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Wednesday, July 07, 2010
One Giant Leap (Backward)
By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
"Waste anything but time." That was the motto of the teams behind NASA's Apollo mission. That spirit has long since evaporated. Today's NASA is pulled by a million missions, from improving education and spinning off more products like Tang to its latest call of duty: telling Muslims how good they are at math.
NASA chief Charles Bolden recently told Al-Jazeera TV that President Obama charged him with three crucial missions: (1) "help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math"; (2) "expand our international relationships"; and (3) "perhaps foremost" Bolden explained, president Obama "wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world ... to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering."
We've gone from "waste anything but time" to "waste everything, especially time" in about a generation.
Liberalism is caught in something of a Catch-22. Under Obama, liberals are determined to reinvigorate the reputation of government, to prove that only the state can get important things done. That is why the Gulf oil spill, for instance, is so vexatious for the White House and its liberal supporters. Why can't the government be more nimble, more resourceful?
It was one thing when the feds failed after Hurricane Katrina, liberals reasoned, because Bush didn't like government. This was not only untrue, it overlooked the fact that the permanent government bureaucracy is on liberal autopilot. Regardless, Obama is different. He loves government, he sees it as the most noble of callings. That's why he wants to make student loans much cheaper for kids who go to work for the government, and it's why he wants government jobs to pay so much better than private sector ones.
According to contemporary liberalism, the government is the control room of society, where problems get solved, where institutions get their marching orders, where the oceans are commanded to stop rising. Each institution must subscribe to the progressive vision, all oars must pull as one. We are all in it together. We can do it all, if we all work together. Yes, we can.
In my book, "Liberal Fascism," I called this phenomenon the "liberal Gleichschaltung" Gleichschaltung is a German word (in case you couldn't have guessed) borrowed from electrical engineering. It means "coordination." The German National Socialists (Nazis) used the concept to get every institution to sing from the same hymnal. If a fraternity or business embraced Nazism, it could stay "independent." If it rejected Nazism, it was crushed or bent to the state's ideology. Meanwhile, every branch of government was charged with not merely doing its job but advancing the official state ideology.
Now, contemporary liberalism is not an evil ideology. Its intentions aren't evil or even fruitfully comparable to Hitlerism. But there is a liberal Gleichschaltung all the same. Every institution must be on the same page. Every agency must advance the liberal agenda.
And this is where the Catch-22 catches. The dream of a nimble, focused, problem-solving government is undone by the reality of hyper-mission creep. When every institution is yoked to an overarching philosophy or mission, its actual purpose can become an afterthought. In 2005, volunteer firefighters from all over the country offered to help with Katrina's aftermath. But FEMA sent many of them to Atlanta first to undergo diversity and sexual harassment training (which most already had).
Such examples are everywhere. What is political correctness other than the gears of the liberal Gleichschaltung? The financial crisis was worsened because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac became tools for liberal social engineering. Let's not even mention public schools.
The White House is determined to be a great friend (i.e., servant) to the unions, so everything from the stimulus to the automaker buyout to the Gulf spill must first pass union muster. Remember those vital, "shovel-ready" weatherization jobs the stimulus was supposed to pay for? The Labor Department delayed them for nearly a year while trying to figure out how to comply with pro-union "prevailing wage" rules for each of more than 3,000 counties.
Liberalism has become a cargo cult to the New Deal, but many of the achievements of the New Deal would be impossible now. Just try to get a Hoover Dam built today.
President Obama likes to say "if we could put a man on the moon" we can do anything, from socializing medicine to abandoning fossil fuels. That's nonsense on stilts for a host of reasons. But it's also ironic, given that we can't even put a man on the moon anymore. Not when NASA's foremost priority is boosting the self-esteem of children and Muslims.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
"Waste anything but time." That was the motto of the teams behind NASA's Apollo mission. That spirit has long since evaporated. Today's NASA is pulled by a million missions, from improving education and spinning off more products like Tang to its latest call of duty: telling Muslims how good they are at math.NASA chief Charles Bolden recently told Al-Jazeera TV that President Obama charged him with three crucial missions: (1) "help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math"; (2) "expand our international relationships"; and (3) "perhaps foremost" Bolden explained, president Obama "wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world ... to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering."
We've gone from "waste anything but time" to "waste everything, especially time" in about a generation.
Liberalism is caught in something of a Catch-22. Under Obama, liberals are determined to reinvigorate the reputation of government, to prove that only the state can get important things done. That is why the Gulf oil spill, for instance, is so vexatious for the White House and its liberal supporters. Why can't the government be more nimble, more resourceful?
It was one thing when the feds failed after Hurricane Katrina, liberals reasoned, because Bush didn't like government. This was not only untrue, it overlooked the fact that the permanent government bureaucracy is on liberal autopilot. Regardless, Obama is different. He loves government, he sees it as the most noble of callings. That's why he wants to make student loans much cheaper for kids who go to work for the government, and it's why he wants government jobs to pay so much better than private sector ones.
According to contemporary liberalism, the government is the control room of society, where problems get solved, where institutions get their marching orders, where the oceans are commanded to stop rising. Each institution must subscribe to the progressive vision, all oars must pull as one. We are all in it together. We can do it all, if we all work together. Yes, we can.
In my book, "Liberal Fascism," I called this phenomenon the "liberal Gleichschaltung" Gleichschaltung is a German word (in case you couldn't have guessed) borrowed from electrical engineering. It means "coordination." The German National Socialists (Nazis) used the concept to get every institution to sing from the same hymnal. If a fraternity or business embraced Nazism, it could stay "independent." If it rejected Nazism, it was crushed or bent to the state's ideology. Meanwhile, every branch of government was charged with not merely doing its job but advancing the official state ideology.
Now, contemporary liberalism is not an evil ideology. Its intentions aren't evil or even fruitfully comparable to Hitlerism. But there is a liberal Gleichschaltung all the same. Every institution must be on the same page. Every agency must advance the liberal agenda.
And this is where the Catch-22 catches. The dream of a nimble, focused, problem-solving government is undone by the reality of hyper-mission creep. When every institution is yoked to an overarching philosophy or mission, its actual purpose can become an afterthought. In 2005, volunteer firefighters from all over the country offered to help with Katrina's aftermath. But FEMA sent many of them to Atlanta first to undergo diversity and sexual harassment training (which most already had).
Such examples are everywhere. What is political correctness other than the gears of the liberal Gleichschaltung? The financial crisis was worsened because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac became tools for liberal social engineering. Let's not even mention public schools.
The White House is determined to be a great friend (i.e., servant) to the unions, so everything from the stimulus to the automaker buyout to the Gulf spill must first pass union muster. Remember those vital, "shovel-ready" weatherization jobs the stimulus was supposed to pay for? The Labor Department delayed them for nearly a year while trying to figure out how to comply with pro-union "prevailing wage" rules for each of more than 3,000 counties.
Liberalism has become a cargo cult to the New Deal, but many of the achievements of the New Deal would be impossible now. Just try to get a Hoover Dam built today.
President Obama likes to say "if we could put a man on the moon" we can do anything, from socializing medicine to abandoning fossil fuels. That's nonsense on stilts for a host of reasons. But it's also ironic, given that we can't even put a man on the moon anymore. Not when NASA's foremost priority is boosting the self-esteem of children and Muslims.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
NASA Does Muslim Outreach
It might just be that Muslim self-confidence is more dangerous to us than imagined Muslim feelings of inadequacy.
By Mona Charen
http://www.nationalreview.com
July 7, 2010 12:00 A.M.
It’s not really surprising that President Obama told NASA administrator Charles Bolden that his highest priority should be “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science . . . and math and engineering.” It fits with so much that we already knew about the president.
It is consistent with his wildly exaggerated concept of governmental and presidential power and competence. Samuel Johnson wrote: “How small, of all that human hearts endure / that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” Mr. Obama believes the opposite — that his presidency can be a transformative moment not just for the nation, but for the world. He will halt global warming and stop the rise of the oceans, transition America to a green energy future, end the “cycle of boom and bust” in the economy, provide universal health care while spending less than before, cushion “underwater” mortgage holders without rewarding profligate borrowers, increase taxes on the “rich” without harming the middle class, solve the problem of excessive public debt by amassing more public debt, and so on.
How in the world would NASA help Muslim nations to “feel good” about themselves? Would NASA hold science fairs in Tripoli or Tehran? Produce and circulate propaganda films about Great Muslim Men (careful, never women) of Science? Stress our global debt to Muhammad ibn Masa al-Khwarizmi, the father of algebra? (That’s risky, since al-Khwarizmi reportedly learned his math from the Indians.) How would Mr. Obama’s NASA chief undertake to alter the civilizational self-esteem of a billion people?
Of course, it’s entirely possible (pace Bernard Lewis) that the Muslim world does not lack for self-esteem on the matter of science or anything else. Certainly scientific know-how has not been lacking in nuclear-armed Pakistan, or (would-be) nuclear Iran. Besides, hasn’t Mr. Obama heard? The whole self-esteem myth has been exploded. Though millions of tax dollars and God only knows how many wasted instructional hours have gone toward making American kids think they are really, really special, it turns out that there is zero correlation between such drilled self-esteem and academic performance. (See Scientific American, January 2005.)
The Obama directive to NASA also revealed a mental tic common to liberals — the tendency to universalize the African-American experience. Just as African Americans were denied their rights and dignity, goes this reasoning, so today fill-in-the-blank are being persecuted or demeaned — women, gays, Muslims, the handicapped, illegal immigrants, Palestinians, “people of color.”
But this line of reasoning impedes rather than advances understanding. The African-American experience in America was actually very different from that of women, gays, the handicapped, illegal immigrants, or others here, to say nothing of the experience of Palestinians or “people of color” worldwide. Invoking the emotionally charged civil-rights paradigm closes the door on nuance and context and encourages dogmatism.
To treat the Muslim world as a vast ocean of African Americans in need of respect and encouragement from us is both arrogant and incredibly solipsistic. In fact, large swaths of the Muslim world feel inexpressibly superior to us — particularly morally and spiritually. Until cold terror forced them to accept American servicemen on their soil, the Saudis kept “infidel” pollution to the barest minimum in the home of the prophet. That wasn’t an expression of inferiority. Osama bin Laden boasted in 2000 that he had defeated the Soviet Empire and that it would be a small matter to defeat the American one. Again, he may have been deluded, but he was not a candidate for assertiveness training. Nearly every Muslim child is instructed that his is the true faith, superior in every way to the errors that came before — Judaism and Christianity — and infinitely above paganism or atheism. Jihadis are taught that their shining pure religion requires no less than the mass murder of infidels and unbelievers.
It might just be that Muslim self-confidence is more dangerous to us than imagined Muslim feelings of inadequacy. But in any case, solicitude about the feelings of individuals cannot constitute a foreign policy. Muslim nations, like other nations, are motivated by advantage and influenced by perceptions of strength and weakness. The president has absolutely no control over the way Muslims feel about themselves — but he has every power over the way they perceive us.
— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
By Mona Charen
http://www.nationalreview.com
July 7, 2010 12:00 A.M.
It’s not really surprising that President Obama told NASA administrator Charles Bolden that his highest priority should be “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science . . . and math and engineering.” It fits with so much that we already knew about the president.It is consistent with his wildly exaggerated concept of governmental and presidential power and competence. Samuel Johnson wrote: “How small, of all that human hearts endure / that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” Mr. Obama believes the opposite — that his presidency can be a transformative moment not just for the nation, but for the world. He will halt global warming and stop the rise of the oceans, transition America to a green energy future, end the “cycle of boom and bust” in the economy, provide universal health care while spending less than before, cushion “underwater” mortgage holders without rewarding profligate borrowers, increase taxes on the “rich” without harming the middle class, solve the problem of excessive public debt by amassing more public debt, and so on.
How in the world would NASA help Muslim nations to “feel good” about themselves? Would NASA hold science fairs in Tripoli or Tehran? Produce and circulate propaganda films about Great Muslim Men (careful, never women) of Science? Stress our global debt to Muhammad ibn Masa al-Khwarizmi, the father of algebra? (That’s risky, since al-Khwarizmi reportedly learned his math from the Indians.) How would Mr. Obama’s NASA chief undertake to alter the civilizational self-esteem of a billion people?
Of course, it’s entirely possible (pace Bernard Lewis) that the Muslim world does not lack for self-esteem on the matter of science or anything else. Certainly scientific know-how has not been lacking in nuclear-armed Pakistan, or (would-be) nuclear Iran. Besides, hasn’t Mr. Obama heard? The whole self-esteem myth has been exploded. Though millions of tax dollars and God only knows how many wasted instructional hours have gone toward making American kids think they are really, really special, it turns out that there is zero correlation between such drilled self-esteem and academic performance. (See Scientific American, January 2005.)
The Obama directive to NASA also revealed a mental tic common to liberals — the tendency to universalize the African-American experience. Just as African Americans were denied their rights and dignity, goes this reasoning, so today fill-in-the-blank are being persecuted or demeaned — women, gays, Muslims, the handicapped, illegal immigrants, Palestinians, “people of color.”
But this line of reasoning impedes rather than advances understanding. The African-American experience in America was actually very different from that of women, gays, the handicapped, illegal immigrants, or others here, to say nothing of the experience of Palestinians or “people of color” worldwide. Invoking the emotionally charged civil-rights paradigm closes the door on nuance and context and encourages dogmatism.
To treat the Muslim world as a vast ocean of African Americans in need of respect and encouragement from us is both arrogant and incredibly solipsistic. In fact, large swaths of the Muslim world feel inexpressibly superior to us — particularly morally and spiritually. Until cold terror forced them to accept American servicemen on their soil, the Saudis kept “infidel” pollution to the barest minimum in the home of the prophet. That wasn’t an expression of inferiority. Osama bin Laden boasted in 2000 that he had defeated the Soviet Empire and that it would be a small matter to defeat the American one. Again, he may have been deluded, but he was not a candidate for assertiveness training. Nearly every Muslim child is instructed that his is the true faith, superior in every way to the errors that came before — Judaism and Christianity — and infinitely above paganism or atheism. Jihadis are taught that their shining pure religion requires no less than the mass murder of infidels and unbelievers.
It might just be that Muslim self-confidence is more dangerous to us than imagined Muslim feelings of inadequacy. But in any case, solicitude about the feelings of individuals cannot constitute a foreign policy. Muslim nations, like other nations, are motivated by advantage and influenced by perceptions of strength and weakness. The president has absolutely no control over the way Muslims feel about themselves — but he has every power over the way they perceive us.
— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Open-Borders DOJ vs. America
The federal government sues to stop enforcement of its own laws.
By Michelle Malkin
http://www.nationalreview.com
July 7, 2010 12:00 A.M.
The Obama administration’s lawsuit against Arizona, officially unveiled on Tuesday, is an affront to all law-abiding Americans. It is a threatening salvo aimed at all local, county, or state governments that dare to take control of the immigration chaos in their own backyards. And it is being driven by open-borders extremists who have dedicated their political careers to subverting homeland-security policies in the name of “compassion” and “diversity.”
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, headed by assistant attorney general Thomas E. Perez, took the lead in prepping the legal brief against Arizona. The son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Perez is a far-left lawyer and activist who worked for the late mass-illegal-alien-amnesty champion Sen. Ted Kennedy and served in the Clinton administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ). While holding down a key government position there, one in which he was entrusted to abide by the rule of law, Perez volunteered for CASA de Maryland — a notorious illegal-alien advocacy group funded through a combination of taxpayer-subsidized grants and radical-liberal philanthropy, including billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Institute (not to mention more than $1 million showered on the group by Venezuelan thug Hugo Chávez’s regime-owned oil company, CITGO).
Perez rose from CASA de Maryland volunteer to president of the group’s board of directors. Under the guise of enhancing the “multicultural” experience, he crusaded for an ever-expanding set of illegal-alien benefits ranging from in-state tuition discounts at public colleges to driver’s licenses. CASA de Maryland opposes enforcement of deportation orders, has protested post-9/11 coordination of local, state, and national criminal databases, and produced a “know your rights” propaganda pamphlet for illegal aliens depicting federal immigration agents as armed bullies making babies cry.
In 2006, CASA de Maryland threatened to protest at the schools of children whose parents belonged to the pro-immigration-enforcement group Minuteman Project — and then headed into the Montgomery County, Md., public schools to recruit junior amnesty protesters, who were offered school credits for traveling with CASA de Maryland to march on Washington.
As a former Maryland resident, I got to see Perez’s militant friends and colleagues in action. I watched CASA de Maryland president Gustavo Torres (who met with President Obama last week) complain that motor-vehicle-administration officials have “absolutely no right to ask for people’s Social Security number or immigration status to get a driver’s license.” I stood among CASA de Maryland grievance-mongers who shouted, “No license, no justice! No justice, no peace!” while playing the race card against naturalized Americans and legal immigrants who opposed the illegal-alien welfare state.
