be a common conservative belief that you could work within a system and still speak out against elements of the system. Logically, one could live in a rent-controlled apartment but still oppose rent control (as did the hard-core libertarian Murray Rothbard). This was the basic rationale for right-wing political activism—the golden mean between the Scylla of pietism and the Charybdis of more violent, revolutionary impulses. That the right would now criticize the left for the same approach is troubling.

Indeed, many conservatives, from Benjamin Disraeli to William F. Buckley Jr., have professed an appreciation for the moderating influence of hypocrisy. It's the homage that vice pays to virtue, they would explain, quoting the 17th-century French noble Francois de La Rochefoucauld. There's certainly a case to be made that liberal hypocrisy helps to restrain some fairly troublesome impulses by turning would-be revolutionaries into poseurs, clowns, and petty manipulators.

Teddy Kennedy may call for more government controls but, as Schweizer accidentally suggests, the desire not to harm his own clan's extensive holdings has limited the damage. And when Ralph Nader calls for the abolition of the Taft-Hartley Act or rages against our "corporate paymasters," he's not making serious policy proposals. He's playing a part while leaving his large stock portfolio relatively untrammeled. This sort of hypocrisy we can live with.

Musical Chair

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EDT

As John Paul II's health was failing unto death, American cable news networks started with the around-the-clock coverage and newspapers over the world started to release their papal death packages. Because of the slow working of the Vatican press office, some members of the Italian media jumped the gun and called his demise early.

The news shot across newswires and websites, which sent television and radio producers frantically scrambling to find experts to tell us what this all means. I caught a few minutes of Larry King Friday night. The suspendered colossus of talk paired Father Richard John Neuhaus with deep thinker Deepak Chopra but cut them both short to make way for James Caviezel.

Next up, Jesus!

As the talking heads droned on, the basic shape of the A&E Biography version of the pope's life began to take shape: Born in Wadowice, Poland, Karol Wojtyla (nicknamed "Lolek") suffered along with his fellow countrymen first under Nazism and then under Communism. He studied in secret to become a priest under Nazi rule and brushed up against death-by-firing-squad several times.

As a priest, Wojtyla became a climber in the Polish arm of the Catholic Church. He was the youngest bishop in Poland's history and was promoted to archbishop in five years. He was made cardinal at 47, which gave him voting rights at papal conclaves and put him—very theoretically—in the running to sit on the Chair of Saint Peter.

As pope, Wojtyla was a rock star. From the start, he caught most observers by surprise. When John Paul I—the Jerry Ford of popes—died of a massive heart attack after only 33 days in office, this put the fear of a Seriously Pissed Off Deity into many of the cardinals. And so, when voting deadlocked over two popular Italian candidates, they decided to thrust John Paul II onto the world.

Looking at some of the television footage of Wojtyla when he was introduced to the world as John Paul II, and shortly after, I can see why the crowds took to him. He was young for a pope (58), vigorous, and cut quite the figure. He was the first non-Italian pope in over 400 years and the first Slavic pope ever. He was something new and different and unpredictable.

As if to underscore this, for his inaugural address, Wojtyla broke from protocol and shrugged off the dead language of the Vatican to address the crowds in his broken Italian. Over the next 26 years, he would redefine what we think of when the word "pope" is uttered.

Before, the pope was someone in Rome who oversaw the governance and development of the Church. If you wanted to talk to him, you went to Rome. The pontiff was well above the average visitor and the gate-keeping officers of the Vatican curia were seen as self-interested, cliqueish, almost sinister. Think Franco Zeffirelli's Brother Sun, Sister Moon.

This older mode of doing things may reassert itself with the next Vicar of Christ, but I doubt it. Wojtyla's way has proved more effective in reaching the masses, and, ultimately, more fun. John Paul II traveled and traveled and traveled. He addressed audiences from the Poland to the U.S. to Cuba to Nigeria. He even concocted his own holiday—World Youth Day—as an excuse to grab the attention of the young faithful every few years.

I don't mean to suggest that all this travel was a lark. Wojtyla's return to Poland, for instance, less than a year after he was elected marked his support for his country's struggle against domination by the Soviet Union.

John Paul II's support—both moral and financial—for the Solidarity movement in his fatherland, helped the country to survive under the crackdown of Martial Law, and worked to give the Russians another diplomatic black eye. This formed a one, two, three combo with the Jimmy Carter–funded resistance of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and the incredibly expensive arms race that Ronald Reagan helped to start.

It has never been decisively established exactly who put the Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca up to trying to assassinate John Paul II in 1981. But in his final book, Memory and Identity, Wojtyla decided to drop the politesse. In an interview appended to the back of the book, he called the attempt on his life, "one of the final convulsions of the arrogant ideologies unleashed during the twentieth century. Both fascism and nazism eliminated people. So did communism."

In Church governance, Wojtyla's record is mixed and incomplete and bound up in the fallout from the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). The grand bargain of Vatican II—from this very amateur lay Catholic's perspective—should be stated in two complimentary but necessary parts.

The first part was that the Church would become less archaic and less authoritarian. So Latin Masses were sidelined (for a while, they were totally banned, which caused a lot of headaches and a traditionalist schism), priests were to face the audience rather than the altar during the moment of transubstantiation, and we were all expected to shake hands. The Catholic Church would still preserve its doctrines but it would no longer seek to use the state to enforce orthodoxy.

The second part—often overlooked—was the reason for these changes. The divisions between priest and pew-warmers should narrow because the old idea of the super-pious professional religious and the not-so-pious Joe Catholic was said to be wrong. Put simply: We should all want to be saints.

And maybe we should, but that hasn't been how it's worked out so far in practice. In the '70s the Catholic Church in the U.S. and the rest of the western world experienced a massive fall-off in the percentage of Catholics who attended weekly Mass.

At the same time, tens of thousands of priests decided to hang up their collars and a huge number of nuns decided to call it quits. Those who stayed often discarded their religious garb and innovated with the Mass to the point that it was nearly unrecognizable. This was often justified as being in the mythical "Spirit of Vatican II."

This was the church that Wojtyla inherited—the western part of it, at least—and he muddled through. He forced priests to pull out of partisan politics in part because the agendas that they tended to advance were not too far removed from the Communists that he was railing against. He slowly established a firmer grip on the standards of worship so that most Catholic services nowadays—even the happy clappy ones—are recognizably Catholic. With his writing and preaching, he urged his co-religionists to be more true to their own faith.

God knows, John Paul II had plenty of failings, though, from where I'm sitting, they were usually sins of omission. Many have fingered his lackluster response to the American priest sex scandals. They have a point, but then the episode goes to show why this pope, until the very end, remained the thundering moral voice of the Church.

In a special meeting of the U.S. bishops in April of '02, Wojtyla he let them have it. "The abuse," he said, "which has caused this crisis is by every standard wrong and rightly considered a crime by society. It is also an appalling sin in the eyes of God. To the victims and their families, wherever they may be, I express my profound sense of solidarity and concern."

Tripped Up

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 00:00:00 EDT

Joel Miller's first book, Bad Trip: How the War Against Drugs is Destroying America, is a devastating examination of government anti-drug policies. Publishers Weekly calls the book a "well-researched, bitingly written account," and "a formidable challenge to the reigning prohibitionist orthodoxy."

Miller, a former aide for the California legislature, is a veteran of several now-defunct online startups (including the libertarian e-zine Real Mensch) and the former commentary editor at WorldNetDaily.com. He was senior editor at WND Books, a collaboration between the website and publisher Thomas Nelson, and is now senior editor at Nelson Current.

Though Miller's personal tastes run more to home brewed beer and pipe tobacco, he started writing regularly about the war against drugs while working for WorldNetDaily. Bad Trip has been praised by ABC Radio host Larry Elder and Fox News legal correspondent Judge Andrew P. Napolitano. Miller spoke with former colleague Jeremy Lott on the ingenuity of drug smugglers, on why anti-drug laws are the terrorist's best friend, and on what this year's election means for the war against drugs.

Reason: Several members of the Bush administration have pushed the line that if you buy illegal drugs, you're funding terrorism. Is that true?

The answer is yes—partly—but it's their fault. The laws against drugs are what create the market in which drugs are so incredibly profitable. There's no other reason a coca bush should be worth more than a privet shrub. Without prohibition, terrorists could no more profit from drugs than from growing bananas. They'd have to turn to other sorts of funding.

Reason: Such as?

Well, FARC in Colombia has made a fair bit by kidnapping people, and before the Soviet Union fell, terrorist organizations were funding themselves through subsidies from Communist governments. But today nothing is so lucrative as drugs; kill prohibition and you hit their bottom line.

Reason: How much do these groups depend on drug money?

Well they're all in pretty deep. FARC in Columbia, ELN, and AUC—three factions that are at war either with themselves or the central government—rely on profits from either taxing the drug trade in the areas that they patrol, or from protection money, or from growing the drugs themselves. According to a confidential 2003 Columbia government report, it is impossible to tell the difference between the AUC groups and the traffickers. The same report claimed that AUC drew up to 80 percent of its money from trafficking.

Before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban oversaw the production of 70 percent of the world's opium poppies. Osama bin Laden administered their profits, laundering them through the Russian mob. He pulled in about 10 or 15 percent of the total, which gave him an estimated annual income of $1 billion, and that kind of money can buy a lot of flight lessons.

This has been going on for a while. In 1984, the U.S. Justice Department estimated that Yasser Arafat's PLO procured about 40 percent of its light weaponry by trading hash and heroin.

Reason: You come down hard on the police for drugs-inspired corruption. What has modern prohibition done to law enforcement?

Modern prohibition provides an incredible incentive for cops to go bad, in little ways and in big ways.

The big are embodied in cops like Joseph Miedzianowski. People around the case referred to him as the most corrupt cop in the history of Chicago, which is quite an achievement considering the kind of corruption that comes out of Chicago. He was busted in 1998 after a long and fruitful career of dope pedaling, extortion, lying to obtain search warrants, torturing suspects, stealing money, stealing jewels, stealing guns, even ratting out the identity of an undercover cop to a gang member.

Amazing amounts of corruption have come from the profits and the power that police are able to pull from their involvement in the drug trade.

Reason: What if cops aren't so overtly corrupt? Are there other ways that drug prohibition effect them?

There are subtle things. It's difficult to make drug arrests because people keep their drug use secret and quiet. One thing that comes up time and again are cops who basically lie about the facts regarding a search so that they can make the search legal on paper even if it wasn't legal in fact.

Then there are cops who plant drugs on suspects because they want to make busts, sometimes for reasons that go beyond drug enforcement. Sometimes they are involved in the drug trade and they are busting a rival, or helping a partner deal with a competitor. There is an awful lot of opportunity for corruption, and police are in the difficult position of not only being very close to lawbreaking but often the only ones who know about it. So they're able to justify all kinds of ill behavior.

Reason: What were some of the more surprising cases that you uncovered for the chapter on smuggling?

Smuggling reflects the most profound thing about human nature, and that is that human beings will do anything if the payoff is big enough.

And when I say anything, I mean anything: dig under the southern border with incredible tunnels, some of which have been open for years. I mention one in Bad Trip that was discovered just south of San Diego. Authorities estimated that it had been open for 10 or 20 years shuttling drugs through. This thing had lights, ventilation ducts, the whole thing. They found a quarter ton of pot in the tunnel when they got there, which means that the people who were operating it were probably alerted to the fact that there was a raid and all got out fine.

That points to problems with enforcement but it also shows the incredible amount of ingenuity and craft that people will put into their smuggling. It includes things like building submarines, training pigeons how to carry packets of drugs across borders. It includes smuggling substances inside of things, disguising them as other things, including taking opium and soaking blankets with it and smuggling the blankets, taking cocaine and mixing it with plastic and fiberglass resin and creating things out of it like dog kennels and bathtubs, and then extracting the cocaine once it's across the border. There's no way to test for it without testing every single item: you can't smell it, can't see it. The only way cops can get it is if they're actually taking chips out of these products and testing them.

Reason: What does the drug trade tell us about how markets work?

It tells us that markets work really well. Faustino Ballv�, the economist, calls black markets the true market, because they're the only markets actually dealing with reality instead of pawing vigorously against it. When people have incentives, people are able to deliver, and there's really no way around that. It's a fact of human nature, and there's no beating human nature.

Reason: Are government efforts making a dent in the supply of drugs?

Not really. We've had drug prohibition in this country since 1914, and yet every administration since Nixon has had to jack up its enforcement budgets, and we're seeing very little in the way of results.

Reason: In the '90s, what happened to the price of drugs?

Consistently, they dropped. With cocaine, the downward slump was not huge, but with heroin it was pretty strong. Prices in general for drugs seem to be on the decline.

Reason: This occurred at the same time as crime rates fell. Does that mean more drugs equal less crime?

Dropping prices can definitely mean increased supply. It could mean other things too, but it's an interesting fact that the only type of crime that began rising in the late '90s while every other type of crime was going down, was gang crime—street crime. That's the crime most closely associated with the drug trade. It was responsible for half of the murders in Los Angeles.

So I don't know that more drugs equals less crime in any causal way, but you could certainly make the argument that drug prohibition is increasing crime, and if you were to lighten up the thumbscrews on enforcement, you'd see crime drop.

Reason: Bad Trip has been marketed to a mostly conservative audience. How have right-wingers received it?

The response has been mixed. Some traditional conservatives see the overreach of government as a very ominous problem. They're ticked off about a number of overreaches of the state—recently from Republicans—and they fold this into their general disdain about the growth of government.

Others simply argue that drugs are bad and drugs need to be gotten rid of. For some reason, they can argue that the government is a poor solution for things like retirement and welfare but it's the perfect solution for dealing with drugs, even though history and practical experience say otherwise.

Reason: Why has drug legalization been such a dead letter politically?

Nobody wants to go on record as being for drugs. There's just something about, you know, "I am running for office and I support the legalization of PCP" that does not register well with voters. Voters with little historical, economic, or political insight into the drug problem are not likely to cast ballots for someone who wants to change the status quo.

Reason: How would a Kerry administration drug policy differ from Bush's, if at all?

Well, last year, Kerry said that he would stop the federal drug raids on medical marijuana patients. That would be nice. It's about time state attorneys general got some stones anyway and threw down the gauntlet to the feds on that. Some federal cooperation in stopping the harassment would be helpful.

But I don't think it would be a major switch. If there's anything that's been consistent among administrations—with the anomaly, maybe, of Carter—it's that drug prohibition is popular and well received. Kerry has already indicated support for administrative positions for people who are hardcore drug warriors. And it's really not in his best interest politically to go on the line and be against prohibition. The best we'd probably see is more of the same.

Found Objects

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 EST

Jesus Sells

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Sat, 01 Feb 2003 00:00:00 EST

No doubt the evangelical Christian Booksellers Association (CBA) picked the Anaheim Convention Center for its annual convention last year because the place is enormous and has a certain architectural inspiration. Conventioneers can pause as they approach the huge lobby, with its three-story glass wall, for a view that seems to offer a glimpse of heaven. Unfortunately, Disneyland's Space Mountain ride is always in the way.

When I joined the CBA attendees in Anaheim last summer, row upon row of mostly white men and women dressed in their Sunday best were filing into one of the big conference rooms. CBA President Bill Anderson welcomed us; those present, he said, represented some 50 states and 60 nations. Then he got down to business, as it were.