Perez himself derided secure-borders citizen activists as “xenophobes” but denied painting the grassroots immigration-enforcement movement as racist. Questioned during his confirmation hearing last year by GOP senator Jeff Sessions about the illegal-alien rights guide produced by CASA de Maryland, Perez grudgingly stated that “the Civil Rights Division must not act in contravention to valid enforcement actions of our federal immigration laws.” But “act(ing) in contravention” is exactly what the Civil Rights Division is doing in spearheading the challenge to Arizona’s valid enforcement actions of our federal immigration law.
Perez, Attorney General Eric Holder, and the rest of the open-borders DOJ team have invoked a “preemption” doctrine based on the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause to attack Arizona’s anti-illegal-immigration measure and oppose local and state enforcement of federal immigration laws. Never mind that the Arizona law was drafted scrupulously to comply with all federal statutes and the Constitution.
You gotta love Obama’s fair-weather friends of the Constitution. When a state acts to do the job the feds won’t do, Obama’s legal eagles run to the Founding Fathers for protection. When, on the other hand, left-wing cities across the country pass illegal-alien sanctuary policies that flagrantly defy national immigration laws and hamper cross-jurisdiction enforcement, the newfound federal preemption advocates are nowhere in sight.
The Obama DOJ’s lawsuit against Arizona is sabotage of the people’s will and the government’s fundamental responsibility to provide for the common defense. No border enforcement, no security. No security, no peace.
— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
By Michelle Malkin
http://www.nationalreview.com
July 7, 2010 12:00 A.M.
The Obama administration’s lawsuit against Arizona, officially unveiled on Tuesday, is an affront to all law-abiding Americans. It is a threatening salvo aimed at all local, county, or state governments that dare to take control of the immigration chaos in their own backyards. And it is being driven by open-borders extremists who have dedicated their political careers to subverting homeland-security policies in the name of “compassion” and “diversity.”The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, headed by assistant attorney general Thomas E. Perez, took the lead in prepping the legal brief against Arizona. The son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Perez is a far-left lawyer and activist who worked for the late mass-illegal-alien-amnesty champion Sen. Ted Kennedy and served in the Clinton administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ). While holding down a key government position there, one in which he was entrusted to abide by the rule of law, Perez volunteered for CASA de Maryland — a notorious illegal-alien advocacy group funded through a combination of taxpayer-subsidized grants and radical-liberal philanthropy, including billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Institute (not to mention more than $1 million showered on the group by Venezuelan thug Hugo Chávez’s regime-owned oil company, CITGO).
Perez rose from CASA de Maryland volunteer to president of the group’s board of directors. Under the guise of enhancing the “multicultural” experience, he crusaded for an ever-expanding set of illegal-alien benefits ranging from in-state tuition discounts at public colleges to driver’s licenses. CASA de Maryland opposes enforcement of deportation orders, has protested post-9/11 coordination of local, state, and national criminal databases, and produced a “know your rights” propaganda pamphlet for illegal aliens depicting federal immigration agents as armed bullies making babies cry.
In 2006, CASA de Maryland threatened to protest at the schools of children whose parents belonged to the pro-immigration-enforcement group Minuteman Project — and then headed into the Montgomery County, Md., public schools to recruit junior amnesty protesters, who were offered school credits for traveling with CASA de Maryland to march on Washington.
As a former Maryland resident, I got to see Perez’s militant friends and colleagues in action. I watched CASA de Maryland president Gustavo Torres (who met with President Obama last week) complain that motor-vehicle-administration officials have “absolutely no right to ask for people’s Social Security number or immigration status to get a driver’s license.” I stood among CASA de Maryland grievance-mongers who shouted, “No license, no justice! No justice, no peace!” while playing the race card against naturalized Americans and legal immigrants who opposed the illegal-alien welfare state.
Perez himself derided secure-borders citizen activists as “xenophobes” but denied painting the grassroots immigration-enforcement movement as racist. Questioned during his confirmation hearing last year by GOP senator Jeff Sessions about the illegal-alien rights guide produced by CASA de Maryland, Perez grudgingly stated that “the Civil Rights Division must not act in contravention to valid enforcement actions of our federal immigration laws.” But “act(ing) in contravention” is exactly what the Civil Rights Division is doing in spearheading the challenge to Arizona’s valid enforcement actions of our federal immigration law.
Perez, Attorney General Eric Holder, and the rest of the open-borders DOJ team have invoked a “preemption” doctrine based on the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause to attack Arizona’s anti-illegal-immigration measure and oppose local and state enforcement of federal immigration laws. Never mind that the Arizona law was drafted scrupulously to comply with all federal statutes and the Constitution.
You gotta love Obama’s fair-weather friends of the Constitution. When a state acts to do the job the feds won’t do, Obama’s legal eagles run to the Founding Fathers for protection. When, on the other hand, left-wing cities across the country pass illegal-alien sanctuary policies that flagrantly defy national immigration laws and hamper cross-jurisdiction enforcement, the newfound federal preemption advocates are nowhere in sight.
The Obama DOJ’s lawsuit against Arizona is sabotage of the people’s will and the government’s fundamental responsibility to provide for the common defense. No border enforcement, no security. No security, no peace.
— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
A Very Obama Scandal
The Black Panthers voter intimidation scandal plagues the Justice Department
By JOHN FUND
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
JULY 7, 2010
J. Christian Adams, a former career Justice Department official who resigned over the Obama administration's failure to pursue a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party, will finally get a chance to tell his story in public today when he testifies before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Mr. Adams will make some explosive charges. He says the administration used a racial double standard in deciding last year to drop the prosecution of the New Black Panther Party after members were videotaped in front of a Philadelphia polling place on Election Day 2008 dressed in military-style uniforms, brandishing a billy club and using racial slurs against voters. Mr. Adams says the career prosecutors who pursued the case did their job but were stymied by Obama political appointees, for whom he has harsh words: "To abandon law-abiding citizens and abet wrongdoers constitutes corruption," he told Fox News last week.
President Obama's Justice Department continues to stonewall inquiries about why it dropped the voter intimidation case, which Bartle Bull, a former civil rights lawyer and former publisher of the left-wing Village Voice, calls "the most blatant form of voter intimidation I've ever seen." Mr. Bull and others witnessed one Black Panther pointing his billy club at voters and making racial threats. Mr. Bull says he heard one yell: "You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!"
Nonetheless, the Justice Department moved to dismiss most of the charges a month after winning a default judgment against the Black Panthers when the party failed to appear in federal court. The move came after Justice secured an agreement from one Black Panther member not to carry a "deadly weapon" near a polling place until 2012. In a written statement, the Justice Department now says it acted in good faith, adding: "It is regrettable when a former department attorney distorts the facts and makes baseless allegations to promote his or her agenda."
But the Washington Times has reported that six career lawyers at Justice, including Christopher Coates, former chief of the Justice Department's voting section, also favored pursuing the case. One of the career attorneys, Appellate Chief Diana Flynn, had urged in an internal memo that a judgment be pressed against the defendants to "prevent the paramilitary style intimidation of voters" in the future.
All of the career attorneys were overruled by Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, an Obama appointee.
Rep. Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, says his efforts to require Justice to make the career attorneys available for questions have been rebuffed. Mr. Adams is able to testify today only because he voluntarily resigned his career position. It will be interesting to see if his public testimony finally stirs the broadcast networks to cover this outrage.
[If you wish to read J. Christian Adams' own account of all this garbage click on link below:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/black-panther-case-who-runs-the-country/]
By JOHN FUND
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
JULY 7, 2010
J. Christian Adams, a former career Justice Department official who resigned over the Obama administration's failure to pursue a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party, will finally get a chance to tell his story in public today when he testifies before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Mr. Adams will make some explosive charges. He says the administration used a racial double standard in deciding last year to drop the prosecution of the New Black Panther Party after members were videotaped in front of a Philadelphia polling place on Election Day 2008 dressed in military-style uniforms, brandishing a billy club and using racial slurs against voters. Mr. Adams says the career prosecutors who pursued the case did their job but were stymied by Obama political appointees, for whom he has harsh words: "To abandon law-abiding citizens and abet wrongdoers constitutes corruption," he told Fox News last week.President Obama's Justice Department continues to stonewall inquiries about why it dropped the voter intimidation case, which Bartle Bull, a former civil rights lawyer and former publisher of the left-wing Village Voice, calls "the most blatant form of voter intimidation I've ever seen." Mr. Bull and others witnessed one Black Panther pointing his billy club at voters and making racial threats. Mr. Bull says he heard one yell: "You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!"
Nonetheless, the Justice Department moved to dismiss most of the charges a month after winning a default judgment against the Black Panthers when the party failed to appear in federal court. The move came after Justice secured an agreement from one Black Panther member not to carry a "deadly weapon" near a polling place until 2012. In a written statement, the Justice Department now says it acted in good faith, adding: "It is regrettable when a former department attorney distorts the facts and makes baseless allegations to promote his or her agenda."
But the Washington Times has reported that six career lawyers at Justice, including Christopher Coates, former chief of the Justice Department's voting section, also favored pursuing the case. One of the career attorneys, Appellate Chief Diana Flynn, had urged in an internal memo that a judgment be pressed against the defendants to "prevent the paramilitary style intimidation of voters" in the future.
All of the career attorneys were overruled by Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, an Obama appointee.
Rep. Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, says his efforts to require Justice to make the career attorneys available for questions have been rebuffed. Mr. Adams is able to testify today only because he voluntarily resigned his career position. It will be interesting to see if his public testimony finally stirs the broadcast networks to cover this outrage.
[If you wish to read J. Christian Adams' own account of all this garbage click on link below:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/black-panther-case-who-runs-the-country/]
Tuesday, July 06, 2010
NASA's new mission: Building ties to Muslim world
By Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
The Washington Examiner
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/
July 6, 2010
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden prepares to testify on Capitol Hill in February. (Gerald Herbert/AP)
You'd be hard-pressed to find an American who doesn't know that the "S" in NASA stands for "Space." Since the race to the moon in the 1960s, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been one of the most storied agencies in the U.S. government. Now, under President Obama, its mission is changing -- and space isn't part of the story.
"When I became the NASA administrator, [Obama] charged me with three things," NASA head Charles Bolden said in a recent interview with the Middle Eastern news network al-Jazeera. "One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering."
From moon landings to promoting self-esteem: It would be difficult to imagine a more dramatic shift in focus for an agency famous for reaching the heavens. Bolden's words left supporters of space exploration astonished. "Everyone had the same impression: Is this what he is spending his time on?" says a Republican Hill aide who tracks the space program. "A lot of people are very upset about it."
NASA is not getting out of the space business, at least not entirely. But Bolden's words, together with the president's decision to scrap much of NASA's mission and include the agency in the "Cairo Initiative" -- that is, the White House outreach program outlined in Obama's June 4, 2009, Cairo speech to the Muslim world -- show that the NASA of the future will be little like the past.
Obama released his plan for NASA a few months ago, and to many it seemed a blueprint for disaster. The moon program will be scrapped, replaced by a hazy hope to visit Mars. The space shuttle will die, too, leaving America with no way to put a man in orbit.
Obama's proposal stunned U.S. space heroes Neil Armstrong and Eugene Cernan -- the first and last men to walk on the moon -- who, along with Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell, made a rare public statement denouncing the plan as a "devastating" scheme that "destines our nation to become one of second- or even third-rate stature."
Even John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth who later became a Democratic senator and Obama supporter, was dismayed by the president's plan to rely on the Russians to ferry American astronauts to the international space station. "We're putting ourselves in line for a single-point failure ending the whole manned space program," Glenn said.
The Muslim outreach at NASA is the result of the White House's preparation for Obama's Cairo speech. Staffers found that many Muslims admire American achievements in science and technology, so Obama used the speech to announce the appointment of U.S. "science envoys" and a new fund "to support technological development in Muslim-majority countries."
Obama appointed Egyptian-American scientist Ahmed Zewail as the first science envoy to the Middle East. Just last week, Zewail argued that the U.S. can build better relations with the Muslim world by "harnessing the soft power of science in the service of diplomacy." The NASA initiative is part of that.
Last month, Bolden himself traveled to Cairo to mark the first anniversary of Obama's speech. In an address at the American University, Bolden cited Zewail's work and stressed NASA's role in improving relations with Islamic nations. Beginning with a hearty "Assalaamu alaykum," Bolden explained that in the past, NASA worked with countries that were capable of space exploration, but now Obama has "asked NASA to change ... by reaching out to 'nontraditional' partners and strengthening our cooperation in the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia and in particular in Muslim-majority nations."
"NASA is not only a space exploration agency," Bolden concluded, "but also an Earth improvement agency."
At the same time, Bolden gave a bleak assessment of the space part of NASA's mission. More than 40 years after the first moon landing, he told al-Jazeera, the U.S. can no longer reach beyond Earth's orbit without assistance from abroad. "We're not going to go anywhere beyond low Earth orbit as a single entity," Bolden said. "The United States can't do it."
Its space initiatives junked, its administrator rhapsodizing about helping Muslims "feel good" about themselves: That is the new NASA.
Byron York, The Examiner's chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blog posts appears on ExaminerPolitics.com
Chief Political Correspondent
The Washington Examiner
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/
July 6, 2010
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden prepares to testify on Capitol Hill in February. (Gerald Herbert/AP)
You'd be hard-pressed to find an American who doesn't know that the "S" in NASA stands for "Space." Since the race to the moon in the 1960s, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been one of the most storied agencies in the U.S. government. Now, under President Obama, its mission is changing -- and space isn't part of the story.
"When I became the NASA administrator, [Obama] charged me with three things," NASA head Charles Bolden said in a recent interview with the Middle Eastern news network al-Jazeera. "One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering."
From moon landings to promoting self-esteem: It would be difficult to imagine a more dramatic shift in focus for an agency famous for reaching the heavens. Bolden's words left supporters of space exploration astonished. "Everyone had the same impression: Is this what he is spending his time on?" says a Republican Hill aide who tracks the space program. "A lot of people are very upset about it."
NASA is not getting out of the space business, at least not entirely. But Bolden's words, together with the president's decision to scrap much of NASA's mission and include the agency in the "Cairo Initiative" -- that is, the White House outreach program outlined in Obama's June 4, 2009, Cairo speech to the Muslim world -- show that the NASA of the future will be little like the past.
Obama released his plan for NASA a few months ago, and to many it seemed a blueprint for disaster. The moon program will be scrapped, replaced by a hazy hope to visit Mars. The space shuttle will die, too, leaving America with no way to put a man in orbit.
Obama's proposal stunned U.S. space heroes Neil Armstrong and Eugene Cernan -- the first and last men to walk on the moon -- who, along with Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell, made a rare public statement denouncing the plan as a "devastating" scheme that "destines our nation to become one of second- or even third-rate stature."
Even John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth who later became a Democratic senator and Obama supporter, was dismayed by the president's plan to rely on the Russians to ferry American astronauts to the international space station. "We're putting ourselves in line for a single-point failure ending the whole manned space program," Glenn said.
The Muslim outreach at NASA is the result of the White House's preparation for Obama's Cairo speech. Staffers found that many Muslims admire American achievements in science and technology, so Obama used the speech to announce the appointment of U.S. "science envoys" and a new fund "to support technological development in Muslim-majority countries."
Obama appointed Egyptian-American scientist Ahmed Zewail as the first science envoy to the Middle East. Just last week, Zewail argued that the U.S. can build better relations with the Muslim world by "harnessing the soft power of science in the service of diplomacy." The NASA initiative is part of that.
Last month, Bolden himself traveled to Cairo to mark the first anniversary of Obama's speech. In an address at the American University, Bolden cited Zewail's work and stressed NASA's role in improving relations with Islamic nations. Beginning with a hearty "Assalaamu alaykum," Bolden explained that in the past, NASA worked with countries that were capable of space exploration, but now Obama has "asked NASA to change ... by reaching out to 'nontraditional' partners and strengthening our cooperation in the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia and in particular in Muslim-majority nations."
"NASA is not only a space exploration agency," Bolden concluded, "but also an Earth improvement agency."
At the same time, Bolden gave a bleak assessment of the space part of NASA's mission. More than 40 years after the first moon landing, he told al-Jazeera, the U.S. can no longer reach beyond Earth's orbit without assistance from abroad. "We're not going to go anywhere beyond low Earth orbit as a single entity," Bolden said. "The United States can't do it."
Its space initiatives junked, its administrator rhapsodizing about helping Muslims "feel good" about themselves: That is the new NASA.