What followed had all the trappings of a religious service -- songs, testimonies, a sermon. Technically, it was a religious service. But it was overtly commercialized to a greater extent than any religious gathering I had ever observed (and as the son of a Baptist minister, I've seen a lot of them). The printed programs, for example, were underwritten by the publisher of Pastor Lee Strobel -- he'd preached the sermon -- and featured an ad for his many books. The singers at the service were in town to promote their latest CDs to retailers.

If the participants felt any shame about the nakedly commercial nature of the event, they did a good job of hiding it. In his invocation prayer, Anderson addressed God on behalf of "a group of colleagues working together under Your Lordship." Strobel, between jokes and stories about his days as an "atheistic reporter" in Chicago, commended the retailers for doing the Lord's work and assured them that "we've got the truth," thus giving them "an unfair advantage in the marketplace of ideas."

The CBA was nothing if not a marketplace. At 350,000 square feet, the floor of the convention center is nearly the size of eight football fields, including three halls, two outdoor eating areas, and several restaurants. Over the next few days this huge space would be home to almost 500 display booths, over 12,000 people, and even a special Internet café. In its zeal to grow and serve its market, the Christian culture industry mirrors its secular counterpart. As important, it shines a light on how both true believers and non-believers use culture to create all sorts of identities and communities.

Many glass cases displayed such wares as crosses, paintings, color-coded Bibles, T-shirts, mugs, greeting cards, bracelets, CDs, necklaces, children's videos, diet books, jigsaw puzzles, backpacks, board games, and decorative plates. And that was just in the lobby. It wasn't until I got past the security guard, flashing my scarlet-lettered press pass, that I had a chance to see what was on the sales floor.

All of the major evangelical Christian publishers were present in force, with some booths the size of small houses. Older mainstream names such as Doubleday, Penguin, Random House, and Oxford University Press were well represented. Young upstart publishers such as Canon Press and Relevant Books -- publisher of such tomes as Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2 and The Gospel According to Tony Soprano (do unto others and then split?) -- had smaller but still impressive booths. There were several Spanish-language publishers and a couple of African-American presses, along with a few Catholic ones. A number of children's publishers sat alongside hawkers of Christian comics. The book area was surrounded by "personality booths," where authors autographed and gave away lots of free books to dealers in the hope of pumping up sales.

Books were only a part of the story. Also pushing their wares were such movie companies as Cloud Ten Productions, music and multimedia booths run by companies such as Word Entertainment, and plenty of Christian "gift" outlets in a section of their own. In addition to the items in the lobby, these gifts included everything from Scripture Mints shaped like little fish ("reaching the world one piece at a time") to hand puppets.

Word Entertainment took the prize for best attention grabber with spotlights, free popcorn, and -- I am not making this up -- a "Catch the Cash" booth with money swirling around: You stepped into it and grabbed as much as you could as fast as you could. Other memorable promotions included inflatable sharks, Jews for Jesus shopping bags, a guy in a kilt, and one booth that featured a stop sign altered to read, "STOP Liberals!"

The CBA may be the only trade show that sets off spasms of conscience among its own participants. Several editors and publishers told me, under condition of anonymity, that they were appalled at some of the products on the floor -- and they weren't necessarily sparing their own titles. The Rev. R.C. Sproul Jr., son of a famous Calvinist polemicist, published a brief Internet commentary that considered the possibility of driving out the moneychangers, though he finally concluded that it is, after all, a trade show. Christianity Today review editor Doug LeBlanc complained to me about the "buffoonery" of such crass gimmicks as the money booth. The promoter with the inflatable sharks sent me a note that made fun of the fish-shaped mints ("Mmmm, minty fresh Scripture").

Nor is this discomfort a new development. In his 1997 book Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey Into the Evangelical Subculture in America, Columbia University professor of religion Randall Balmer tells of his trip to the 1988 CBA convention. He describes a gathering similar to, if slightly smaller than, the one I attended, including wild promotions, a cornucopia of products, and, of course, fretting by evangelicals over how commercial and gaudy the industry had become. John Pott, an editor at Eerdmans, confessed to finding the whole scene "utterly demoralizing." Publisher Lisa Shaw admitted that she had gotten "so fed up with the whole thing that I went...to my hotel and cried for two hours." If blatant commercialization is cause for tears, it's a wonder that Shaw stopped after only two hours.

The Christian culture industry, as represented both by the CBA convention and by its member stores, may have been less concerned with sales in the past, but I've found little evidence of that. The sense of guilt that hovers over the convention may reflect the growing pains of an industry that is expanding its services to a slice of society whose cultural demands grow each year.

Most Christian book companies started as small family affairs or as publishing arms of Bible colleges; many CBA stores started as mom-and-pop operations. Through a process of sifting much like what goes on in the secular publishing and bookselling industries, some went bust while others innovated, grew, and sold out to secular publishers who wanted a piece of the Christian action. In fact, most large Christian publishers are now owned by otherwise secular houses. Random House, for instance, owns Zondervan, a leading Christian house. While no Christian chain yet rivals Barnes & Noble, Family Christian Bookstores has several hundred outlets across the country.

The older presses that have not sold out to the secular giants either struggle or get religion, the religion in this case being marketing. One editor of a very conservative holdout told me the only question his publisher asks about a book is whether it will sell. (Theology does play an indirect part in the selection process: If a book's message is likely to offend readers, it probably won't sell.) Publishers that have typically peddled more highbrow fare are experimenting with different sorts of titles. The current catalog of the high-toned house Westminster John Knox Press, for example, features The Gospel According to the Simpsons.

In fact, the publisher Thomas Nelson, one of the few holdouts to make it big, recently reversed the familiar process and started a secular imprint, WND Books.

It features such newsmaking authors as former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris (now a member of Congress) and shock jock Michael Savage.

Not only is the Christian book industry itself huge, its borders are getting hard to define because so many of its works are published and sold by secular firms. It's difficult to fix the dollar figures with any kind of precision, but sales through CBA member stores and distributors -- a large segment but by no means all of the industry -- came to $4 billion in 2001.

The best-selling novel that year was not a John Grisham or Tom Clancy number but The Remnant, the latest installment of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind series, a feat that landed the authors on the cover of Time. As a result, mainstream publisher Bantam Dell signed LaHaye to a reported $45 million book contract for a separate series. Other Christian titles, such as Bruce Wilkinson's The Prayer of Jabez, occasionally make ripples in the secular publishing world, and most large bookstores have expanded their sections of religious books and novels. Not long ago, if someone wanted a work by Christian horror writer Frank Peretti or lay theologian Philip Yancey, they would have had to visit a religious specialty store. Now they can find it at Barnes & Noble or Borders.

Evangelical Christian pop music -- popularly known as Contemporary Christian Music, or CCM -- now rivals country as the most popular radio format. Several acts, from Michael W. Smith to Jars of Clay, have tried "crossing over" to secular markets, with varying degrees of success. New quasi-religious acts like Creed and Litehouse engage in heavy flirtation with the CCM market without explicitly joining it.

Christian filmmaking is also starting to emerge from the swamp of poor distribution and lousy production values. On display at the CBA were such films as Waterproof (starring Burt Reynolds), To End All Wars (dubbed a film "to end all Christian films" by the religious periodical Books & Culture), and Hometown Legend (think Rudy minus the Hail Marys). The cloth strap that held my convention ID doubled as a promotion for the new Veggie Tales movie, Jonah, which according to Box Office Mojo had taken in over $23 million by Thanksgiving 2002.

Not everybody is happy with the shape and success of the modern Christian culture industry and its growing crossover appeal. In response to the huge LaHaye book deal, critic Bruce Bawer warned on TomPaine.com of the "growing ties between New York publishers and evangelical Christian authors."

Bawer, author of Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity and A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society, expressed nostalgia for an earlier era of publishing when "no reputable New York publisher would have published such books" as the Left Behind series in order to get its mitts on vaguely sinister-sounding "evangelical money." "Some of us," explained Bawer, "still cling to the old fashioned idea that the publishing of books in a democratic society, in addition to being a business, is also a profession that carries with it certain moral, intellectual, and aesthetic obligations....The current move into premillenialist prophecy novels and other works of hard core fundamentalism seems a giant step too far."

In case readers missed the other-shoe-dropping implications of his screed, Bawer took a swipe at the patriotism of Bantam Dell and company for "capitulating" to Bible-thumpers "at a time when the United States is waging a war against fundamentalist intolerance and illiberality -- against minds and hearts possessed by irrational dreams of violence."

Other lines of criticism come from the constituency of the Christian culture industry itself. To many evangelicals, who after all are Protestants, the gaudy excesses of the industry trigger vague cultural memories of ancient controversies over relics and indulgences. The Reformers viewed the marketing of religious artifacts and get-out-of-purgatory-free passes as a sign of decay. It's a pretty good bet that John Calvin or Martin Luther would be none too thrilled by the Jesus, Mary, and Joseph action figures or the Christian self-help books (as one author put it, "It's like a regular motivational book with Bible verses sprinkled in") displayed on the CBA convention floor.

This queasiness is reinforced by an anti-materialist streak that American evangelicalism seems to have absorbed during the 1960s and '70s. In fact, evangelicals' professed contempt for material things can rival the anti-consumerism of the most ardent Naderite. A popular anti-materialistic evangelical song from the '60s featured the refrain "they'll know that we are Christians by our love." When I suggested to evangelical acquaintances that it's just as likely that "they'll know that we are Christians by our stuff," it produced a lot of exasperated sighing.

Another criticism of the culture industry, expressed from within as well as without, is that it has a tendency to reinforce a certain insularity in evangelicals. In the 1980s evangelical singer-songwriter Steve Taylor mockingly expounded on the benefits of the industry: "You'll be keeping all your money/in the kingdom now/And you'll only drink milk from a Christian cow." In the 1990s a secular narrator of one of the vignettes in Douglas Coupland's novella Life After God expressed this distance by reporting on his attempt to understand the "many many" Christian radio stations he happened upon as he drove through a desert. He sensed a real enthusiasm he ultimately failed to penetrate:

"The radio stations all seemed to be talking about Jesus nonstop, and it seemed to be this crazy orgy of projection, with everyone projecting onto Jesus the antidotes to the things that had gone wrong in their own lives. He is Love. He is Forgiveness. He is Compassion. He is a Wise Career Decision. He is a Child Who Loves Me."

Critics are right about the apparent insularity of evangelical culture, but not as right as they think they are. The hand wringing that the Left Behind series has engendered, for instance, is irrational. Though Bruce Bawer's Tompaine.com piece is an extreme example of overreaction, a few nonreligious friends have privately explained to me that the existence and popularity of such books -- "wish fulfillment fantasies about non-fundamentalists suffering apocalyptic torment," as Bawer put it -- worry them. The reviewer for the determinedly anti-religious Free Inquiry likened the series to The Turner Diaries, the anti-Semitic survivalist underground classic that helped inspire Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh.

Yet, other popular nov elists, Stephen King among them, are often just as apocalyptic as LaHaye and Jenkins, without inspiring dire warnings that America is about to embrace a fascist theocracy. True, King and company don't take their apocalypses seriously. On the other hand, the end of the world has been a popular subgenre for many years. Exactly what has drawn readers to so many secular total destruction fantasies is a question that's hard to answer, but that answer is unlikely to be compassion for humanity.

In any event, one might hazard that the incomprehension of secular outsiders has contributed significantly to the birth of the commercial Christian pop culture scene. That is, while the books, music, and videos in CBA stores may not have been of the highest quality or featured the best production values, they at least took seriously the beliefs held by evangelicals, who may constitute anywhere from a quarter to a third of American society. The move by secular presses, movie studios, radio stations, and record labels to cater to this market could be viewed as a victory for commercial self-interest over religious intolerance.

In fact, the economic embrace of Christian pop culture by mainstream producers may be straining the original Christian cultural scene. Now that evangelical novelists can be published by secular presses, they can avoid relatively stifling moral guidelines that have been constraining them (no swearing, no sex out of marriage unless it has disastrous consequences, the requisite amount of God talk, etc.). New Christian music acts are now routinely courted by secular record labels. That allows them more freedom to inject their faith into the mainstream culture in a way that simply wasn't done by secular labels before, even while removing the more popular groups from the Christian labels' lists. Christian publishers are being squeezed at both ends as bookstores demand steeper discounts while increasingly influential mainstream agents secure better contracts for Christian writers. In turn, Christian bookstores face new competition from secular bookstores.

Sales of Christian books through nonreligious bookstores are also rectifying a long-running, quasi-conspiratorial grievance of many evangelical authors, because it allows their books to climb bestseller lists from The New York Times to USA Today. Such lists only count sales through mainstream bookstores, which in the past effectively excluded even the most wildly successful evangelical bestsellers from recognition. This division of secular and religious book sales, like the division of secular and religious culture in general, had the effect of removing evangelical culture from the view of those who were not a part of that subculture.

Now that this industry is increasingly in plain sight, its relationship with its consumers can be studied. It turns out that the industry is neither as sinister and monolithic as secular critics claim nor as secular and venal as religious critics fear.

Randall Balmer, the religion professor, describes Christian culture as the product of a separatist impulse that managed to yield results very similar to the secular culture Christians sought to escape. Superficially, he has a point. As I wandered down the aisles of the CBA, I asked the same question: Hasn't the industry simply replaced self-help and pop psychology books with pious variants thereof, the secular Butt Ugly Martians with the religious Veggie Tales, Altoids with Scripture Mints, Beanie Babies with Holy Bears, and secular schlock apocalyptic novels with tamer, preachier Christian schlock apocalyptic novels? On first blush, it sure looks that way.

But the distinction between the material and the sacred, or the commercial and the spiritual, can be tricky. To pick an obvious example, there is no more sacred book to evangelicals than the Bible -- more tradition-minded Christians sometimes accuse them of "bibliolatry," the worship of the text -- and there is no product of the Christian culture industry that is more effectively exploited and marketed than the Good Book.

At the convention were dozens of different translations and paraphrases of the Bible -- the New International Version, the King James, the New King James, The Message -- along with hundreds of specialty Bibles with commentaries (by rock musicians as well as serious Bible scholars), and countless freestanding commentaries on individual biblical books. (The existence of red-lettered editions of the Bible, in which the words attributed to Christ appear in red, serves as the set-up for an awkward situation in Christopher Moore's Island of the Sequined Love Nun. The clueless hero asks a Bible-reading guard if the red writing highlights all the juicy parts.)

Or take other, more suspect items from the convention: those Scripture Mints, holy diet books, spiritual key chains, Thomas Kinkade paintings, biblical action figures -- all items that your local evangelical bookstore is likely to carry. Surely these items are shameless and naked grabs for evangelical filthy lucre. What possible purpose, skeptics ask, can such kitsch serve?

Are many of these products merely a way to make a fast and cynical buck? They probably are. But the more revealing question is not about what the products do for their producers; it is about what they may be doing for their consumers.

The anti-materialistic/anti-consumerist criticism overlooks an essential fact: that material artifacts, even kitsch, can embody real meaning for those who use them.

The products, good and bad, that dominated the CBA both reflected and validated the subculture that generated the demand for them. The people who read the books, listen to the music, hang the Thomas Kinkade paintings in their homes, and use the other products of this industry are surrounding themselves with artifacts that reflect their values and beliefs, that validate who they are. For such consumers, the Left Behind novels, the evangelical pop music, and all the rest serve as the building blocks of a shared evangelical cultural identity. In brief, evangelicals are using the market to fashion and refashion themselves, and to project the resulting identity to others, in just the way that all consumers do.