Byron York, The Examiner's chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blog posts appears on ExaminerPolitics.com
Yankee Utopians in a Chinese Century
by Patrick J. Buchanan
http://www.humanevents.com/
07/02/2010
For those who can yet recall the backyard blast furnaces of Mao's China in the 1950s and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to re-instill peasant values in the 1970s, the news was jarring.
In 2011, said the Financial Times, China will surpass the United States as first manufacturing power, a title America has held since surpassing Great Britain around 1890.
Each year, China passes a new milestone.
Last year, China surpassed Germany as the greatest exporting nation. This year, China surpasses Japan as the world's second-largest economy. This year, China became the first auto manufacturer on earth.
For a decade, China has been running history's largest trade surpluses with the United States and has amassed a hoard of $2.3 trillion in foreign currency. She now holds the mortgage on America.
How has China vaulted to the forefront in manufacturing, trade and technology? Export-driven economic nationalism.
Beijing cut the value of its currency in half in 1994, doubling the price of imports, slashing the price of exports and making Chinese labor the best bargain in Asia. Foreign firms were invited to relocate their plants in China and told this was the price of access to the Chinese market. Beijing began looting these firms of technology, as she sent her sons to study in America. Industrial espionage and intellectual property theft became Chinese specialties.
And how has America fared in the new century?
One in every three manufacturing jobs we had in 2000, nearly 6 million, vanished. Some 50,000 U.S. factories shut down. We have run trade deficits totaling $5 trillion since NAFTA passed. The real wages of working Americans have been stagnant for a decade.
While China has resumed her 12 percent growth rate, the United States, with 25 million unemployed or underemployed, appears headed for a double-dip recession.
Yet, even as the end of America's tenure as the world's first manufacturing power was being announced, The Wall Street Journal admonished us to keep our eyes on the prize: a new world order where it does not matter who produces what or where.
"The pursuit of some ideal global 'balance' in trade and capital flows is an illusion. ... World leaders would do better to worry less about (trade) imbalances and more about whether their own nations are pursuing policies that contribute to global prosperity."
There you have it -- the conflict in visions between us.
For decades, America's leaders have followed the Wall Street Journal ideology. We put a mythical world economy before our own economy. We put "global prosperity" before national interest. We forced our workers to compete, in their own country, against the products of foreign laborers earning a tenth of their pay. And we let in tens of millions of semi-skilled and unskilled immigrants, legal and illegal, to take the jobs of our countrymen.
And the Chinese? They put China first, second and third.
And who won the decade? And who is winning the future?
Inside the July 1 Washington Post is a small story about how the World Trade Organization finally ruled that European nations have been unfairly subsidizing Airbus -- for 40 years.
While welcome, what good will it do now for scores of thousands of U.S. workers who built commercial jets for Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas, which Airbus took down, or Boeing, which was outsourcing jobs even before Airbus dethroned it as the world's No. 1 aircraft manufacturer.
Why did some U.S. president not tell the Europeans when they started this: Either stop subsidizing Airbus to kill our U.S. aircraft companies -- or start defending yourselves against the Russians.
The day the FT reported that China was sweeping past us to become No. 1 in manufacturing, The New York Times ran a front-page story on the closing of the Whirlpool refrigerator plant in Evansville, Ind., and the loss of 1,100 jobs. The plant is moving to Mexico.
The Times spoke with Natalie Ford, a worker, whose husband and son also worked at Whirlpool, as had her dad, "This is all about corporate greed," Mrs. Ford said, "It's devastating to our family and to everyone in the plant. I wonder where we'll be two years from now. There aren't any jobs here. How is this community going to survive?"
"My mom and dad told me that when they were young, there were jobs everywhere. They said we had Whirlpool, Bristol-Myers, Mead Johnson, Windsor Plastics, Guardian Automotive, Zenith. Now if you want to find a job, there's nothing around."
"Free trade! Free trade!" said Henry Clay in the tariff debate of 1833. "The call for free trade is as unavailing as the cry of a spoiled child in its nurse's arms for the moon or the stars that glitter in the firmament of heaven. It has never existed. It will never exist."
It will only place us, said Clay, "under the commercial dominion of Great Britain." Today, it is the dominion of China.
Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of "Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World", "The Death of the West,", "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."
http://www.humanevents.com/
07/02/2010
For those who can yet recall the backyard blast furnaces of Mao's China in the 1950s and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to re-instill peasant values in the 1970s, the news was jarring.
In 2011, said the Financial Times, China will surpass the United States as first manufacturing power, a title America has held since surpassing Great Britain around 1890.
Each year, China passes a new milestone.
Last year, China surpassed Germany as the greatest exporting nation. This year, China surpasses Japan as the world's second-largest economy. This year, China became the first auto manufacturer on earth.For a decade, China has been running history's largest trade surpluses with the United States and has amassed a hoard of $2.3 trillion in foreign currency. She now holds the mortgage on America.
How has China vaulted to the forefront in manufacturing, trade and technology? Export-driven economic nationalism.
Beijing cut the value of its currency in half in 1994, doubling the price of imports, slashing the price of exports and making Chinese labor the best bargain in Asia. Foreign firms were invited to relocate their plants in China and told this was the price of access to the Chinese market. Beijing began looting these firms of technology, as she sent her sons to study in America. Industrial espionage and intellectual property theft became Chinese specialties.
And how has America fared in the new century?
One in every three manufacturing jobs we had in 2000, nearly 6 million, vanished. Some 50,000 U.S. factories shut down. We have run trade deficits totaling $5 trillion since NAFTA passed. The real wages of working Americans have been stagnant for a decade.
While China has resumed her 12 percent growth rate, the United States, with 25 million unemployed or underemployed, appears headed for a double-dip recession.
Yet, even as the end of America's tenure as the world's first manufacturing power was being announced, The Wall Street Journal admonished us to keep our eyes on the prize: a new world order where it does not matter who produces what or where.
"The pursuit of some ideal global 'balance' in trade and capital flows is an illusion. ... World leaders would do better to worry less about (trade) imbalances and more about whether their own nations are pursuing policies that contribute to global prosperity."
There you have it -- the conflict in visions between us.
For decades, America's leaders have followed the Wall Street Journal ideology. We put a mythical world economy before our own economy. We put "global prosperity" before national interest. We forced our workers to compete, in their own country, against the products of foreign laborers earning a tenth of their pay. And we let in tens of millions of semi-skilled and unskilled immigrants, legal and illegal, to take the jobs of our countrymen.
And the Chinese? They put China first, second and third.
And who won the decade? And who is winning the future?
Inside the July 1 Washington Post is a small story about how the World Trade Organization finally ruled that European nations have been unfairly subsidizing Airbus -- for 40 years.
While welcome, what good will it do now for scores of thousands of U.S. workers who built commercial jets for Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas, which Airbus took down, or Boeing, which was outsourcing jobs even before Airbus dethroned it as the world's No. 1 aircraft manufacturer.
Why did some U.S. president not tell the Europeans when they started this: Either stop subsidizing Airbus to kill our U.S. aircraft companies -- or start defending yourselves against the Russians.
The day the FT reported that China was sweeping past us to become No. 1 in manufacturing, The New York Times ran a front-page story on the closing of the Whirlpool refrigerator plant in Evansville, Ind., and the loss of 1,100 jobs. The plant is moving to Mexico.
The Times spoke with Natalie Ford, a worker, whose husband and son also worked at Whirlpool, as had her dad, "This is all about corporate greed," Mrs. Ford said, "It's devastating to our family and to everyone in the plant. I wonder where we'll be two years from now. There aren't any jobs here. How is this community going to survive?"
"My mom and dad told me that when they were young, there were jobs everywhere. They said we had Whirlpool, Bristol-Myers, Mead Johnson, Windsor Plastics, Guardian Automotive, Zenith. Now if you want to find a job, there's nothing around."
"Free trade! Free trade!" said Henry Clay in the tariff debate of 1833. "The call for free trade is as unavailing as the cry of a spoiled child in its nurse's arms for the moon or the stars that glitter in the firmament of heaven. It has never existed. It will never exist."
It will only place us, said Clay, "under the commercial dominion of Great Britain." Today, it is the dominion of China.
Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of "Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World", "The Death of the West,", "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."
Mariano Rivera, King of the Closers
By JAMES TRAUB
From the July 4th issue of The New York Times Magazine
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html
June 28, 2010
Nigel Parry for The New York Times
Before the seventh game of the 2003 American League Championship Series with the Boston Red Sox, Mariano Rivera, the New York Yankees star who is widely considered the greatest relief pitcher in the history of baseball, said a prayer. Rivera, a deeply religious man, prays with his family before every home game. But this was a special prayer, which he delivered within himself, because the two teams, so evenly matched, had fought their way down to this final contest. Rivera’s prayers remained unanswered until the bottom of the eighth inning, when, in one of the great comebacks in playoff history, the Yankees scored three runs against Boston’s ace, Pedro Martinez, to tie the game. Before heading for the mound, Rivera, the most stoical of athletes, had to leave the bullpen for a little shed nearby, where he proceeded, astonishingly, to weep.
“I feel a tremendous load on my shoulders,” Rivera recalled this past March, sitting in front of his locker at the Yankees’ spring-training camp in Tampa, Fla. Rivera was trying to convey something quite different from what that expression normally means. A closer, who generally comes into a game only in the highly pressurized ninth inning to finish off the opponent, must welcome the kind of burden most of us — and even some otherwise very effective pitchers — flee. “I know,” Rivera went on, “I am going to have a good opportunity to pitch.” Closers normally pitch one inning. That night, Rivera navigated his way through a supremely tense ninth inning. And then the 10th. And then, with the score still tied, the 11th. “It was always a battle,” Rivera said. “It was a beautiful game.” In the bottom of the 11th, Yankees third baseman Aaron Boone won the game, and the series, with a home run. And if he hadn’t? “Tell you what,” Rivera said, flashing a most unworshipful grin, “I would have gone out there again.”
In his 16th year with the Yankees, Mariano Rivera, who is 40, has become a kind of living god of baseball. While his regular-season statistics are remarkable, in postseason play, where the pressure is at its highest, he is sui generis. He holds the lowest earned-run average in postseason history (0.74) among pitchers with at least 40 innings pitched. On 30 occasions he has gone more than one inning to record a save; over the same period, all other pitchers combined have done so only a few more times more than Rivera alone. In 2009, when he was thought to be slowing down and yielding his place to the Red Sox phenom Jonathan Papelbon, he pitched 16 innings in postseason play and gave up one run, while extending his career postseason saves record to 39 as the Yankees won the World Series. (Papelbon gave up a two-run lead in the ninth to end the Red Sox’ season in the divisional round against the Angels.) Rivera, when pressed, attributes his gifts to providence; people of a more secular bent say that he combines one of the single greatest pitches baseball has ever seen — his cutter, or cut fastball — with an inner calm, and a focus, no less unusual and no less inimitable.
UNTIL 30 OR 40 YEARS AGO, starting pitchers typically finished games. When they were shelled, managers called on the stock of has-beens they kept in the bullpen. Some pitchers with goofy offerings, like the knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm, made a living coming out of the bullpen. A very few talented hurlers, like the Yankees fireballer Joe Page in the late ’40s, came on in relief; but Page could be called upon at any point in the course of a game. In the ’70s, managers began looking for pitchers who could be counted on to get a few crucial outs toward the end of the game. Fans began to pay attention to saves, which relievers earned by entering a game with a slim lead and preserving the victory, and by the ’80s, relief pitchers like Dan Quisenberry of the Royals, Bruce Sutter with the Cubs and Cardinals and Dennis Eckersley with the Athletics became stars in their own right. The last two made it to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The great Yankees teams of the ’70s relied on one such fabled stopper, Rich Gossage, better known as Goose. A Hall of Famer himself, the Goose was a mountainous figure with a Wild West mustache and a 100-mile-an-hour fastball. The mustache has gone white, but Gossage remains a formidable, if genial and garrulous, presence in spring training, where he serves as a pitching instructor and the Old Man of the Mound. The Goose and I talked one quiet morning as players began gathering. “I saw the total evolution of the bullpen where it used to be a junk pile where old starters went who couldn’t start anymore,” he said from somewhere above my head. Gossage came up a pure reliever with the Chicago White Sox. With the Yankees, he briefly had, in Ron Davis, his own setup man — a reliever who pitches an inning or two and preserves the lead for the closer in the ninth — but Gossage frequently entered games as early as the seventh inning, often with men on base. “When you come into the game with inherited runners, when you can’t even allow the ball to be put in play — that’s where I shined,” said the Goose, a man in no way uncertain of his own place in baseball history. “I could get two strikeouts. The mental drain is incredible. I would be exhausted just because of the letdown of the pressure and the mental part of it.” And then he had to go out and pitch the eighth and ninth.
Life evolves toward increasing specialization, and the age of the iron-man closer was itself short-lived. By the late ’80s, closers were being asked to get only three outs. (Gossage says, with some justice, that he could have compiled all-universe numbers had he played in the current, namby-pamby era.) Mariano Rivera arrived at precisely this moment. Signed by the Yankees in 1990, Rivera was pegged as a starting pitcher. He moved steadily up the minor-league ladder without really turning any heads. He had a straight fastball with a top velocity of 91 or 92 m.p.h., a slider and a change-up — the normal starter’s repertory. In 1995, Yankees General Manager Gene Michael brought him from the Class AAA Columbus Clippers to the parent club, and Rivera compiled average numbers. Michael sent him back down. The team was hoping to acquire pitcher David Wells from the Detroit Tigers, and Rivera was a modest part of the trade bait.
And then providence intervened — in Rivera’s telling, though not Michael’s. “He was down there two, three weeks,” says Michael, a raconteur who calls to mind baseball’s bygone bardic era. He has told this story before. (I first encountered it in “The Yankee Years,” by former Yankees Manager Joe Torre and Tom Verducci.) “The numbers come across my desk, and I see the gun time — 94, 95.” Michael, known around baseball as Stick, called Columbus to make sure the radar gun wasn’t on the fritz. He called the Tigers scout who had expressed interest in Rivera:
“Yeah, I saw him, Stick.”
“What did he throw?”
“About 94, 95.”
The next report had Rivera at 95-96. What happened? “Nobody knows,” Michael says. “All of a sudden he’s just letting the ball go.” Perhaps he had finally recovered from a 1992 operation on his arm. Michael immediately ordered Yankees Manager Buck Showalter to clear a date a few days later for a Rivera outing. “We had a date in Chicago, daytime. I figure, That’s good, it’s shiny, it’s tough to see in Chicago. So we bring him up — eight innings, two hits. Then we knew we had something.” Rivera’s overall numbers that year were nothing special: five wins and three losses, while surrendering an average of five and a half runs per game. But in the course of the divisional series against the Seattle Mariners, he pitched a total of five and a third innings without yielding a run. Gossage took notice when Rivera came on in the decisive fifth game (which the Yankees went on to lose) and got out of a bases-loaded jam with a strikeout. “I just sat there,” the not-easily-impressed Goose says. “Oh, my God — the coolness.”
When I told Rivera what Gossage said about the emotional strain of coming into a game with men on base, he seemed a trifle perplexed — like Mr. Spock encountering the idea of fear. “It’s a thing I can’t control,” he said. “They did it already. I don’t think about it. If you think about it, you’re going to get drained, and you might not do the job. So what is worth to think about? I’ve got to get the guy out that’s at the plate. I can do something about it.” You’re a Yankees rookie, and the season is on the line, and the bases are loaded. Just don’t think about it? Alex Rodriguez, a truly great hitter who has been known to think himself into knots at such moments, may be on to something when he says, “I don’t think he knows what pressure means.”
POWER PITCHERS, who get much of their thrust from their hams, tend to be beefy across the middle. Not Rivera: at six feet two inches, 185 pounds, he is built like a cheetah, an impression reinforced by his smooth skin, his high, sharp cheekbones and his glittering teeth. One morning, when Rivera was preparing to pitch some batting practice, I watched him perform a stretching routine that culminated in a half split, his right leg fully butterflied against the locker-room carpet — more like a dancer than a pitcher. Rivera is an extremely gifted athlete who never seems to lose his balance, even when he has to pounce off the mound to track down a bunt or a slow-rolling grounder. During a game in May, he fired a cutter that broke the hitter’s bat, as often happens, and half the bat came spinning straight at him with the ball bouncing right behind. Rivera leapt straight up, like a kid on a skateboard, came down and speared the ball in the same motion and then threw the man out, a play that so stupefied the Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay that it was replayed again and again.
That morning I met with him at spring training, Rivera ambled out to one of the practice fields. Fans gathered along a fence in right field to gawk. Rivera threw to some of the young players with high uniform numbers who would soon be returning to the minors — an experience for them to write home about. Rivera’s mechanics are smooth, simple and unhurried. As he drives forward, his hips rotate counterclockwise, bringing his left knee up just beyond his waistband; his arm comes straight up over his shoulder, and he ends with his hand down by his right foot. “He has real good finish,” Gene Michael says, “a long finish, real good, easy wrist pop.” Goose Gossage says that Rivera, like the ageless power pitcher Nolan Ryan, “throws with the big muscles in his body.” This physiological efficiency explains Rivera’s remarkable durability. And the impression of effortlessness baffles hitters; thanks to his long fingers and loose wrist, the ball seems to explode from Rivera’s hand. After 30 or so pitches, Rivera walked over to the knot of fans and signed whatever they thrust at him.
Everything in Rivera seems to flow in the same direction. “I don’t want to say this like he doesn’t work hard,” Manager Joe Girardi says, “but it’s just who he is. I don’t think he has to think about who he is.” Rivera grew up in Puerto Caimito, Panama, a fishing village where his father worked as a ship’s captain and Rivera, once he was old enough, as a mate. He played baseball, with a flattened milk carton for a glove and a stick for a bat, because he loved it. He just turned out to be much better at it than everyone else. Though we are inclined to think of the Latin American countryside as so grimly confining that young men latch onto baseball out of the desperate wish for salvation, Rivera himself recalls not so much the poverty as the raucous family gatherings orchestrated by his father. His parents were not churchgoers, and neither was he one. Rivera said that he had a born-again experience when he was 21 or 22. Nowadays, he says, his parents have become religious as well.
The Mariano Rivera whom the Yankees saw in 1995 had athleticism, flawless mechanics, velocity and, as baseball people say, makeup. Rivera’s startling performance in the playoffs convinced management that he could be a more powerful weapon coming out of the bullpen than he could as a starter. The team already had a dominant closer, John Wetteland, and as Rivera quickly demonstrated his mastery, Manager Joe Torre made him Wetteland’s setup man. Yankees fans remember 1996 as the year of the six-inning game: if the Yankees were ahead after the sixth, the game was effectively over, because Rivera would pitch the seventh and eighth and Wetteland would pitch the ninth. Like many closers, Wetteland lived on the edge, walking one guy and giving up a hit to another before tugging on his sweat-stained cap and blowing fastballs past the last few batters. Not Rivera: scarcely anything seemed to happen when he was out there. Rivera won eight games and lost three with a sparkling E.R.A. of 2.09. (Anything under 3.00 is considered effective for a reliever.) In 107⅔ innings he struck out 130 batters while giving up 73 hits. (The standard for excellence is striking out one batter and surrendering no more than one hit per inning.) There’s a strong argument that Rivera should have been named the most valuable player in the American League that year, though the award has never gone to a setup man.
And then, as if that weren’t enough, came the second providential episode of Rivera’s career — the Miracle of the Cut Fastball. Rivera has said that the cutter simply appeared one day in 1997, like a divine visitation. He threw the fastball, and it cut. Girardi, however, says that Rivera already had the cutter, if in embryonic form, in 1996, when Girardi joined the team as a catcher. It is a matter of purely historical significance. A cutter is a fastball that, rather than rising or sinking, as most fastballs do, stays on a level plane but breaks sharply away from the pitcher’s throwing hand; when thrown by a right-hander like Rivera, for example, it jams a left-handed hitter and rides away from a righty. “Here’s the deal,” the Yankees’ batting coach, Kevin Long, says. “The ball’s coming in, and you’re thinking it’s going to be right here.” He motions over the plate. “So you start to swing, and it ends up here — inside. You might know it’s going to cut, but you can’t really see it until the last minute, when it takes off.” Long estimates that Rivera’s cutter moves six to eight inches.
Plenty of other pitchers throw a cutter, including Phil Hughes, a Yankees starter. Hughes says, however, that though he grips the cutter the same way Rivera does, “it does a lot less.” It’s true: Hughes’s cutter is a fastball with a little swivel at the end, while Rivera’s cutter is, as the Yankees’ puckish outfielder Nick Swisher puts it, “a heat-seeking missile, and the target is the handle of your bat.” Rivera’s cutter is faster and breaks more than just about anyone else’s and almost always ends up exactly where Rivera wants it to be. Though Rivera throws a single pitch 80 percent of the time, the velocity, break and pinpoint control still make him almost unhittable.
By 1997, the Yankees had enough confidence in Rivera to let Wetteland go and make Rivera the closer. He had another great year. In the American League Division Series, though, he gave up a game-tying home run to Indians catcher Sandy Alomar Jr. in the eighth inning of Game 4. (The Indians went on to win that game and, eventually, the series.) As any Yankees fan can tell you, it was a high, outside cutter, and the right-handed Alomar leaned across the plate to poke it over the right-center-field fence. It was the first sign that Rivera was mortal. Rivera brought up the moment, unbidden, while talking about the need to learn from your mistakes. He had missed his spot; the pitch should have been lower. The lesson? “You do whatever you got to do to get it there.” But was it even a mistake? Alomar wasn’t a high-ball hitter. Rivera himself said: “I throw the pitch maybe 20 times, and he don’t hit. He maybe don’t swing at it.” The pitch was more a misfortune than a mistake.
The following year, Rivera developed a new pitch, or rather a new location — a cutter thrown to the opposite part of the plate, inside to right-handers, to keep them from leaning out over the plate as Alomar did. He also began to throw a classic fastball — held along rather than across the seams — which moved down and in to a right-handed hitter. Over the next three years, the Yankees rampaged through the league, winning the World Series each year. Rivera was unbeaten during the postseason. There were no major mistakes or misfortunes during this golden era, and so nothing is remembered. When a closer does his job properly, nothing happens, and his stint is over in moments. It is thus the peculiarity of his profession that only the failures stick in the collective memory.
In 2001, Rivera and the Yankees tasted the bitterness of the late-game collapse. The peerless closer entered the seventh game of the World Series against the Arizona Diamondbacks with a one-run lead. This was money in the bank: Rivera had not taken a loss in 51 consecutive postseason games. In the ninth inning, the first batter punched a single into short center field. The next batter bunted, and Rivera’s throw to second was just errant enough that shortstop Derek Jeter couldn’t make the play — an extremely rare miscue by the slick-fielding Rivera. Then, after an out, Rivera threw a cutter on the hands of the left-handed Tony Womack — who, to everyone’s surprise, hit it sharply for a run-scoring double, the only solidly hit ball of the inning. Rivera tried to crowd the next batter, and hit him. Finally, Luis Gonzalez, a power hitter, choked way up on the bat in the hope of making contact — and blooped a perfect Rivera cutter over the infield for the Series-ending hit.
When I asked Rivera about that fateful sequence, he just shrugged. “You can’t second-guess baseball,” he said, ever the stoic philosopher. “You can’t second-guess yourself.” Jorge Posada, Rivera’s catcher then and now, told me, “Even though he threw the ball away, even though he gave up the double, even though he hit a batter, he was still competing, knowing that he had a chance to get guys out.” Failure on so supreme a stage can be psychologically devastating to a closer. During that Series, the Yankees hit two game-tying home runs and a game-winning home run over the course of back-to-back games against the Diamondbacks’ closer, Byung-Hyun Kim, who was never quite the same pitcher afterward. Rivera, by all accounts, was crushed by losing the Series. But he did not show it in the locker room. Rivera says that he does not let anyone see the full measure of his suffering save his wife, Clara — “my anchor,” he says. The two grew up together; they were, Rivera says, elementary-school sweethearts. I don’t think he was joking.
OVER THE COURSE of Rivera’s career, the great baseball rivalry has continued to be that of the Yankees and the Red Sox. Both organizations are well run and so richly financed that they can pursue almost any prized player. The teams play each other 18 times in the regular season and, almost inevitably, again in the playoffs. They have furnished some of the most memorable games in recent years, including the deciding game of the 2003 A.L.C.S. and the fourth game of the 2004 A.L.C.S., when Rivera suffered his other dramatic reversal, surrendering a run in the ninth inning of a game the Yankees went on to lose. The Red Sox have hit Rivera well and have defeated him more often than any other team. For a time, in 2004 and 2005, they even seemed to have a bit of a hex on him, though that has since come to an end.
During the spring, I paid a visit to the Red Sox at their facility in Fort Myers, Fla., to talk to some of the team’s veterans. You can feel the difference between the two teams’ cultures long before you reach the locker room. The Yankees play in George M. Steinbrenner Field, located on Steinbrenner Drive. Formerly known as Legends Field, the complex features a grassy Valhalla with plaques of the many players whose uniform numbers have been retired. Across from Whitey Ford, the great pitcher of the ’50s and ’60s, is a smaller grassy patch containing a replica of the World Trade Center — an expression of Steinbrenner’s blustering patriotism as well as the Yankees’ iconic sense of themselves. The Sox, by contrast, play in a low, whitewashed facility called City of Palms Park; you could drive by it if you hadn’t turned on your GPS. There was less security outside the locker room than in Tampa, and more facial hair inside.
Half the team, along with most of the press, had traveled to an away game, leaving the remaining players in a thickly carpeted hush. At the very back of the locker room, I found Mike Lowell, the glowering, bearded third basemen. When I mentioned the Rivera cutter, Lowell warmed to the subject. “It’s just high velocity and high movement, and you don’t see that,” he said. “Guys who throw a good split-finger” — another variety of fastball — “if they throw 95, their split’s not at 95; it’s at 88 or 89. When your eyes pick up a cutter, you almost figure that it’s coming in at a slow pace, and you don’t think it’s going to cut as much as it does.” As a right-handed batter, Lowell said, he has been particularly flummoxed by Rivera’s back-door cutter: “Righties give up on that pitch, because it’s literally at your right hip. By the time you freeze or pull back, it cuts so much that he gets a lot of strike calls, because where the catcher ends up catching it, it looks like a strike.”
Kevin Youkilis, Boston’s batting genius and merrymaker, pointed out Rivera’s few vulnerabilities, which the team has exploited over the years. Rivera can’t control the sinking fastball the way he can the cutter, and it often rides inside to righties. Youkilis said he’d been hit with the pitch a few times. The only time Rivera ever gets in bad jams, Youkilis added, “is when he doesn’t have command of the cutter. Sometimes he gets the ball up, and it kind of floats. Sometimes if you just battle him,” you’ll get a pitch you can hit.
Across the locker room sat Jason Varitek, the durable and dignified catcher who has been the team’s heart and soul across the long era of Yankee-Sox agon. Shrugging off his 10 career hits against the Yankees closer — “You have to have a little favor sometimes” — Varitek described Rivera’s success with a catcher’s dispassionate appreciation. “You see guys with sometimes even better stuff unable to make quality pitches when the game is on the line,” he said. Rivera, with his easy delivery and simplicity of moving parts, had the gift of execution. “The ability to repeat,” Varitek said, “is both mental and mechanical.”
Finally, I talked with Jonathan Papelbon, the closer who has become Rivera’s great rival. “I always watch closers,” Papelbon said, “what it takes for them to be successful. I try to pick up little nuances that you think might help you.” And with Rivera? “His focus. He may not stare in at the plate, but you can see that he’s in control, and I’ve tried to emulate that.” Papelbon acknowledged that he and Rivera occupy the opposite ends of the characterological spectrum of closers. “I’m the type of pitcher that uses energy and adrenaline to help me succeed,” he said. “He’s the type of pitcher that tries to control that.” Youkilis said of his teammate, “We just say Pap’s nuts.” No one on the Yankees would describe Rivera that way. It would be as difficult to imagine the serene and pious Rivera with the Red Sox as it would the amped-up Papelbon with the Yankees.
LIKE MANY OF THE YANKEES, Rivera lives in New York’s suburbs. He and Clara have three sons, ages 16, 13 and 7. I asked Rivera if they were athletic, and he seemed uninterested in the question. He would support them in whatever interested them. When I asked if he had any hobbies, Rivera said no — being with Clara and the boys was his hobby. Rivera seems almost not to have any personal attributes at all; virtue and duty and dignity take up the space that in others is occupied by appetite or vanity or cleverness or even ulterior motive. When I asked what achievements stood out in his own mind — not a tough question for most star athletes — he balked. “I don’t think like that,” he said. “I’m a different breed, I guess. Team wins; I’m proud for that.” Rivera threw a scare into Yankees fans some years back by saying that he felt called to the pulpit rather than to the mound. But God had other plans for him, and he returned to baseball. Rivera’s contract, which pays him $15 million a year, expires at the end of this year, but he seems likely to continue playing.
Derek Jeter congratulates Mariano Rivera after they beat the Cleveland Indians at Yankee Stadium on April 19, 2009 in the Bronx. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)
Rivera channels his philanthropic activities through a personal foundation, as many prominent ballplayers do. The Mariano Rivera Foundation, which distributes at least half a million dollars a year, helps underprivileged children through church-based institutions in both Panama and the U.S. Rivera is quite possibly the world’s most famous Panamanian, but he said that he makes a point of staying “under the radar” when he is there — which isn’t often, because during the off-season the boys are in school and he is loath to leave. When he does put away the mitt, Rivera says, he will devote himself to his philanthropic work.
Rivera takes his role as mentor very seriously, and seems to enjoy teaching as much as he enjoys playing. People who do what they do effortlessly are usually not very effective, or very patient, teachers. Rivera has patience to spare. The problem is following his instructions. Rivera will show absolutely anyone, including rivals, exactly how he throws the cutter. When I asked him why he was so unguarded, Rivera said, “It’s a blessing from the Lord: when he gives you something, it’s yours.” It took me a moment to realize that he wasn’t saying that he had an obligation to share the blessing, but rather that no one without the blessing was going to throw his cutter. God had doled out his favors parsimoniously.
Rivera’s chief students, of course, are his own teammates. He talks to them constantly about how to behave in various situations. Joba Chamberlain, Rivera’s bulldogish young setup man, and possibly his successor, told me that Rivera directed him to pay more attention to at-bats when they sat together in the bullpen. Jonathan Albaladejo, another relief pitcher, told me that he and Rivera talked often about mental toughness, about holding your emotions in check. Albaladejo spoke wistfully of his mentor’s inner calm. “I wish some day I could do that,” he said. The superpressurized atmosphere of Yankee Stadium had gotten to him, he admitted. Now, he said hopefully, “I’m a little more used to it.”
To talk to players of more middling achievement is to understand how extraordinary is Rivera’s consistency, his grace under pressure. Chad Gaudin, whom the Yankees acquired last year for the bottom part of the starting rotation, said that he had virtually apprenticed himself to the team’s closer-sage. He described a typical exchange:
“What do you do to throw that one pitch where you want it all the time when the situation is heavy — say, 3-1 count, bases loaded, big hitter up?”
“I don’t ever second-guess myself. I don’t say, ‘I can’ or ‘I should’ or ‘I must.’ I will throw the ball where I want to.”
Here was the distilled gnostic wisdom of the mound. Gaudin understood that he needed absolute commitment — to that pitch at that moment. Nothing else in his head. But of course when he got out on the mound, he found that there were all sorts of other things in his head — doubts, for example. “There have been numerous times that I’ve been out there and I think about the conversation we had when I’m pitching,” Gaudin said. “I think about it as a key for myself: What did we talk about? Now I’m going to do it. I tell myself, Just throw this pitch.” Gaudin tries to do through conscious effort what Rivera does naturally. Gaudin says that it has helped him. But not enough, apparently — he was released at the end of spring training. Though he was re-signed by the Yankees at the end of May, he has often not been able to throw the ball where he wants to. Albaladejo likewise has yet to translate Rivera’s lessons into a major-league career, but he has been an effective closer this season at Class AAA Scranton/Wilkes-Barre.
Watching Rivera during the first three months this season, I was struck by the fact that while he doesn’t always hit his spots, the number of consequential mistakes he makes — mistakes in those “heavy” situations — is vanishingly small. Rivera didn’t allow a run over the first 11 innings he pitched, running his string to 51 straight converted save opportunities at home. He was, as always, boringly effective. Then on May 16, he came into a game against the Minnesota Twins in the eighth inning with the bases loaded and the Yankees leading 3-1. He walked Jim Thome, the aging slugger, to force in a run. And the next batter, Jason Kubel, turned on an inside cutter and hit a grand slam. I had never seen either of these things happen to Rivera. (It was, in fact, the fourth time in each case.) The pitch to Kubel was the same one with which Rivera has struck out left-handed sluggers like Boston’s David Ortiz time after time; it was the walk that was shocking. Afterward, Rivera berated himself for the walk, not the homer. That was his last serious mistake. At press time, the 40-year-old closer had converted every other save opportunity, posting an E.R.A. of 1.03 while surrendering a ridiculously low 11 hits and striking out 23 in 26 innings.