Therein lies the real significance of the Christian cultural industry. It is fixed enough to support a religious group identity for millions of people but fluid enough to accommodate myriad arguments and interpretations. And it gives this minority religious group the ability to make the wider culture take it seriously -- to punch above its weight in the market contest it has entered.

Carnal Cabaret

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Fri, 01 Nov 2002 00:00:00 EST

To enforce Spokane County, Washington's dreaded Cabaret Ordinance, local cops mounted a sting operation in August that led to the arrest of five strippers and the manager of the Déjà Vu strip club on misdemeanor charges.

The girls were charged with violating the ordinance's four-foot "buffer zone" -- the distance the law requires between strippers and patrons -- by performing private lap dances on the undercover cops and others in exchange for cash. In an odd twist to the story, the cops left the club after their lap dances, then returned to make the arrests wearing masks to avoid being recognized in future stings.

Outrage followed. In a satirical piece for the local Spokesman-Review, columnist Doug Clark defended the officers against vice charges. "Many of you don't understand the kind of pressure these men were up against," he chided readers. As for the controversial provision of the 1997 cabaret law, Clark said he thanks God "every day for the Four-Foot Buffer Zone."

The comments on the Spokesman-Review's Web site and letters page ran heavily in favor of the strippers. Residents suggested that the law enforcement budget was too large, that police were kowtowing to the religious right, and even that such an operation was evidence that "the terrorists will win."

Cpl. Dave Reagan, spokesman for the sheriff's department, acknowledges that the community reaction has been "mixed" at best, with the pro�lap dance faction the more vocal. But he insisted that "we only do this type of enforcement at the request or behest of neighboring businesses or government officials in that area" -- in this case, the Spokane Valley Chamber of Commerce. Reagan indicated that the sheriff's office will lay off the Déjà Vu club for a while and "go on about other things."

History's Dustbin

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Tue, 01 Oct 2002 00:00:00 EDT

To help narrow an ever-widening budget deficit, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has scaled back his city's curbside recycling program. On July 1 the city stopped collecting plastics and glass. Bloomberg says those collections won't resume until the city can figure out how to do so without hemorrhaging taxpayer cash. The recycling program has cost Big Apple taxpayers as much as half a billion dollars during the last decade.

Bloomberg had wanted to discontinue the collection of metals as well but ultimately compromised with city council members who wanted to increase the resources devoted to recycling. Led by Michael McMahon, several council members proposed that the city add a surcharge to bottles of noncarbonated drinks and start collecting unclaimed deposits, which beverage makers currently get to keep. The estimated $100 million a year generated by these changes would have gone to create a bureaucracy charged with finding a way to make recycling profitable.

New York Times columnist John Tierney, whose protracted war against recycling may have played some part in the mayor's decision to cut it back, slyly called the pro-recycling council members "politicians who do not run from trouble." Regarding the proposed bureaucracy, Tierney asked readers to "imagine what a...group of political hacks could do with a business that's unprofitable to begin with."

Previously the anti-recycling movement, which questions the cost-effectiveness of the practice, had caught on mostly in smaller cities and counties, such as Chattanooga, Tennessee. Now recycling activists worry that New York's change of heart might help spread the disenchantment to more-cosmopolitan areas.

Persistent Protesters

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Tue, 01 Oct 2002 00:00:00 EDT

The School of the Americas (SOA), recently renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, is infamous for training dictators such as Manuel Noriega. But it may as well be regarded as an ongoing internship program for American political protesters, who have been demonstrating against the school for 15 years.

In July, 37 defendants were tried in federal court for trespassing on Georgia's Fort Benning as part of the annual protest of the U.S. government-funded military school. The institute is dedicated to establishing links with the elite of Central and South American countries by training them in the art of soldiering, but protesters charge that it is a "School of the Assassins," teaching the latest techniques in violent repression.

Receiving sentences ranging from six months in jail to fines, the trespassers joined over 70 past protesters who have served more than 40 combined years since the protest's inception, according to the organization School of the Americas Watch. They are also part of a much larger cohort of people simply arrested for trespassing but not charged. Since 1997 Fort Benning police have detained over 2,300 protesters.

Performance Anxiety

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Tue, 01 Oct 2002 00:00:00 EDT

Smash! Pow! Bam!

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Tue, 01 Oct 2002 00:00:00 EDT

Bin Fadin'

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Tue, 10 Sep 2002 00:00:00 EDT

An almost wicked thought for the anniversary of 9/11: Has there ever been a more un-American mantra than "We shall never forget"?

A year ago, America's many radio stations became a sort of echo chamber for the people's voices. They played plenty of fun, near-Jingoistic jingles ("I Won't Back Down"), instant reactions ("Let's Roll"), and patriotic thumbsuckers ("Proud To Be An American"), but, for my money, the most overplayed song was U2's "Stuck In A Moment."

Though not written in response to 9/11, it's easy to see why it was used for that purpose. The song was simultaneously consoling and challenging, with the lead singer telling the audience that he empathized with them ("I know it's tough") but that, really, they needed to "get yourself together." Else, they would end up in an inescapable purgatory of their own making ("you can't get out of it").

The most eerie line of the song ("I wasn't jumping ... for me it was a fall/ It's a long way down to nothing at all") inadvertently reminded listeners of the now-banished network footage of people in the towers of the World Trade Center who jumped to their deaths to escape being roasted alive. Of these jumpers, Bush cousin John Ellis has memorably written what amounts to a prose poem:

Hanging on the ledge. Heat from the fire burning their backs. The last ten seconds before the last ten seconds of free fall. ... [T]he sound of the dead weight of one jumper and then the next, hitting the roof over the entrance. A dreadful thud. And another. And another. Osama did that.

Yes he did, and if recent media coverage is any indication we are still very much stuck in the moments of that sad, sad day. The commemorative issue of Time, for instance, features 20 covers occupied with the event and its aftermath, the War on Terrorism, that graced newsstands and grocery store checkout lines last year.

Time also carries an essay by Andrew Sullivan. In it, the ubiquitous pundit compares the events of 9/11 to a disorienting family tragedy for which there can be no consolation.

Worse, abruptly switching metaphors, Sullivan tells us that the threat of fundamentalist Islamic violence on America is so unpredictable and so all pervasive ("more like a virus than a host") that the illusions of "isolationism," "appeasement," and "American exceptionalism" were all destroyed by three loud thuds. In fact, the whole idea of America as a New World—as "a place where you could safely leave the Old World and its resentments behind"—was done away with as well. A younger generation, which knows that "neutrality is no longer an option," will look to 9/11 as its formative experience.

I am not an isolationist, and I am vengeful enough that seeing Osama bin Laden's body displayed in a pine box would give me great pleasure. But I think I speak for many when I dearly hope that Sullivan is wrong on this one. That Americans score poorly on history tests may in part be a reflection on our educational system, but I've always thought it had something to do with the American character itself.

Despite countless attempts to improve us, Americans are not a "serious" people. Our entertainment is low, our religion is personal and radically ahistoric, and our politics mystify outside observers. We have little patience for geopolitics and when we are dragged in to foreign struggles, our instincts have been to get the job done, extract ourselves, and come home as soon as possible, hopefully leaving the world a better place. (This, at any rate, is the nation's character as defined by its people; the high-handed, largely unaccountable wizards of US statecraft—and their British-born apologists in the media—think and act otherwise.)

The idea of a New World, where old grievances gradually fade into the mists of time, may be a myth; but it's one that, before 9/11, we devoutly believed in. George W. Bush was elected on a platform that included a "more humble foreign policy" than that of his predecessor, who had placed American troops and American prestige at the center of various ethnic cauldrons, often with less than ideal results. With the Cold War well behind us and few enemies in sight, America was pulling back—and many of us were glad of it.