Rivera’s one breakthrough achievement of 2010 is his new role as glamorpuss: the men’s fashion designer Canali has featured him in an ad campaign. You can tell that the trim man in the blue pinstriped blazer (a coincidence, Canali says, not a reference to the Yankees’ fabled uniform) is a ballplayer, because he’s holding a baseball and has a mitt perched on his forearm. But with his Alfred E. Neuman ears and his shy grin, our model is plainly a very approachable superstar. It comes as no surprise to learn that Rivera actually patronized Canali before being asked to serve as model.
In an enterprise where arrested development is the norm, Rivera really does seem selfless. Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager, who has known Rivera since the pitcher joined the franchise, says: “Success changes most players. It hasn’t changed him one bit.” During spring training, Cashman said, Rivera will sometimes change into street clothes, wander over to one of the outer fields, sit on the bench and talk to the minor leaguers. “It’s not asked, it’s not expected; stars don’t do that.” A good deal of the advice Rivera offers, especially to other Hispanic players, has nothing to do with throwing a baseball. Francisco Cervelli, who has been sharing the catching duties with Posada this season, said that Rivera talked to him about dealing with the press: “Don’t worry about what the people say; be yourself, say what you want to say with respect. They’ll respect you, and then they’re going to trust you.” Excellent advice — if you happen to be in possession of a soul at peace, rather than one divided against itself.
Mariano Rivera shakes hands with catcher Jorge Posada after throwing out the ceremonial first pitch in a game against the Seattle Mariners June 30, 2009 at Yankee Stadium. (June 30, 2009 - Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images North America)
Nobody would say that the Yankees are Rivera’s team. After all, he appears in less than 5 percent of the team’s innings. Derek Jeter is the Yankees’ captain and the team’s iconic figure. He’s the franchise. But the Yankees’ identity is forged not by any one player but by the veterans who came up together in the mid-’90s — Rivera, Jeter, Posada and the pitcher Andy Pettitte. No other team in baseball has held on to its core of players as the Yankees have. Few have two such players, much less four. Commitment through thick and thin is not, in fact, graven on the Steinbrenner tablets: the Yankees made little attempt to re-sign Pettitte after the 2003 season, allowing him to leave for the Houston Astros before bringing him back in 2007. The Yankees have held on to their stars because they can afford to do so. Nevertheless, the four men have given the team a powerful collective identity: professional, undemonstrative, dignified and arguably a bit colorless. When I met with Cashman, he had just come from a team meeting with a “Delta Force special-ops guy” who discussed “how they go about their business.” That would be the Yankees: do the job right, and don’t leave a mess.
Even the most disciplined collective will have its outliers; and for the Yankees, that means Alex Rodriguez, superstar and perennial source of agita. A-Rod, unlike the old stalwarts, generates ink for all the right reasons and the wrong reasons — monstrous home runs, celebrity girlfriends, salary disputes, steroids. At times — like when he doesn’t deliver in the playoffs — A-Rod has seemed to be more trouble than he’s worth. This spring, with almost comic inevitability, the buff third baseman was ensnared in yet another scandal when he confirmed that he had seen a doctor suspected of blood doping.
Rodriguez said that he would be glad to talk about Rivera, whom he described as one of his closest friends on the team. He fiddled with his BlackBerry as we spoke, only looking up halfway through the conversation, when I asked if he had learned anything from Rivera. “You probably don’t have enough time for me to tell you how much I’ve learned,” he said.
“Try me,” I said. A-Rod gathered his thoughts. Rivera, he said, was “the greatest closer of all time” and “even a better human being and a great leader.” Rivera was a force in the locker room. “There’s been a number of times that he’s stood up and said something that was profound and important.” Could he recall any specific instances? No, A-Rod said; that would be private. Here, perhaps, was further proof that Rivera’s example was difficult to follow for people not constituted like himself.
THE YANKEES HELD their home opener this year on April 13. Fans exiting the subway to the team’s year-old limestone palace could see that over the winter its predecessor, the House That Ruth Built, had been unbuilt; great heaps of shattered masonry and twisted metal lay in the shadow of the right-field stands, which had not yet submitted to the wrecking ball. Before the game, the players were called out one by one to receive their 2009 World Series rings. When Rivera’s name was announced, the fans began to cheer, then rose to their feet and then let out a mighty roar of thanks. The only players to enjoy a comparable reception were the beloved Derek Jeter and Hideki Matsui, last year’s World Series M.V.P., who had since been acquired by the Angels, the Yankees’ opponents that day.
The Yankees’ old guard shined that afternoon. Pettitte allowed no runs in six innings. Jeter homered. Posada hit two doubles. Only Rivera himself was left out, for the Yankees were leading 7-1 going into the top of the ninth. Girardi allowed Dave Robertson, a hard-throwing reliever, to mop up. But Robertson quickly got himself into trouble, falling behind hitters and then having to throw strikes. Perhaps he was having commitment issues. With the bases loaded, Bobby Abreu hit a grand slam. Suddenly it was 7-5, and Robertson was yanked. As the bullpen door swung open and the sound system cued up “Enter Sandman” and Rivera began jogging toward the mound, the fans went wild. It felt as if Robertson had accepted his role in the drama by pitching badly enough to give Rivera a chance to write his own inimitable conclusion to the afternoon.
Torii Hunter, one of the Angels’ best hitters, was up with one out. Rivera bent over deeply from the waist, in the almost prayerful gesture with which he begins his windup, and fired a cutter. And then another. And another. He fell behind Hunter, 3-1, and then threw two more cutters past him for a strikeout. Then fate provided the perfect coda for the day in the form of Matsui, the Japanese superstar who had played his entire American career with the Yankees and had come to seem the very incarnation of Yankee professionalism and class — a clutch performer of unshakable sang-froid. If Mariano Rivera were a position player, he would be Hideki Matsui. The fans roared again as Matsui came to the plate. Rivera fired his seventh cutter of the day, jamming the left-handed hitter. Matsui popped out weakly to second to end the game and provide Rivera the 529th save of his career.
After the game, reporters crowded Rivera’s locker, and he patiently answered questions in English and Spanish — standing up, not sitting in his folding chair, as many players do. Matsui, he said, was a great player, a great guy. The team was looking good. The whole day had been deeply moving. “It was,” he said, “special for me.”
James Traub is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent article was about the U.S. counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan.
From the July 4th issue of The New York Times Magazine
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html
June 28, 2010
Nigel Parry for The New York Times
Before the seventh game of the 2003 American League Championship Series with the Boston Red Sox, Mariano Rivera, the New York Yankees star who is widely considered the greatest relief pitcher in the history of baseball, said a prayer. Rivera, a deeply religious man, prays with his family before every home game. But this was a special prayer, which he delivered within himself, because the two teams, so evenly matched, had fought their way down to this final contest. Rivera’s prayers remained unanswered until the bottom of the eighth inning, when, in one of the great comebacks in playoff history, the Yankees scored three runs against Boston’s ace, Pedro Martinez, to tie the game. Before heading for the mound, Rivera, the most stoical of athletes, had to leave the bullpen for a little shed nearby, where he proceeded, astonishingly, to weep.
“I feel a tremendous load on my shoulders,” Rivera recalled this past March, sitting in front of his locker at the Yankees’ spring-training camp in Tampa, Fla. Rivera was trying to convey something quite different from what that expression normally means. A closer, who generally comes into a game only in the highly pressurized ninth inning to finish off the opponent, must welcome the kind of burden most of us — and even some otherwise very effective pitchers — flee. “I know,” Rivera went on, “I am going to have a good opportunity to pitch.” Closers normally pitch one inning. That night, Rivera navigated his way through a supremely tense ninth inning. And then the 10th. And then, with the score still tied, the 11th. “It was always a battle,” Rivera said. “It was a beautiful game.” In the bottom of the 11th, Yankees third baseman Aaron Boone won the game, and the series, with a home run. And if he hadn’t? “Tell you what,” Rivera said, flashing a most unworshipful grin, “I would have gone out there again.”
In his 16th year with the Yankees, Mariano Rivera, who is 40, has become a kind of living god of baseball. While his regular-season statistics are remarkable, in postseason play, where the pressure is at its highest, he is sui generis. He holds the lowest earned-run average in postseason history (0.74) among pitchers with at least 40 innings pitched. On 30 occasions he has gone more than one inning to record a save; over the same period, all other pitchers combined have done so only a few more times more than Rivera alone. In 2009, when he was thought to be slowing down and yielding his place to the Red Sox phenom Jonathan Papelbon, he pitched 16 innings in postseason play and gave up one run, while extending his career postseason saves record to 39 as the Yankees won the World Series. (Papelbon gave up a two-run lead in the ninth to end the Red Sox’ season in the divisional round against the Angels.) Rivera, when pressed, attributes his gifts to providence; people of a more secular bent say that he combines one of the single greatest pitches baseball has ever seen — his cutter, or cut fastball — with an inner calm, and a focus, no less unusual and no less inimitable.
UNTIL 30 OR 40 YEARS AGO, starting pitchers typically finished games. When they were shelled, managers called on the stock of has-beens they kept in the bullpen. Some pitchers with goofy offerings, like the knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm, made a living coming out of the bullpen. A very few talented hurlers, like the Yankees fireballer Joe Page in the late ’40s, came on in relief; but Page could be called upon at any point in the course of a game. In the ’70s, managers began looking for pitchers who could be counted on to get a few crucial outs toward the end of the game. Fans began to pay attention to saves, which relievers earned by entering a game with a slim lead and preserving the victory, and by the ’80s, relief pitchers like Dan Quisenberry of the Royals, Bruce Sutter with the Cubs and Cardinals and Dennis Eckersley with the Athletics became stars in their own right. The last two made it to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The great Yankees teams of the ’70s relied on one such fabled stopper, Rich Gossage, better known as Goose. A Hall of Famer himself, the Goose was a mountainous figure with a Wild West mustache and a 100-mile-an-hour fastball. The mustache has gone white, but Gossage remains a formidable, if genial and garrulous, presence in spring training, where he serves as a pitching instructor and the Old Man of the Mound. The Goose and I talked one quiet morning as players began gathering. “I saw the total evolution of the bullpen where it used to be a junk pile where old starters went who couldn’t start anymore,” he said from somewhere above my head. Gossage came up a pure reliever with the Chicago White Sox. With the Yankees, he briefly had, in Ron Davis, his own setup man — a reliever who pitches an inning or two and preserves the lead for the closer in the ninth — but Gossage frequently entered games as early as the seventh inning, often with men on base. “When you come into the game with inherited runners, when you can’t even allow the ball to be put in play — that’s where I shined,” said the Goose, a man in no way uncertain of his own place in baseball history. “I could get two strikeouts. The mental drain is incredible. I would be exhausted just because of the letdown of the pressure and the mental part of it.” And then he had to go out and pitch the eighth and ninth.
Life evolves toward increasing specialization, and the age of the iron-man closer was itself short-lived. By the late ’80s, closers were being asked to get only three outs. (Gossage says, with some justice, that he could have compiled all-universe numbers had he played in the current, namby-pamby era.) Mariano Rivera arrived at precisely this moment. Signed by the Yankees in 1990, Rivera was pegged as a starting pitcher. He moved steadily up the minor-league ladder without really turning any heads. He had a straight fastball with a top velocity of 91 or 92 m.p.h., a slider and a change-up — the normal starter’s repertory. In 1995, Yankees General Manager Gene Michael brought him from the Class AAA Columbus Clippers to the parent club, and Rivera compiled average numbers. Michael sent him back down. The team was hoping to acquire pitcher David Wells from the Detroit Tigers, and Rivera was a modest part of the trade bait.
And then providence intervened — in Rivera’s telling, though not Michael’s. “He was down there two, three weeks,” says Michael, a raconteur who calls to mind baseball’s bygone bardic era. He has told this story before. (I first encountered it in “The Yankee Years,” by former Yankees Manager Joe Torre and Tom Verducci.) “The numbers come across my desk, and I see the gun time — 94, 95.” Michael, known around baseball as Stick, called Columbus to make sure the radar gun wasn’t on the fritz. He called the Tigers scout who had expressed interest in Rivera:
“Yeah, I saw him, Stick.”
“What did he throw?”
“About 94, 95.”
The next report had Rivera at 95-96. What happened? “Nobody knows,” Michael says. “All of a sudden he’s just letting the ball go.” Perhaps he had finally recovered from a 1992 operation on his arm. Michael immediately ordered Yankees Manager Buck Showalter to clear a date a few days later for a Rivera outing. “We had a date in Chicago, daytime. I figure, That’s good, it’s shiny, it’s tough to see in Chicago. So we bring him up — eight innings, two hits. Then we knew we had something.” Rivera’s overall numbers that year were nothing special: five wins and three losses, while surrendering an average of five and a half runs per game. But in the course of the divisional series against the Seattle Mariners, he pitched a total of five and a third innings without yielding a run. Gossage took notice when Rivera came on in the decisive fifth game (which the Yankees went on to lose) and got out of a bases-loaded jam with a strikeout. “I just sat there,” the not-easily-impressed Goose says. “Oh, my God — the coolness.”
When I told Rivera what Gossage said about the emotional strain of coming into a game with men on base, he seemed a trifle perplexed — like Mr. Spock encountering the idea of fear. “It’s a thing I can’t control,” he said. “They did it already. I don’t think about it. If you think about it, you’re going to get drained, and you might not do the job. So what is worth to think about? I’ve got to get the guy out that’s at the plate. I can do something about it.” You’re a Yankees rookie, and the season is on the line, and the bases are loaded. Just don’t think about it? Alex Rodriguez, a truly great hitter who has been known to think himself into knots at such moments, may be on to something when he says, “I don’t think he knows what pressure means.”POWER PITCHERS, who get much of their thrust from their hams, tend to be beefy across the middle. Not Rivera: at six feet two inches, 185 pounds, he is built like a cheetah, an impression reinforced by his smooth skin, his high, sharp cheekbones and his glittering teeth. One morning, when Rivera was preparing to pitch some batting practice, I watched him perform a stretching routine that culminated in a half split, his right leg fully butterflied against the locker-room carpet — more like a dancer than a pitcher. Rivera is an extremely gifted athlete who never seems to lose his balance, even when he has to pounce off the mound to track down a bunt or a slow-rolling grounder. During a game in May, he fired a cutter that broke the hitter’s bat, as often happens, and half the bat came spinning straight at him with the ball bouncing right behind. Rivera leapt straight up, like a kid on a skateboard, came down and speared the ball in the same motion and then threw the man out, a play that so stupefied the Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay that it was replayed again and again.
That morning I met with him at spring training, Rivera ambled out to one of the practice fields. Fans gathered along a fence in right field to gawk. Rivera threw to some of the young players with high uniform numbers who would soon be returning to the minors — an experience for them to write home about. Rivera’s mechanics are smooth, simple and unhurried. As he drives forward, his hips rotate counterclockwise, bringing his left knee up just beyond his waistband; his arm comes straight up over his shoulder, and he ends with his hand down by his right foot. “He has real good finish,” Gene Michael says, “a long finish, real good, easy wrist pop.” Goose Gossage says that Rivera, like the ageless power pitcher Nolan Ryan, “throws with the big muscles in his body.” This physiological efficiency explains Rivera’s remarkable durability. And the impression of effortlessness baffles hitters; thanks to his long fingers and loose wrist, the ball seems to explode from Rivera’s hand. After 30 or so pitches, Rivera walked over to the knot of fans and signed whatever they thrust at him.
Everything in Rivera seems to flow in the same direction. “I don’t want to say this like he doesn’t work hard,” Manager Joe Girardi says, “but it’s just who he is. I don’t think he has to think about who he is.” Rivera grew up in Puerto Caimito, Panama, a fishing village where his father worked as a ship’s captain and Rivera, once he was old enough, as a mate. He played baseball, with a flattened milk carton for a glove and a stick for a bat, because he loved it. He just turned out to be much better at it than everyone else. Though we are inclined to think of the Latin American countryside as so grimly confining that young men latch onto baseball out of the desperate wish for salvation, Rivera himself recalls not so much the poverty as the raucous family gatherings orchestrated by his father. His parents were not churchgoers, and neither was he one. Rivera said that he had a born-again experience when he was 21 or 22. Nowadays, he says, his parents have become religious as well.
The Mariano Rivera whom the Yankees saw in 1995 had athleticism, flawless mechanics, velocity and, as baseball people say, makeup. Rivera’s startling performance in the playoffs convinced management that he could be a more powerful weapon coming out of the bullpen than he could as a starter. The team already had a dominant closer, John Wetteland, and as Rivera quickly demonstrated his mastery, Manager Joe Torre made him Wetteland’s setup man. Yankees fans remember 1996 as the year of the six-inning game: if the Yankees were ahead after the sixth, the game was effectively over, because Rivera would pitch the seventh and eighth and Wetteland would pitch the ninth. Like many closers, Wetteland lived on the edge, walking one guy and giving up a hit to another before tugging on his sweat-stained cap and blowing fastballs past the last few batters. Not Rivera: scarcely anything seemed to happen when he was out there. Rivera won eight games and lost three with a sparkling E.R.A. of 2.09. (Anything under 3.00 is considered effective for a reliever.) In 107⅔ innings he struck out 130 batters while giving up 73 hits. (The standard for excellence is striking out one batter and surrendering no more than one hit per inning.) There’s a strong argument that Rivera should have been named the most valuable player in the American League that year, though the award has never gone to a setup man.