Then 9/11 happened. A man who was the very embodiment of Old World grievances (in his 1996 fatwa, bin Laden held the U.S. responsible for the anti-Muslim violence of the Crusades) brought the New World to a screeching halt, and provoked justified red hot rage on the part of Americans.

According to Bush and Sullivan, the resulting war does not yet have a terminal point in view. Spurred on by the memory of 9/11, the U.S. will do as it wishes to whomever it believes to be a threat. In the process, we will, of course, generate many new resentments, and we may have to jettison cherished old ideas about necessary restraint. An empire, by definition, is eternally at war.

The thing that will make this possible is not the capricious whim of a cowboy president, but the rage of a people who continue to want justice for their fallen fellow citizens as well as the assurance that this sort of thing will not happen again—ever. If it is held with any fervency, the oft-repeated phrase "We shall [or will] never forget" could mean that Sullivan is right, that Americans are abandoning the idea of a New World as unworkable.

I hope not. As bad as 9/11 was, it does not seem desirable that this terrible event should so radically change the ideals of a unique people. In many ways, America is about forgetting the past, or at least it used to be. From the Japan to Germany to Vietnam to former slaves and slave owners: the grudges slowly fade away, making America vastly different than so many other strife ridden clans and nations. This is a lesson we forget (or remember) at our peril.

Cool Libertarians

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Tue, 30 Jul 2002 00:00:00 EDT

In this, my last scheduled contribution to Editor's Links, I want to say a few nice words about libertarians a much-maligned, funny, quarrelsome lot of people who were kind enough to foot my bills this summer.

One of the great things about laissez-faire types is that they're not in power and truth be told they have no desire to be. This is seen by some as a bad thing; a sign that libertarians aren't "serious people." But the approach is not without its benefits.

Right- and left-wingers are tethered to partisan political movements or political parties, which can be weights of albatross-like proportions. Advancing a party’s propaganda and interests often contorts and warps reality all out of recognizable proportion. For instance, a recent Washington Monthly review of right-wing bomb thrower Ann Coulter's new book Slander relayed her claim that "for about twenty years now, all new ideas have bubbled up from the right wing." The incredulous reviewer asked "All new ideas? All? Air Jordans? The Macarena? Pizza Hut's Stuffed-Crust Pizza?"

Across the aisle are odious pundits like Joe Conason who, in his Salon blog today, credited “big government” with saving the Pennsylvania coal miners, reminded readers that Ted Bundy was a young Republican (only one step removed from Ralph Reed), and compared the Bush administration’s attempts to have hiring and firing flexibility in the newly created Department of Homeland Security to the anti-union “obsession[s] of totalitarian regimes and their imitators.” He justified this last charge by explaining – I am not making this up – that if Ann Coulter could be nasty then so could he.

Libertarians are sometimes damned as purists, but at least they aren't as predictable or as boring as their sniping counterparts on the right and left. They're also and I say this from experience a whole lot more fun. They lack the anti-corporate nervous tics of progressives ("Oh, I couldn't order Dominos. Do you have any idea what kind of causes they finance?!") and the woe is us moralistic hang-ups of conservatives ("There was sex on TV last night! We're doomed.").

A startlingly diverse group, the only common ground that all libertarians share is a desire to live in a society in which people are truly free of wars, of petty government regulations, of a creeping Puritanism that holds suspect any fun activity. That might be a pipe dream, but it's one I've come to share.

Thieves Like Traficant

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Thu, 25 Jul 2002 00:00:00 EDT

The U.S. House of Representatives' voted on Wednesday night to expel Rep. James Traficant (D-Ohio), who has been convicted in federal court of bribery and taking kickbacks. The 420-1 tally (several members were not present) was both expected and overwhelming. In the end, Traficant's sole supporter was--surprise!--disgraced lame duck Rep. Gary Condit (D-Calif.). Congress will surely be a less telegenic place absent Traficant's rhetorical bombast ("Beam me up, Mr. Speaker!"), surrealistic toupee, and wild fashion sense.

A few hysterical conservatives have opined that Traficant was removed for the crime of being very un-P.C. He was certainly that, but he was also a total nut job, albeit a highly amusing one. In his testimony before the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, Traficant explained to the chairman why he was late to his own hanging: "I was on media broadcasts trying to demean you and the others." He asked former employer and friendly witness Sandra Ferrante point blank, "Were you and I sex partners?"

Ferrante: No.

Traficant: Why not?

Charges of collusion with the mob notwithstanding, it's easy to have sympathy for Traficant. The people from his district certainly did. Back in 1983, a jury of his peers acquitted then-Sheriff Traficant of bribery charges; voters went on to send him to Congress for nine successive terms. (He'll be on the ballot in the fall, though it's unlikely that he'll win.) Part of his popularity stemmed from his days as sheriff, when he sometimes refused to foreclose on properties in the depressed Youngstown, Ohio market.

Sure, the House made the right choice by voting to remove Traficant, even if they were driven to it by the new unseemly scramble to appear more ethical than thou. Bribery even the mostly petty charges that the government managed to hang on the former congressman is corrosive of public institutions and puts the lie to fair governance. It should not be tolerated by public officials.

But let the record show that, just as some 420 members of the House prepared to expel their poorly dressed, semi-coherent colleague for bribery and kickbacks, they were putting the final touches on plans to legally bilk the public purse by voting themselves a large pay raise.

"I look forward to coming back and getting another $1.3 billion," Traficant told his soon-to-be ex-colleagues in his final statement on the House floor, flaunting his reputation for bringing home the bacon for his district. Sadly there's nothing illegal about raiding public funds when it's done as part of the appropriations process. If it were, Jim Traficant would have plenty of distinguished company in the slammer.

Plumbers Line

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Mon, 22 Jul 2002 00:00:00 EDT

Given that 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were of Saudi Arabian extraction, that Osama bin Laden was a Saudi, and that the House of Saud has been financing the spread of a militant form of Islam, many normally pro-immigration conservatives had urged the Bush administration to plug this leak in the U.S.'s national security by tightening visa requirements for Saudis. The Weekly Standard's Chris Caldwell, for one, ridiculed the State Department's resistance to such restrictions ("Wouldn't want to offend our ally, after all.") and suggested that it was symptomatic of an entire political elite that refuses to realize that it is at war.

But the boys at Foggy Bottom had proven remarkably adept at sidestepping such criticisms right up until July 12, that is, when they stepped in it. National Review Online reporter Joel Mowbray was detained by the State Department to be questioned about a leaked cable that he had used in an earlier article which accused the department of operating a "Visa Express."

The resulting hubbub from Mowbray’s brief detainment was not only highly embarrassing in a diplomatic sense. It also focused attention on the supposed free ride that the Saudis are getting and helped to bring status quo to a screeching halt. Mowbray’s latest dispatch explains that the old lenient regime is now history: Saudis can “no longer submit their visa applications to travel agents and that all applicants, save for diplomats and children, will be interviewed.” It is also likely that authority over visas will be stripped from the State Department and handed to the newly formed Department of Homeland Security.

The famously tight lipped (and Saudi-friendly) Bush administration is reportedly so angered by this development that it is thinking of plugging some leaks of its own, by subjecting government officials to polygraph tests.

AOL Hell

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Thu, 18 Jul 2002 00:00:00 EDT

These are dark and dreary days for AOL Time Warner. The stock price, currently hovering above $12 dollars a share, is down from $60 two years ago and may not yet have found bottom. The ungainly company has management woes that are quickly approaching the WorldCom threshold, including revolving door executives and its own mini-accounting scandal.

When the two components of this still-disjointed "media empire" merged two years ago, the move was alternatively damned as an example of the creeping monopolization of the media the lefty American Prospect actually ran a symposium entitled "Is the AOL-Time Warner merger safe for democracy?" and praised as the beginning of the so-called New Economy's takeover of the decaying old one.

It may have simply been a bad idea. Analyst and First Family member in good standing John Ellis argued at the time that the two companies would prove incompatible. Ellis asked what this deal added to customer value and concluded that "AOL's senior managers are no longer focused on the needs of AOL customers and instead have decided to focus on themselves."

His diagnosis seems to have proven accurate. Over the last few years, customer service has decayed and the company has responded to falling revenues by shelling paying customers including yours truly with annoying pop up ads. All things considered, at $12 a share, the megafirm's stock may still be overpriced.

Shootout in the Sky

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Thu, 11 Jul 2002 00:00:00 EDT

This has not been a good week for George W. Bush. The market took a beating after the president attempted to goose public confidence in Wall Street by promising to lock the bums up . His multiple-heart-attack victim veep came under legal attack by a frothing conservative watchdog group, further fueling speculation that Cheney might resign. And now, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has given him the legislative equivalent of a 21-finger salute by overwhelmingly passing a bill that would allow airline pilots to be armed.

The Senate is likely to give this legislation the St. Valentine's Day Massacre treatment, but it's hard to understand why Bush, a Texan with supposed cowboy instincts and a lightning rod attorney general came down on the side of anti-gun activist Sarah Brady and Sylvester "I used to be a contender" Stallone on this one. The White House line that pilots should leave defense up to air marshals and stewardesses doesn't really fly.

Many of the prez's fellow travelers are none too happy about this (though one character from Little Green Men did inveigh against "imprudent bravery"). As one conservative wag put it, while pilots fighting back is verboten, "allowing them to be stabbed in the back with box cutters seems to be okay." But any House vote that goes 310 to 113 is evidence of what some politely call an issue's "resonance" i.e., it's an issue worth stealing.

Though piously pronouncing himself in favor of gun control "like all reasonable people," Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen opined that pilots should be armed to the teeth. Cohen asked why Bush, who signed a concealed-carry law as governor of the Lone Star State, thought it was appropriate to arm "every Tom, Dick and Harry" but not people who control some of the most potentially explosive projectiles known to man. Even the lefty American Prospect, after learning that hijacked planes will now be shot down, thought really hard about changing its position on pilot pacifism. And now, in what The San Jose Mercury News coyly calls a "surprise announcement", liberal California Democrat Sen. Barbara Boxer has linked arms with Neanderthal New Hampshire Republican Sen. Bob Smith to pronounce arming pilots "a matter of life and death."

Like most political statements, that can be parsed a number of ways. One way concerns Bush's political prospects and his party's chances in this year's mid-term elections. The elephants are not terribly likely to pick up many seats by running to the left of the arguably the most liberal member of the Senate.

Turkey Lurkeys Wanted

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Mon, 08 Jul 2002 00:00:00 EDT

Following in the grand apocalyptic tradition of Paul Ehrlich, William Butler Yeats, and Chicken Little, the World Wildlife Fund is set to release a report on the state of the planet tomorrow. The prognosis, warns the London Guardian, is not good. Countless species will perish, global warming will intensify, and most vital resources will be exhausted by the year 2050. A ridiculous link from the article reads "Earth to expire? Talk about it online."

The next few weeks will see environmental writers right, left, and faux center argue over the data, the methodology, and, most importantly, each other's motives. Lefties will denounce skeptics as shills for industry. Skeptics will fire back that they don't call it the World Wildlife Fund for nothing.

Meanwhile, us environmental ignoramuses will continue to muddle about with vague intuitions about the extent of The Problem or what is to be done about it diagnoses largely informed by our politics. Those to the left of center tend to magnify the problem and favor government solutions. Conservatives try to "put things in perspective" and argue that spilled oil can actually make quite the balanced diet for otters, penguins, and baby seals.

One problem is that two sides are talking past, rather than with each other. Most environmentalists aren't able to understand how changes quite apart from the government (e.g. energy saving devices and cloning) can reduce pollution and rescue species. Conservatives, for their part, are unable to interpret the apocalyptic milieu from which such dire warnings as this current report spring. From a religious perspective, the absolute accuracy of apocalyptic pronunciations (see Revelation) is not nearly as important as the overall sentiment, in this case that we ought to be concerned about how we affect nature.

What this melodrama needs is a Turkey Lurkey to sternly remind everyone that the sky is not falling and that we can muddle through.

Disappearing Divide

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Mon, 01 Jul 2002 00:00:00 EDT

In response to a new survey gauging Americans' online activity between 1997 and 2001, the pressure group Children's Partnership cited a continuing digital divide. On one side, said the partnership in a February report, are the connected, "mostly rich whites"; on the other, the unconnected, poor minorities and people with disabilities.

Those who could benefit most from Internet job opportunities, the group complained, "are the least likely to be online." It urged members to lobby Congress and local legislatures to invest more money in "community technology" to redress this imbalance.

Many others, drawing on the same report from the U.S. Department of Commerce, arrived at a different conclusion. Washington Post economics columnist Robert J. Samuelson declared the idea of a static digital divide "largely fiction." Thanks to falling computer and online access prices and diminishing skill requirements, the digital divide has been shrinking without government intervention.

As of September 2001, 56 percent of Americans used the Internet and 66 percent used computers. The Commerce Department found that participation was increasing, "regardless of income, education, race, ethnicity or gender," at a rate of 2 million new surfers every month. Low-income users grew at twice the rate of high-income users, with families headed by single mothers among the most likely to go online.

As with televisions and refrigerators, the online gap between rich and poor appears to be closing quickly as the technology becomes commonplace.

Fireworked Up

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Mon, 24 Jun 2002 00:00:00 EDT

Call it an explosive debate. A very explosive debate.

Every year, as families make plans for Independence Day, public health experts, firefighters, dog owners, and killjoys across the political spectrum argue for ever more restrictions on the ancient and venerable practice of setting off fireworks. The American Academy of Ophthalmology has named this July Eye Injury Prevention Month, advising parents to “leave the lighting of fireworks to trained professionals” and “never let children play with fireworks of any type.”

Most tsk-tskers don't stop with stern admonitions. Many counties and states opt for heavy fines or outright bans. In Colorado, 17 counties have either banned fireworks or criminalized the use of anything fun. Ohio allows the sale of fireworks, but improbably tells celebrants to go start fires somewhere else. Oregon and several other states ban the use of Roman candles and bottle rockets in government-owned parks.

This year, the perennial battle between "responsibility" and "fun" has tilted much more in favor of the responsible set, with wildfires raging in Western states, a dearth of rain in California, and New Yorkers who are "scared shitless" of explosions or even loud car backfires.

Indeed, for perhaps the first time since Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in his cap, this year, those who set off fireworks are being chastised as unpatriotic. That certainly seems to be the upshot of a recent Joseph Farah column. (Full disclosure: He's a former boss of mine). Writing in WorldNetDaily, Farah wondered, “How can this nation celebrate its independence every year by supporting the evil empire in Beijing?” He called for all God-fearing freedom-loving Americans to boycott fireworks made in China – that is to say, virtually all fireworks – because of the Chinese government’s many human rights abuses.

In today's America, it seems, the rockets' red glare has been deemed not only unsafe, but unprincipled as well.

Prophecy and Paranoia

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Mon, 17 Jun 2002 00:00:00 EDT

In more ways than one, the June 23 release of the Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise movie Minority Report could not have been better planned. Based on a 1956 Philip K. Dick short story of the same name, the upcoming flick has already managed to capture a political and cultural moment in the way that Wag the Dog illustrated the Clinton administration's foreign policy misadventures and The China Syndrome caught concerns about Three Mile Island.