And then, as if that weren’t enough, came the second providential episode of Rivera’s career — the Miracle of the Cut Fastball. Rivera has said that the cutter simply appeared one day in 1997, like a divine visitation. He threw the fastball, and it cut. Girardi, however, says that Rivera already had the cutter, if in embryonic form, in 1996, when Girardi joined the team as a catcher. It is a matter of purely historical significance. A cutter is a fastball that, rather than rising or sinking, as most fastballs do, stays on a level plane but breaks sharply away from the pitcher’s throwing hand; when thrown by a right-hander like Rivera, for example, it jams a left-handed hitter and rides away from a righty. “Here’s the deal,” the Yankees’ batting coach, Kevin Long, says. “The ball’s coming in, and you’re thinking it’s going to be right here.” He motions over the plate. “So you start to swing, and it ends up here — inside. You might know it’s going to cut, but you can’t really see it until the last minute, when it takes off.” Long estimates that Rivera’s cutter moves six to eight inches.
Plenty of other pitchers throw a cutter, including Phil Hughes, a Yankees starter. Hughes says, however, that though he grips the cutter the same way Rivera does, “it does a lot less.” It’s true: Hughes’s cutter is a fastball with a little swivel at the end, while Rivera’s cutter is, as the Yankees’ puckish outfielder Nick Swisher puts it, “a heat-seeking missile, and the target is the handle of your bat.” Rivera’s cutter is faster and breaks more than just about anyone else’s and almost always ends up exactly where Rivera wants it to be. Though Rivera throws a single pitch 80 percent of the time, the velocity, break and pinpoint control still make him almost unhittable.
By 1997, the Yankees had enough confidence in Rivera to let Wetteland go and make Rivera the closer. He had another great year. In the American League Division Series, though, he gave up a game-tying home run to Indians catcher Sandy Alomar Jr. in the eighth inning of Game 4. (The Indians went on to win that game and, eventually, the series.) As any Yankees fan can tell you, it was a high, outside cutter, and the right-handed Alomar leaned across the plate to poke it over the right-center-field fence. It was the first sign that Rivera was mortal. Rivera brought up the moment, unbidden, while talking about the need to learn from your mistakes. He had missed his spot; the pitch should have been lower. The lesson? “You do whatever you got to do to get it there.” But was it even a mistake? Alomar wasn’t a high-ball hitter. Rivera himself said: “I throw the pitch maybe 20 times, and he don’t hit. He maybe don’t swing at it.” The pitch was more a misfortune than a mistake.
The following year, Rivera developed a new pitch, or rather a new location — a cutter thrown to the opposite part of the plate, inside to right-handers, to keep them from leaning out over the plate as Alomar did. He also began to throw a classic fastball — held along rather than across the seams — which moved down and in to a right-handed hitter. Over the next three years, the Yankees rampaged through the league, winning the World Series each year. Rivera was unbeaten during the postseason. There were no major mistakes or misfortunes during this golden era, and so nothing is remembered. When a closer does his job properly, nothing happens, and his stint is over in moments. It is thus the peculiarity of his profession that only the failures stick in the collective memory.
In 2001, Rivera and the Yankees tasted the bitterness of the late-game collapse. The peerless closer entered the seventh game of the World Series against the Arizona Diamondbacks with a one-run lead. This was money in the bank: Rivera had not taken a loss in 51 consecutive postseason games. In the ninth inning, the first batter punched a single into short center field. The next batter bunted, and Rivera’s throw to second was just errant enough that shortstop Derek Jeter couldn’t make the play — an extremely rare miscue by the slick-fielding Rivera. Then, after an out, Rivera threw a cutter on the hands of the left-handed Tony Womack — who, to everyone’s surprise, hit it sharply for a run-scoring double, the only solidly hit ball of the inning. Rivera tried to crowd the next batter, and hit him. Finally, Luis Gonzalez, a power hitter, choked way up on the bat in the hope of making contact — and blooped a perfect Rivera cutter over the infield for the Series-ending hit.When I asked Rivera about that fateful sequence, he just shrugged. “You can’t second-guess baseball,” he said, ever the stoic philosopher. “You can’t second-guess yourself.” Jorge Posada, Rivera’s catcher then and now, told me, “Even though he threw the ball away, even though he gave up the double, even though he hit a batter, he was still competing, knowing that he had a chance to get guys out.” Failure on so supreme a stage can be psychologically devastating to a closer. During that Series, the Yankees hit two game-tying home runs and a game-winning home run over the course of back-to-back games against the Diamondbacks’ closer, Byung-Hyun Kim, who was never quite the same pitcher afterward. Rivera, by all accounts, was crushed by losing the Series. But he did not show it in the locker room. Rivera says that he does not let anyone see the full measure of his suffering save his wife, Clara — “my anchor,” he says. The two grew up together; they were, Rivera says, elementary-school sweethearts. I don’t think he was joking.
OVER THE COURSE of Rivera’s career, the great baseball rivalry has continued to be that of the Yankees and the Red Sox. Both organizations are well run and so richly financed that they can pursue almost any prized player. The teams play each other 18 times in the regular season and, almost inevitably, again in the playoffs. They have furnished some of the most memorable games in recent years, including the deciding game of the 2003 A.L.C.S. and the fourth game of the 2004 A.L.C.S., when Rivera suffered his other dramatic reversal, surrendering a run in the ninth inning of a game the Yankees went on to lose. The Red Sox have hit Rivera well and have defeated him more often than any other team. For a time, in 2004 and 2005, they even seemed to have a bit of a hex on him, though that has since come to an end.
During the spring, I paid a visit to the Red Sox at their facility in Fort Myers, Fla., to talk to some of the team’s veterans. You can feel the difference between the two teams’ cultures long before you reach the locker room. The Yankees play in George M. Steinbrenner Field, located on Steinbrenner Drive. Formerly known as Legends Field, the complex features a grassy Valhalla with plaques of the many players whose uniform numbers have been retired. Across from Whitey Ford, the great pitcher of the ’50s and ’60s, is a smaller grassy patch containing a replica of the World Trade Center — an expression of Steinbrenner’s blustering patriotism as well as the Yankees’ iconic sense of themselves. The Sox, by contrast, play in a low, whitewashed facility called City of Palms Park; you could drive by it if you hadn’t turned on your GPS. There was less security outside the locker room than in Tampa, and more facial hair inside.
Half the team, along with most of the press, had traveled to an away game, leaving the remaining players in a thickly carpeted hush. At the very back of the locker room, I found Mike Lowell, the glowering, bearded third basemen. When I mentioned the Rivera cutter, Lowell warmed to the subject. “It’s just high velocity and high movement, and you don’t see that,” he said. “Guys who throw a good split-finger” — another variety of fastball — “if they throw 95, their split’s not at 95; it’s at 88 or 89. When your eyes pick up a cutter, you almost figure that it’s coming in at a slow pace, and you don’t think it’s going to cut as much as it does.” As a right-handed batter, Lowell said, he has been particularly flummoxed by Rivera’s back-door cutter: “Righties give up on that pitch, because it’s literally at your right hip. By the time you freeze or pull back, it cuts so much that he gets a lot of strike calls, because where the catcher ends up catching it, it looks like a strike.”
Kevin Youkilis, Boston’s batting genius and merrymaker, pointed out Rivera’s few vulnerabilities, which the team has exploited over the years. Rivera can’t control the sinking fastball the way he can the cutter, and it often rides inside to righties. Youkilis said he’d been hit with the pitch a few times. The only time Rivera ever gets in bad jams, Youkilis added, “is when he doesn’t have command of the cutter. Sometimes he gets the ball up, and it kind of floats. Sometimes if you just battle him,” you’ll get a pitch you can hit.
Across the locker room sat Jason Varitek, the durable and dignified catcher who has been the team’s heart and soul across the long era of Yankee-Sox agon. Shrugging off his 10 career hits against the Yankees closer — “You have to have a little favor sometimes” — Varitek described Rivera’s success with a catcher’s dispassionate appreciation. “You see guys with sometimes even better stuff unable to make quality pitches when the game is on the line,” he said. Rivera, with his easy delivery and simplicity of moving parts, had the gift of execution. “The ability to repeat,” Varitek said, “is both mental and mechanical.”
Finally, I talked with Jonathan Papelbon, the closer who has become Rivera’s great rival. “I always watch closers,” Papelbon said, “what it takes for them to be successful. I try to pick up little nuances that you think might help you.” And with Rivera? “His focus. He may not stare in at the plate, but you can see that he’s in control, and I’ve tried to emulate that.” Papelbon acknowledged that he and Rivera occupy the opposite ends of the characterological spectrum of closers. “I’m the type of pitcher that uses energy and adrenaline to help me succeed,” he said. “He’s the type of pitcher that tries to control that.” Youkilis said of his teammate, “We just say Pap’s nuts.” No one on the Yankees would describe Rivera that way. It would be as difficult to imagine the serene and pious Rivera with the Red Sox as it would the amped-up Papelbon with the Yankees.
LIKE MANY OF THE YANKEES, Rivera lives in New York’s suburbs. He and Clara have three sons, ages 16, 13 and 7. I asked Rivera if they were athletic, and he seemed uninterested in the question. He would support them in whatever interested them. When I asked if he had any hobbies, Rivera said no — being with Clara and the boys was his hobby. Rivera seems almost not to have any personal attributes at all; virtue and duty and dignity take up the space that in others is occupied by appetite or vanity or cleverness or even ulterior motive. When I asked what achievements stood out in his own mind — not a tough question for most star athletes — he balked. “I don’t think like that,” he said. “I’m a different breed, I guess. Team wins; I’m proud for that.” Rivera threw a scare into Yankees fans some years back by saying that he felt called to the pulpit rather than to the mound. But God had other plans for him, and he returned to baseball. Rivera’s contract, which pays him $15 million a year, expires at the end of this year, but he seems likely to continue playing.
Derek Jeter congratulates Mariano Rivera after they beat the Cleveland Indians at Yankee Stadium on April 19, 2009 in the Bronx. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)Rivera channels his philanthropic activities through a personal foundation, as many prominent ballplayers do. The Mariano Rivera Foundation, which distributes at least half a million dollars a year, helps underprivileged children through church-based institutions in both Panama and the U.S. Rivera is quite possibly the world’s most famous Panamanian, but he said that he makes a point of staying “under the radar” when he is there — which isn’t often, because during the off-season the boys are in school and he is loath to leave. When he does put away the mitt, Rivera says, he will devote himself to his philanthropic work.
Rivera takes his role as mentor very seriously, and seems to enjoy teaching as much as he enjoys playing. People who do what they do effortlessly are usually not very effective, or very patient, teachers. Rivera has patience to spare. The problem is following his instructions. Rivera will show absolutely anyone, including rivals, exactly how he throws the cutter. When I asked him why he was so unguarded, Rivera said, “It’s a blessing from the Lord: when he gives you something, it’s yours.” It took me a moment to realize that he wasn’t saying that he had an obligation to share the blessing, but rather that no one without the blessing was going to throw his cutter. God had doled out his favors parsimoniously.
Rivera’s chief students, of course, are his own teammates. He talks to them constantly about how to behave in various situations. Joba Chamberlain, Rivera’s bulldogish young setup man, and possibly his successor, told me that Rivera directed him to pay more attention to at-bats when they sat together in the bullpen. Jonathan Albaladejo, another relief pitcher, told me that he and Rivera talked often about mental toughness, about holding your emotions in check. Albaladejo spoke wistfully of his mentor’s inner calm. “I wish some day I could do that,” he said. The superpressurized atmosphere of Yankee Stadium had gotten to him, he admitted. Now, he said hopefully, “I’m a little more used to it.”
To talk to players of more middling achievement is to understand how extraordinary is Rivera’s consistency, his grace under pressure. Chad Gaudin, whom the Yankees acquired last year for the bottom part of the starting rotation, said that he had virtually apprenticed himself to the team’s closer-sage. He described a typical exchange:
“What do you do to throw that one pitch where you want it all the time when the situation is heavy — say, 3-1 count, bases loaded, big hitter up?”
“I don’t ever second-guess myself. I don’t say, ‘I can’ or ‘I should’ or ‘I must.’ I will throw the ball where I want to.”
Here was the distilled gnostic wisdom of the mound. Gaudin understood that he needed absolute commitment — to that pitch at that moment. Nothing else in his head. But of course when he got out on the mound, he found that there were all sorts of other things in his head — doubts, for example. “There have been numerous times that I’ve been out there and I think about the conversation we had when I’m pitching,” Gaudin said. “I think about it as a key for myself: What did we talk about? Now I’m going to do it. I tell myself, Just throw this pitch.” Gaudin tries to do through conscious effort what Rivera does naturally. Gaudin says that it has helped him. But not enough, apparently — he was released at the end of spring training. Though he was re-signed by the Yankees at the end of May, he has often not been able to throw the ball where he wants to. Albaladejo likewise has yet to translate Rivera’s lessons into a major-league career, but he has been an effective closer this season at Class AAA Scranton/Wilkes-Barre.
Watching Rivera during the first three months this season, I was struck by the fact that while he doesn’t always hit his spots, the number of consequential mistakes he makes — mistakes in those “heavy” situations — is vanishingly small. Rivera didn’t allow a run over the first 11 innings he pitched, running his string to 51 straight converted save opportunities at home. He was, as always, boringly effective. Then on May 16, he came into a game against the Minnesota Twins in the eighth inning with the bases loaded and the Yankees leading 3-1. He walked Jim Thome, the aging slugger, to force in a run. And the next batter, Jason Kubel, turned on an inside cutter and hit a grand slam. I had never seen either of these things happen to Rivera. (It was, in fact, the fourth time in each case.) The pitch to Kubel was the same one with which Rivera has struck out left-handed sluggers like Boston’s David Ortiz time after time; it was the walk that was shocking. Afterward, Rivera berated himself for the walk, not the homer. That was his last serious mistake. At press time, the 40-year-old closer had converted every other save opportunity, posting an E.R.A. of 1.03 while surrendering a ridiculously low 11 hits and striking out 23 in 26 innings.
Rivera’s one breakthrough achievement of 2010 is his new role as glamorpuss: the men’s fashion designer Canali has featured him in an ad campaign. You can tell that the trim man in the blue pinstriped blazer (a coincidence, Canali says, not a reference to the Yankees’ fabled uniform) is a ballplayer, because he’s holding a baseball and has a mitt perched on his forearm. But with his Alfred E. Neuman ears and his shy grin, our model is plainly a very approachable superstar. It comes as no surprise to learn that Rivera actually patronized Canali before being asked to serve as model.
In an enterprise where arrested development is the norm, Rivera really does seem selfless. Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager, who has known Rivera since the pitcher joined the franchise, says: “Success changes most players. It hasn’t changed him one bit.” During spring training, Cashman said, Rivera will sometimes change into street clothes, wander over to one of the outer fields, sit on the bench and talk to the minor leaguers. “It’s not asked, it’s not expected; stars don’t do that.” A good deal of the advice Rivera offers, especially to other Hispanic players, has nothing to do with throwing a baseball. Francisco Cervelli, who has been sharing the catching duties with Posada this season, said that Rivera talked to him about dealing with the press: “Don’t worry about what the people say; be yourself, say what you want to say with respect. They’ll respect you, and then they’re going to trust you.” Excellent advice — if you happen to be in possession of a soul at peace, rather than one divided against itself.
Mariano Rivera shakes hands with catcher Jorge Posada after throwing out the ceremonial first pitch in a game against the Seattle Mariners June 30, 2009 at Yankee Stadium. (June 30, 2009 - Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images North America)Nobody would say that the Yankees are Rivera’s team. After all, he appears in less than 5 percent of the team’s innings. Derek Jeter is the Yankees’ captain and the team’s iconic figure. He’s the franchise. But the Yankees’ identity is forged not by any one player but by the veterans who came up together in the mid-’90s — Rivera, Jeter, Posada and the pitcher Andy Pettitte. No other team in baseball has held on to its core of players as the Yankees have. Few have two such players, much less four. Commitment through thick and thin is not, in fact, graven on the Steinbrenner tablets: the Yankees made little attempt to re-sign Pettitte after the 2003 season, allowing him to leave for the Houston Astros before bringing him back in 2007. The Yankees have held on to their stars because they can afford to do so. Nevertheless, the four men have given the team a powerful collective identity: professional, undemonstrative, dignified and arguably a bit colorless. When I met with Cashman, he had just come from a team meeting with a “Delta Force special-ops guy” who discussed “how they go about their business.” That would be the Yankees: do the job right, and don’t leave a mess.
Even the most disciplined collective will have its outliers; and for the Yankees, that means Alex Rodriguez, superstar and perennial source of agita. A-Rod, unlike the old stalwarts, generates ink for all the right reasons and the wrong reasons — monstrous home runs, celebrity girlfriends, salary disputes, steroids. At times — like when he doesn’t deliver in the playoffs — A-Rod has seemed to be more trouble than he’s worth. This spring, with almost comic inevitability, the buff third baseman was ensnared in yet another scandal when he confirmed that he had seen a doctor suspected of blood doping.
Rodriguez said that he would be glad to talk about Rivera, whom he described as one of his closest friends on the team. He fiddled with his BlackBerry as we spoke, only looking up halfway through the conversation, when I asked if he had learned anything from Rivera. “You probably don’t have enough time for me to tell you how much I’ve learned,” he said.
“Try me,” I said. A-Rod gathered his thoughts. Rivera, he said, was “the greatest closer of all time” and “even a better human being and a great leader.” Rivera was a force in the locker room. “There’s been a number of times that he’s stood up and said something that was profound and important.” Could he recall any specific instances? No, A-Rod said; that would be private. Here, perhaps, was further proof that Rivera’s example was difficult to follow for people not constituted like himself.
THE YANKEES HELD their home opener this year on April 13. Fans exiting the subway to the team’s year-old limestone palace could see that over the winter its predecessor, the House That Ruth Built, had been unbuilt; great heaps of shattered masonry and twisted metal lay in the shadow of the right-field stands, which had not yet submitted to the wrecking ball. Before the game, the players were called out one by one to receive their 2009 World Series rings. When Rivera’s name was announced, the fans began to cheer, then rose to their feet and then let out a mighty roar of thanks. The only players to enjoy a comparable reception were the beloved Derek Jeter and Hideki Matsui, last year’s World Series M.V.P., who had since been acquired by the Angels, the Yankees’ opponents that day.
The Yankees’ old guard shined that afternoon. Pettitte allowed no runs in six innings. Jeter homered. Posada hit two doubles. Only Rivera himself was left out, for the Yankees were leading 7-1 going into the top of the ninth. Girardi allowed Dave Robertson, a hard-throwing reliever, to mop up. But Robertson quickly got himself into trouble, falling behind hitters and then having to throw strikes. Perhaps he was having commitment issues. With the bases loaded, Bobby Abreu hit a grand slam. Suddenly it was 7-5, and Robertson was yanked. As the bullpen door swung open and the sound system cued up “Enter Sandman” and Rivera began jogging toward the mound, the fans went wild. It felt as if Robertson had accepted his role in the drama by pitching badly enough to give Rivera a chance to write his own inimitable conclusion to the afternoon.
Torii Hunter, one of the Angels’ best hitters, was up with one out. Rivera bent over deeply from the waist, in the almost prayerful gesture with which he begins his windup, and fired a cutter. And then another. And another. He fell behind Hunter, 3-1, and then threw two more cutters past him for a strikeout. Then fate provided the perfect coda for the day in the form of Matsui, the Japanese superstar who had played his entire American career with the Yankees and had come to seem the very incarnation of Yankee professionalism and class — a clutch performer of unshakable sang-froid. If Mariano Rivera were a position player, he would be Hideki Matsui. The fans roared again as Matsui came to the plate. Rivera fired his seventh cutter of the day, jamming the left-handed hitter. Matsui popped out weakly to second to end the game and provide Rivera the 529th save of his career.
After the game, reporters crowded Rivera’s locker, and he patiently answered questions in English and Spanish — standing up, not sitting in his folding chair, as many players do. Matsui, he said, was a great player, a great guy. The team was looking good. The whole day had been deeply moving. “It was,” he said, “special for me.”
James Traub is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent article was about the U.S. counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan.
Sunday, July 04, 2010
‘All men are created equal’ is not hypocrisy but vision
By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe Columnist
http://www.boston.com/
July 4, 2010
‘How is it,’’ the great English man of letters Samuel Johnson taunted Americans 235 years ago, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’’ His fellow Englishman Thomas Day remarked in 1776 with equal scorn: “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature it is an American patriot signing resolutions of independency with the one hand and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.’’
That America’s founders were hypocrites, above all on the subject of race, is an enduring charge.
Examples are legion. At a Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society rally in 1854, William Lloyd Garrison condemned the Constitution — which extolled “the blessings of liberty,’’ yet permitted slavery — as “a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.’’ When a bill requiring public school students to recite parts of the Declaration of Independence was proposed in the New Jersey legislature in 2000, it was denounced as insulting. “You have nerve to ask my grandchildren to recite the Declaration,’’ one black lawmaker erupted angrily. “How dare you?’’
In 1975, in an essay marking the approach of the nation’s bicentennial, the eminent historian John Hope Franklin accused the Founders of “betraying the ideals to which they gave lip service.’’ Obviously, he wrote, “human bondage and human dignity were not as important to them as their own political and economic independence.’’
Are the Founders guilty as charged? There is no denying that the patriots who proclaimed it “self-evident’’ that “all men are created equal’’ tolerated black slavery. It is true that the Declaration of Independence, which so stirringly affirms that God endows every human being with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’’ was the work of a Virginia planter who owned 200 slaves.
So, yes, it is easy to damn Jefferson and the other Founders for not living up to their highest ideals. But if that is all it takes to be convicted of hypocrisy, how many of us would escape conviction? Surely what is more remarkable about Jefferson is not that he owned slaves, but that he acknowledged forthrightly and repeatedly that slavery was wrong. In his “Notes on the State of Virginia,’’ for instance, he characterized slave ownership as “the most unremitting despotism’’ — an outrage bound to provoke divine wrath. “Indeed,’’ Jefferson wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.’’
The Founders weren’t stupid. Of course they knew that the universal ideals embraced in the Declaration were not matched in reality across the colonies. The controversy over slavery was intense; but even more intense was the need for a united front against England. The urgent choice in 1776 was not between slavery or abolition. It was between hanging together, as Benjamin Franklin supposedly quipped in Philadelphia, or most assuredly hanging separately. They chose to hang together, and the confrontation over slavery was left for later.
But in that confrontation, the lofty ideal of equality enshrined in the Declaration — precisely because it was enshrined in the Declaration — imparted enormous moral authority to the abolitionists’ cause. Those who indict the Founders because their treatment of African slaves didn’t come up to the standard of “all men are created equal’’ should be asked: Would the Declaration of Independence have been improved if those words had been omitted? Would slavery have ended sooner had abolitionists not been able to invoke that “self-evident truth’’?
Inveighing against slavery on Independence Day in 1852, Frederick Douglass famously asked: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?’’ It was a “sham,’’ he answered, “empty and heartless . . . revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy.’’ For after all, he demanded, “Are the great principles . . . embodied in that Declaration of Independence extended to us?’’ That Declaration could have been written without those great principles. But at what cost to Douglass and all who fought against slavery?
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’’ The Founders chose those words not to describe the nation in which they lived, but a better, more just nation; the nation America could become. Their words became the American creed, the taproot of the American dream — as worthy of celebrating today as they were in 1776.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
http://www.boston.com/
July 4, 2010
‘How is it,’’ the great English man of letters Samuel Johnson taunted Americans 235 years ago, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’’ His fellow Englishman Thomas Day remarked in 1776 with equal scorn: “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature it is an American patriot signing resolutions of independency with the one hand and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.’’That America’s founders were hypocrites, above all on the subject of race, is an enduring charge.
Examples are legion. At a Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society rally in 1854, William Lloyd Garrison condemned the Constitution — which extolled “the blessings of liberty,’’ yet permitted slavery — as “a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.’’ When a bill requiring public school students to recite parts of the Declaration of Independence was proposed in the New Jersey legislature in 2000, it was denounced as insulting. “You have nerve to ask my grandchildren to recite the Declaration,’’ one black lawmaker erupted angrily. “How dare you?’’
In 1975, in an essay marking the approach of the nation’s bicentennial, the eminent historian John Hope Franklin accused the Founders of “betraying the ideals to which they gave lip service.’’ Obviously, he wrote, “human bondage and human dignity were not as important to them as their own political and economic independence.’’
Are the Founders guilty as charged? There is no denying that the patriots who proclaimed it “self-evident’’ that “all men are created equal’’ tolerated black slavery. It is true that the Declaration of Independence, which so stirringly affirms that God endows every human being with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’’ was the work of a Virginia planter who owned 200 slaves.
So, yes, it is easy to damn Jefferson and the other Founders for not living up to their highest ideals. But if that is all it takes to be convicted of hypocrisy, how many of us would escape conviction? Surely what is more remarkable about Jefferson is not that he owned slaves, but that he acknowledged forthrightly and repeatedly that slavery was wrong. In his “Notes on the State of Virginia,’’ for instance, he characterized slave ownership as “the most unremitting despotism’’ — an outrage bound to provoke divine wrath. “Indeed,’’ Jefferson wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.’’
The Founders weren’t stupid. Of course they knew that the universal ideals embraced in the Declaration were not matched in reality across the colonies. The controversy over slavery was intense; but even more intense was the need for a united front against England. The urgent choice in 1776 was not between slavery or abolition. It was between hanging together, as Benjamin Franklin supposedly quipped in Philadelphia, or most assuredly hanging separately. They chose to hang together, and the confrontation over slavery was left for later.
But in that confrontation, the lofty ideal of equality enshrined in the Declaration — precisely because it was enshrined in the Declaration — imparted enormous moral authority to the abolitionists’ cause. Those who indict the Founders because their treatment of African slaves didn’t come up to the standard of “all men are created equal’’ should be asked: Would the Declaration of Independence have been improved if those words had been omitted? Would slavery have ended sooner had abolitionists not been able to invoke that “self-evident truth’’?
Inveighing against slavery on Independence Day in 1852, Frederick Douglass famously asked: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?’’ It was a “sham,’’ he answered, “empty and heartless . . . revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy.’’ For after all, he demanded, “Are the great principles . . . embodied in that Declaration of Independence extended to us?’’ That Declaration could have been written without those great principles. But at what cost to Douglass and all who fought against slavery?
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’’ The Founders chose those words not to describe the nation in which they lived, but a better, more just nation; the nation America could become. Their words became the American creed, the taproot of the American dream — as worthy of celebrating today as they were in 1776.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
A Cold Man's Warm Words
Jefferson's tender lament didn't make it into the Declaration.
By PEGGY NOONAN
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
July 2, 2010
The tenderest words in American political history were cut from the document they were to have graced.
It was July 1, 2 ,3 and 4, 1776, in the State House in Philadelphia. America was being born. The Continental Congress was reviewing and editing the language of the proposed Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson, its primary author, was suffering the death of a thousand cuts.
The tensions over slavery had been wrenching, terrible, and were resolved by brute calculation: to damn or outlaw it now would break fragile consensus, halt all momentum, and stop the creation of the United States. References to the slave trade were omitted, but the founders were not stupid men, and surely they knew their young nation would have its date with destiny; surely they heard in their silence the guns of Fort Sumter.
Still, in the end, the Congress would not produce only an act of the most enormous human and political significance, the creation of America, it would provide history with one of the few instances in which a work of true literary genius was produced, in essence, by committee. (The writing of the King James Bible is another.)
Barbara Kelley
The beginning of the Declaration had a calm stateliness that signaled, subtly, that something huge is happening:
"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separate."
This gave a tone of moral modesty to an act, revolution, that is not a modest one. And it was an interesting modesty, expressing respect for the opinion of the world while assuming the whole world was watching. In time it would be. But that phrase, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" is still a marker, a reminder: We began with respect. America always gets in trouble when we forget that.
The second paragraph will, literally, live forever in the history of man. It still catches the throat:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
What followed was a list of grievances that made the case for separation from the mother country, and this part was fiery. Jefferson was a cold man who wrote with great feeling. He trained his eyes on the depredations of King George III: "He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns. . . . He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compete the work of death, desolation and tyranny . . ."
Members of the Congress read and reread, and the cutting commenced. Sometimes they cooled Jefferson down. He wrote that the king "suffered the administration of justice totally to cease in some of these states." They made it simpler: "He has obstructed the Administration of Justice."
"For Thomas Jefferson it became a painful ordeal, as change after change was called for and approximately a quarter of what he had written was cut entirely." I quote from the historian David McCullough's "John Adams," as I did last year at this time, because everything's there.
Jefferson looked on in silence. Mr. McCullough notes that there is no record that he uttered a word in protest or in defense of what he'd written. Benjamin Franklin, sitting nearby, comforted him: Edits often reduce things to their essence, don't fret. It was similar to the wisdom Scott Fitzgerald shared with the promising young novelist Thomas Wolfe 150 years later: Writers bleed over every cut, but at the end they don't miss what was removed, don't worry.
"Of more than eighty changes in Jefferson's draft during the time Congress deliberated, most were minor and served to improve it," writes Mr. McCullough. But one cut near the end was substantial, and its removal wounded Jefferson, who was right to be wounded, for some of those words should have stayed.
Jefferson had, in his bill of particulars against the king, taken a moment to incriminate the English people themselves—"our British brethren"—for allowing their king and Parliament to send over to America not only "soldiers of our own blood" but "foreign Mercenaries to invade and destroy us." This, he said, was at the heart of the tragedy of separation. "These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us renounce forever" our old friends and brothers. "We must endeavor to forget our former love for them."
Well. Talk of love was a little much for the delegates. Love was not on their mind. The entire section was removed.
And so were the words that came next. But they should not have been, for they are the tenderest words.
Poignantly, with a plaintive sound, Jefferson addresses and gives voice to the human pain of parting: "We might have been a free and great people together."
What loss there is in those words, what humanity, and what realism, too.
"To write is to think, and to write well is to think well," David McCullough once said in conversation. Jefferson was thinking of the abrupt end of old ties, of self-defining ties, and, I suspect, that the pain of this had to be acknowledged. It is one thing to declare the case for freedom, and to make a fiery denunciation of abusive, autocratic and high-handed governance. But it is another thing, and an equally important one, to acknowledge the human implications of the break. These were our friends, our old relations; we were leaving them, ending the particular facts of our long relationship forever. We would feel it. Seventeen seventy-six was the beginning of a dream. But it was the end of one too. "We might have been a free and great people together."
It hurt Thomas Jefferson to see these words removed from his great document. And we know something about how he viewed his life, his own essence and meaning, from the words he directed that would, a half-century after 1776, be cut onto his tombstone. The first word after his name is "Author."
America and Britain did become great and free peoples together, and apart, bound by a special relationship our political leaders don't often speak of and should never let fade. You can't have enough old friends. There was the strange war of 1812, declared by America and waged here by England, which reinvaded, and burned our White House and Capitol. That was rude of them. But they got their heads handed to them in New Orleans and left, never to return as an army.
Even 1812 gave us something beautiful and tender. There was a bombardment at Fort McHenry. A young lawyer and writer was watching, Francis Scott Key. He knew his country was imperiled. He watched the long night in hopes the fort had not fallen. And he saw it—the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
And so to all writers (would-be, occasional and professional) and all editors too, down through our history: Happy 234th Independence Day. And to our British cousins: Nice growing old with you.
By PEGGY NOONAN
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
July 2, 2010
The tenderest words in American political history were cut from the document they were to have graced.
It was July 1, 2 ,3 and 4, 1776, in the State House in Philadelphia. America was being born. The Continental Congress was reviewing and editing the language of the proposed Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson, its primary author, was suffering the death of a thousand cuts.
The tensions over slavery had been wrenching, terrible, and were resolved by brute calculation: to damn or outlaw it now would break fragile consensus, halt all momentum, and stop the creation of the United States. References to the slave trade were omitted, but the founders were not stupid men, and surely they knew their young nation would have its date with destiny; surely they heard in their silence the guns of Fort Sumter.
Still, in the end, the Congress would not produce only an act of the most enormous human and political significance, the creation of America, it would provide history with one of the few instances in which a work of true literary genius was produced, in essence, by committee. (The writing of the King James Bible is another.)
Barbara Kelley
The beginning of the Declaration had a calm stateliness that signaled, subtly, that something huge is happening:
"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separate."
This gave a tone of moral modesty to an act, revolution, that is not a modest one. And it was an interesting modesty, expressing respect for the opinion of the world while assuming the whole world was watching. In time it would be. But that phrase, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" is still a marker, a reminder: We began with respect. America always gets in trouble when we forget that.