Given what Minority Report is about and the moment it illuminates, the Bush administration is unlikely to give it gushing reviews. The paranoid premise of the story is simple enough: In the far-flung future, crime has been abolished by preemptive arrests. The use of advanced technology and severely retarded human beings with precognitive abilities ("monkeys") has enabled the creation of a "pre-crime" police force, which rounds criminals-to-be up and tries them for crimes that they would have committed in the future. Once they are found guilty -- not if -- they are either sent to detention camps or exiled to frontier planets.

In Dick's version, most of the public has accepted this arrangement because it works. It has eliminated murder and most other forms of crime. As one character puts it, "Punishment was never much of a deterrent, and could scarcely have afforded comfort to a victim already dead." The criminals, on the other hand, grasp at one "basic legalistic drawback"-- the fact they didn't do anything. John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise in the movie) is the founder of the pre-crime unit. He brushes off concerns about the system's effect on its convicts as "absolutely metaphysics. We claim they're culpable. They, on the other hand, eternally claim they're innocent. And, in a sense, they are innocent." But so what?

The rub comes when Anderton himself is accused of murder. The resulting conflict is a classic Dick conundrum: Was Anderton set up? Could the monkeys have made a mistake? If he was set up, what does that say about the system? And, results notwithstanding, isn't there something wrong with punishing people for things they didn't do? It's the stuff from which a great movie could be made.

Early indications, however, lead one to doubt that director Spielberg has quite grasped the absurdist nature of Dick's story, much less its canary-in-a-coal-mine implications. In a June interview with Wired, the director explained the changes he's made to Dick's story. He's replaced the author's detention camps with cryogenic freezing units where the "guilty" are kept for the duration of their sentences. Spielberg insisted that Minority Report is not his most cynical movie because "It's not cynical to want to believe that ... they could stop people from killing in the future. ... [I]t went from being a cynical story to being a movie about wishful thinking."

Artists are not often the best judges of their own work and this goes double for artists who adapt other artists' work. But Spielberg's ambivalence about the implications of his new film dovetails nicely with the current American mood these days, and with the recent actions of the Bush administration. According to a recent Matt Drudge leak of a New York Times story, Spielberg has declared himself "on the president's side" in Bush's efforts to "root out those individuals who are a danger to our way of living." (One of Spielberg's fellow executives at Dreamworks, however, has called Attorney General John Ashcroft "scary.")

But the rooting-out that Spielberg says he supports is, of course, pre-emptive. The Justice Department has detained hundreds of suspects for months on immigration and other charges and stonewalled any requests for details on the identities or whereabouts of said persons. On the international scene, much ink is currently being spilt over the government's claims to the right of "anticipatory self defense."

Combining the two concerns is the case of Jose Padilla (a k a Abdullah al Muhajir), the so-called Dirty Bomber who was arrested on May 8. Padilla has been classified as a "enemy combatant," to avoid the necessity of either charging or releasing him. He is being held indefinitely at the request of the Justice Department. From what little that has been released of details surrounding the arrest, Padilla may have traveled to foreign countries and talked to some people with terrorist connections about what it takes to put a "dirty bomb" together. A paucity of publicly examinable information, however, did not stop people in the Pentagon, Justice Department, and other branches of the administration from speculating that, though said plot was "in its initial stages," Padilla might have had Washington D.C. or Chicago in mind as targets.

Or he might not have. Padilla is currently being detained by the U.S. government, not for crimes committed -- at least not crimes that the government is willing to publicly charge him for -- but because of crimes that certain officials think he might have been likely to commit in the future. This Phildickean move to a pre-emptive posture may very well be effective, but it raises real concerns that what Spielberg supports as "our way of living" will be altered. That is the issue that the release of Minority Report should draw into a tight, and perhaps uncomfortable, focus.

Sir Mick, Satisfied

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Tue, 11 Jun 2002 00:00:00 EDT

News that Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger will soon be knighted set off tremors in the British press and across the Atlantic. The Sunday Times opined that “At last, His Satanic Majesty is called to the palace.” Other papers chose to mock Jagger’s history of womanizing and debauchery: Despite the significant musical accomplishments of the Stones, went this line of thought, is Jagger worthy of the title "Sir Mick," given his personal history?

Some, predictably, accused Jagger of selling out. Writing in the New York Press, John Strausbaugh, author of the amusing anti-geriatric rocker pamphlet Rock ’Til You Drop, said that the knighthood “shouldn’t be much of a surprise.” According to Strausbaugh, Jagger’s bad boy image, as manifest in such classic Stones songs as "Street Fighting Man" and "Sympathy for the Devil," "was a consciously constructed public persona, as artificial as the Southern drawl he puts on when he sings or the Cockney he often affects when he speaks. The private Jagger is much more Establishment--a shrewd businessman and self-made multimillionaire, as much an epicure as a libertine, who displays many of the social-climbing traits of the arriviste."

Strausbaugh has a point about the characterization of Jagger as a shrewd businessman intent on squeezing out as much money as possible out of fans. It’s easy to forget that the Stones spent part of the ’70s as tax exiles. More recently, they cancelled a series of concerts in the U.K. because the tax bite demanded by the Labor government was too deep.

Jagger's music has lately taken a spiritual turn, with the goshawful "God Gave Me Everything I Want" assaulting the ears of those listening to various radio stations. But who would have guessed that the original Street Fighting Man really wanted the approval of the Queen of England?

Rotten Denmark

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Sat, 01 Jun 2002 00:00:00 EDT

To deport or not to deport? That is one question -- among others -- now being considered by Danish politicians in the wake of last year's right-wing landslide. Last November Pia Kjaersgaard, a grandmotherly, Nordic version of Pat Buchanan, led the Danish People's Party through an election that doubled its seats in parliament. In the wake of September 11, the party not only emerged from the fringe to take third place, but also set the terms of debate for the election.

During the brief campaign, Kjaersgaard soared in popularity while condemning immigrants, blaming them for a recent uptick in inner-city gang violence. She was particularly hostile to Muslims. In August the party compiled the much-reviled "immigrants list," publishing the names and locations of 5,000 recently naturalized immigrants in a national newspaper.

The three major parties -- the Social Democrats, the Social Liberals, and the center-right Liberal Party -- fell in line, arguing only over how much to cut back immigration. The Liberal Party, which won the elections, backed an end to refugees, further restrictions on entry, a more difficult path to naturalization, and exclusion of noncitizens from welfare benefits.

When Jorge Haider's anti-immigrant Freedom Party joined Austria's ruling coalition a few years back, the European Union imposed sanctions. To avoid such a fate, Kjaersgaard was not offered a cabinet seat. But the DPP, allied with the ruling Liberal Party, has begun to wield significant influence in the new government, which has proposed legislation to trim the number of refugees accepted and to cut back on benefits offered to newcomers.

Bertel Haarder, the new immigration minister, has sought to allay E.U. fears. He told the BBC, "We have the highest asylum acceptance rate in the world probably. What we would like is simply to come down to Swedish or even to British levels."

Mailmen's Malaise

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Thu, 30 May 2002 00:00:00 EDT

Reeling from slow delivery rates and foreign and domestic anthrax threats that have cost more than one worker his life, the United States Postal Service has now come under attack by the General Accounting Office and angry customers who don't want to pay the three-penny first-class price hike set to go into effect on June 30.

The two major causes of the mailmen's malaise are the decline in shipping after 9/11 and longstanding rotten management. But other considerations factor in, including the paranoid mindset of the whole postal system and its occasional willingness to harass innocent private mailbox providers and invoke archaic laws to fine competitors.

In the last several years the post office has attempted to stem the flow of red ink by issuing a series of groovy new stamps and by trying to embrace the Internet. They've even added electronic payments capabilities. But the question remains: Who's going to trust an online service from the folks whose offline counterpart is universally known as "snail mail"?

Maple Leaf Rag

info@reason.com (Jeremy Lott) — Wed, 01 May 2002 00:00:00 EDT