The second paragraph will, literally, live forever in the history of man. It still catches the throat:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
What followed was a list of grievances that made the case for separation from the mother country, and this part was fiery. Jefferson was a cold man who wrote with great feeling. He trained his eyes on the depredations of King George III: "He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns. . . . He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compete the work of death, desolation and tyranny . . ."
Members of the Congress read and reread, and the cutting commenced. Sometimes they cooled Jefferson down. He wrote that the king "suffered the administration of justice totally to cease in some of these states." They made it simpler: "He has obstructed the Administration of Justice."
"For Thomas Jefferson it became a painful ordeal, as change after change was called for and approximately a quarter of what he had written was cut entirely." I quote from the historian David McCullough's "John Adams," as I did last year at this time, because everything's there.
Jefferson looked on in silence. Mr. McCullough notes that there is no record that he uttered a word in protest or in defense of what he'd written. Benjamin Franklin, sitting nearby, comforted him: Edits often reduce things to their essence, don't fret. It was similar to the wisdom Scott Fitzgerald shared with the promising young novelist Thomas Wolfe 150 years later: Writers bleed over every cut, but at the end they don't miss what was removed, don't worry.
"Of more than eighty changes in Jefferson's draft during the time Congress deliberated, most were minor and served to improve it," writes Mr. McCullough. But one cut near the end was substantial, and its removal wounded Jefferson, who was right to be wounded, for some of those words should have stayed.
Jefferson had, in his bill of particulars against the king, taken a moment to incriminate the English people themselves—"our British brethren"—for allowing their king and Parliament to send over to America not only "soldiers of our own blood" but "foreign Mercenaries to invade and destroy us." This, he said, was at the heart of the tragedy of separation. "These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us renounce forever" our old friends and brothers. "We must endeavor to forget our former love for them."
Well. Talk of love was a little much for the delegates. Love was not on their mind. The entire section was removed.
And so were the words that came next. But they should not have been, for they are the tenderest words.
Poignantly, with a plaintive sound, Jefferson addresses and gives voice to the human pain of parting: "We might have been a free and great people together."
What loss there is in those words, what humanity, and what realism, too.
"To write is to think, and to write well is to think well," David McCullough once said in conversation. Jefferson was thinking of the abrupt end of old ties, of self-defining ties, and, I suspect, that the pain of this had to be acknowledged. It is one thing to declare the case for freedom, and to make a fiery denunciation of abusive, autocratic and high-handed governance. But it is another thing, and an equally important one, to acknowledge the human implications of the break. These were our friends, our old relations; we were leaving them, ending the particular facts of our long relationship forever. We would feel it. Seventeen seventy-six was the beginning of a dream. But it was the end of one too. "We might have been a free and great people together."
It hurt Thomas Jefferson to see these words removed from his great document. And we know something about how he viewed his life, his own essence and meaning, from the words he directed that would, a half-century after 1776, be cut onto his tombstone. The first word after his name is "Author."
America and Britain did become great and free peoples together, and apart, bound by a special relationship our political leaders don't often speak of and should never let fade. You can't have enough old friends. There was the strange war of 1812, declared by America and waged here by England, which reinvaded, and burned our White House and Capitol. That was rude of them. But they got their heads handed to them in New Orleans and left, never to return as an army.
Even 1812 gave us something beautiful and tender. There was a bombardment at Fort McHenry. A young lawyer and writer was watching, Francis Scott Key. He knew his country was imperiled. He watched the long night in hopes the fort had not fallen. And he saw it—the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
And so to all writers (would-be, occasional and professional) and all editors too, down through our history: Happy 234th Independence Day. And to our British cousins: Nice growing old with you.
'Mockingbird' still singing 50 years later
Events and new reflections mark 50th anniversary of 'To Kill a Mockingbird'
Sunday, July 04, 2010
By Sally Kalson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/
Harper Lee poses for Life magazine in the balcony of the old courthouse in Monroeville, Ala. in May of 1961.
Fifty years ago this summer, an unassuming novel about life in a small Southern town entered the marketplace and left an indelible mark on the American heart and psyche.
"To Kill a Mockingbird," Harper Lee's classic -- and only -- book, became a best-seller (it sold a half-million copies its first year) and Pulitzer Prize winner. More than 30 million copies later, it still ranks high on the list of most-loved American books. The movie version starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch holds a similar place in the firmament of films.
Published July 11, 1960, the story of a white lawyer defending a black man on a trumped-up rape charge in Alabama was a groundbreaking work, not only for the racial injustice it depicted but for the essential humanity of its characters.
Atticus, the gentle, principled lawyer; Scout, his high-spirited daughter; Tom Robinson, the man falsely accused; Boo Radley, the town recluse; Dill, the mischievous boy modeled on Truman Capote, Harper Lee's childhood neighbor -- all of them live on in print and celluloid.
"Mockingbird" was a revelation because it read like a true slice of Southern life in the 1930s, served up by a true daughter of the South. Set in the decade of the notorious Scottsboro trials, when nine young black men were wrongly convicted of raping two white women on a train, the novel emerged five years after Rosa Parks touched off the Montgomery bus boycott by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Racial segregation was still legal in many places, and the lunch counter sit-ins had barely begun.
Taking the stage at this precarious moment, "Mockingbird" challenged stereotypes of whites and blacks alike. In doing so, it pricked the national conscience and helped set the stage for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It also earned Nelle Harper Lee (she dropped her first name for the book) an accolade she never sought: "brave."
To honor the half-century milestone, celebrations are taking place in book stores and libraries across the country, including public readings, movie screenings and lectures. (Allegheny County already had its big celebration in 2003, when the county library association chose the title to launch its One Book, One Community initiative, but a few individual libraries are having events.)
In addition, HarperCollins has released a 50th anniversary edition. It has also published a new book about the book: "Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' " by journalist and filmmaker Mary McDonagh Murphy.
Ms. Murphy considers "Mockingbird" to be "our national novel."
"I cannot think of another novel that has such indelible characters, a story of suspense, this kind of beautiful writing and also a social message that isn't preachy," she said in a phone interview.
The new book is based on her documentary treatment of the same subject, now making the rounds at film festivals, and includes material she couldn't fit into the movie.
The book has 25 contributors, mostly writers, reflecting on the novel's significance. Among those interviewed are Mary Badham, a non-actor who played Scout in the film; Rick Bragg; Wally Lamb (who wrote the foreward); James McBride; Anna Quindlen; Richard Russo; Scott Turow; Andrew Young and Oprah Winfrey.
Predictably absent is anything new from Ms. Lee herself, who has famously declined interviews since 1964. Now 84, she lives in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., the prototype for Maycomb in the book.
However, Ms. Murphy does succeed in interviewing the author's sister, Alice Finch Lee, 98, a lawyer who still goes to work in Monroeville every day.
"I worked very hard getting that interview, and I enjoyed every minute of it," Ms. Murphy said.
On the perennial question of why Harper Lee never wrote another book, Alice Lee says to Ms. Murphy: "She told one of our cousins who asked her, 'I haven't anywhere to go but down.' "
Another tidbit comes from Ms. Winfrey, who says she had a delightful lunch with Harper Lee but could not convince her to come on her show.
"If you know Boo," Ms. Lee reportedly told her, "then you understand why I wouldn't be doing an interview, because I am really Boo."
Yet Harper Lee has never been a hermit.
"Not giving interviews should not be confused with being a recluse," said Ms. Murphy. "By all accounts, Harper Lee has a normal life and friends. She's not holed up in a house like Boo."
As her friend, the Rev. Thomas Lane Butts of Monroeville, put it, "She has controlled her own destiny. She doesn't have a PR person. She doesn't need one. ... I think she has led a happier life and certainly more contented life because she has chosen how she has related to the public."
Something else Ms. Lee told Ms. Winfrey bears noting, and it's something one rarely hears from famous people today: "Well, honey, I already said everything I had to say."
Several people in Ms. Murphy's book remark on the rumors that "Mockingbird" wasn't written by Ms. Lee at all, but by Mr. Capote, or at least with a lot of his help, and that's why she never wrote another novel. To a one, they reject the notion because their writing styles were so completely different. Some say that the opposite was true, because she was the one who went to Kansas to help him research his book "In Cold Blood."
Their friendship was ended by her success. As Alice Lee explained:
"Truman became very jealous because Nelle Harper got a Pulitzer and he did not. ... he got involved with the drugs and heavy drinking and all. And that was it. It was not Nelle Harper dropping him. It was Truman going away from her."
Occasionally, someone will dispute the literary value of "Mockingbird." Ms. Murphy recounts a May 2006 New Yorker article by Thomas Mallon, dismissing Atticus as "a plaster saint" and Scout as "a highly constructed doll, feisty and cute on every subject from algebra to grown-ups."
When Ms. Murphy asked her about Mr. Mallon's comment, Pulitzer Prize-winning author/historian Diane McWhorter ("Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution") replied, "Whoever this guy is ... they're not going to be reading his book in 50 years. People are going to be reading Harper Lee in this country as long as they draw oxygen."
Ms. Murphy said that when "Mockingbird" first appeared, Harper Lee's hometown paper made note of it. But it was another six months before Newsweek did the first big story on her after the book had become hugely popular. Other publications sought her out when the film version was released in 1962, with a screenplay by the young Horton Foote.
"She was delighted by the film," said Ms. Murphy. "By then the civil rights movement was in full bloom, and she was being asked to discuss some of the most divisive racial issues of the day."
One of those press conferences was witnessed by a reporter from Rogue magazine, then a counterpart to Playboy and Esquire, and described in a March 1963 story:
Q: When you wrote the book, did you hold yourself back?
A: Well, sir, in the book I tried to give a sense of proportion to life in the South, that there isn't a lynching before every breakfast. I think that Southerners react with the same kind of horror as other people do about the injustice in their land. In Mississippi, people were so revolted by what happened, they were so stunned, I don't think it will happen again.
Q: I'd like to know if your book is an indictment against a group in society.
A: The book is not an indictment so much as a plea for something, a reminder to people at home.
It turned out to be a reminder to the whole nation, and its central messages must hold as true today as ever. Otherwise, "Mockingbird" wouldn't continue to be one of the most-read American novels of all time.
"All these years later, it's never been out of print," Ms. Murphy said.
"That's an astonishing phenomenon for a book that people expected might sell 4,000 copies."
Sally Kalson can be reached at skalson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1610.
Sunday, July 04, 2010
By Sally Kalson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/
Harper Lee poses for Life magazine in the balcony of the old courthouse in Monroeville, Ala. in May of 1961.
Fifty years ago this summer, an unassuming novel about life in a small Southern town entered the marketplace and left an indelible mark on the American heart and psyche.
"To Kill a Mockingbird," Harper Lee's classic -- and only -- book, became a best-seller (it sold a half-million copies its first year) and Pulitzer Prize winner. More than 30 million copies later, it still ranks high on the list of most-loved American books. The movie version starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch holds a similar place in the firmament of films.
Published July 11, 1960, the story of a white lawyer defending a black man on a trumped-up rape charge in Alabama was a groundbreaking work, not only for the racial injustice it depicted but for the essential humanity of its characters.
Atticus, the gentle, principled lawyer; Scout, his high-spirited daughter; Tom Robinson, the man falsely accused; Boo Radley, the town recluse; Dill, the mischievous boy modeled on Truman Capote, Harper Lee's childhood neighbor -- all of them live on in print and celluloid.
"Mockingbird" was a revelation because it read like a true slice of Southern life in the 1930s, served up by a true daughter of the South. Set in the decade of the notorious Scottsboro trials, when nine young black men were wrongly convicted of raping two white women on a train, the novel emerged five years after Rosa Parks touched off the Montgomery bus boycott by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Racial segregation was still legal in many places, and the lunch counter sit-ins had barely begun.
Taking the stage at this precarious moment, "Mockingbird" challenged stereotypes of whites and blacks alike. In doing so, it pricked the national conscience and helped set the stage for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It also earned Nelle Harper Lee (she dropped her first name for the book) an accolade she never sought: "brave."
To honor the half-century milestone, celebrations are taking place in book stores and libraries across the country, including public readings, movie screenings and lectures. (Allegheny County already had its big celebration in 2003, when the county library association chose the title to launch its One Book, One Community initiative, but a few individual libraries are having events.)
In addition, HarperCollins has released a 50th anniversary edition. It has also published a new book about the book: "Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' " by journalist and filmmaker Mary McDonagh Murphy.
Ms. Murphy considers "Mockingbird" to be "our national novel."
"I cannot think of another novel that has such indelible characters, a story of suspense, this kind of beautiful writing and also a social message that isn't preachy," she said in a phone interview.
The new book is based on her documentary treatment of the same subject, now making the rounds at film festivals, and includes material she couldn't fit into the movie.
The book has 25 contributors, mostly writers, reflecting on the novel's significance. Among those interviewed are Mary Badham, a non-actor who played Scout in the film; Rick Bragg; Wally Lamb (who wrote the foreward); James McBride; Anna Quindlen; Richard Russo; Scott Turow; Andrew Young and Oprah Winfrey.
Predictably absent is anything new from Ms. Lee herself, who has famously declined interviews since 1964. Now 84, she lives in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., the prototype for Maycomb in the book.
However, Ms. Murphy does succeed in interviewing the author's sister, Alice Finch Lee, 98, a lawyer who still goes to work in Monroeville every day.
"I worked very hard getting that interview, and I enjoyed every minute of it," Ms. Murphy said.
On the perennial question of why Harper Lee never wrote another book, Alice Lee says to Ms. Murphy: "She told one of our cousins who asked her, 'I haven't anywhere to go but down.' "
Another tidbit comes from Ms. Winfrey, who says she had a delightful lunch with Harper Lee but could not convince her to come on her show.
"If you know Boo," Ms. Lee reportedly told her, "then you understand why I wouldn't be doing an interview, because I am really Boo."
Yet Harper Lee has never been a hermit.
"Not giving interviews should not be confused with being a recluse," said Ms. Murphy. "By all accounts, Harper Lee has a normal life and friends. She's not holed up in a house like Boo."
As her friend, the Rev. Thomas Lane Butts of Monroeville, put it, "She has controlled her own destiny. She doesn't have a PR person. She doesn't need one. ... I think she has led a happier life and certainly more contented life because she has chosen how she has related to the public."
Something else Ms. Lee told Ms. Winfrey bears noting, and it's something one rarely hears from famous people today: "Well, honey, I already said everything I had to say."
Several people in Ms. Murphy's book remark on the rumors that "Mockingbird" wasn't written by Ms. Lee at all, but by Mr. Capote, or at least with a lot of his help, and that's why she never wrote another novel. To a one, they reject the notion because their writing styles were so completely different. Some say that the opposite was true, because she was the one who went to Kansas to help him research his book "In Cold Blood."Their friendship was ended by her success. As Alice Lee explained:
"Truman became very jealous because Nelle Harper got a Pulitzer and he did not. ... he got involved with the drugs and heavy drinking and all. And that was it. It was not Nelle Harper dropping him. It was Truman going away from her."
Occasionally, someone will dispute the literary value of "Mockingbird." Ms. Murphy recounts a May 2006 New Yorker article by Thomas Mallon, dismissing Atticus as "a plaster saint" and Scout as "a highly constructed doll, feisty and cute on every subject from algebra to grown-ups."
When Ms. Murphy asked her about Mr. Mallon's comment, Pulitzer Prize-winning author/historian Diane McWhorter ("Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution") replied, "Whoever this guy is ... they're not going to be reading his book in 50 years. People are going to be reading Harper Lee in this country as long as they draw oxygen."
Ms. Murphy said that when "Mockingbird" first appeared, Harper Lee's hometown paper made note of it. But it was another six months before Newsweek did the first big story on her after the book had become hugely popular. Other publications sought her out when the film version was released in 1962, with a screenplay by the young Horton Foote.
"She was delighted by the film," said Ms. Murphy. "By then the civil rights movement was in full bloom, and she was being asked to discuss some of the most divisive racial issues of the day."
One of those press conferences was witnessed by a reporter from Rogue magazine, then a counterpart to Playboy and Esquire, and described in a March 1963 story:
Q: When you wrote the book, did you hold yourself back?
A: Well, sir, in the book I tried to give a sense of proportion to life in the South, that there isn't a lynching before every breakfast. I think that Southerners react with the same kind of horror as other people do about the injustice in their land. In Mississippi, people were so revolted by what happened, they were so stunned, I don't think it will happen again.
Q: I'd like to know if your book is an indictment against a group in society.
A: The book is not an indictment so much as a plea for something, a reminder to people at home.
It turned out to be a reminder to the whole nation, and its central messages must hold as true today as ever. Otherwise, "Mockingbird" wouldn't continue to be one of the most-read American novels of all time.
"All these years later, it's never been out of print," Ms. Murphy said.
"That's an astonishing phenomenon for a book that people expected might sell 4,000 copies."
Sally Kalson can be reached at skalson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1610.
Saturday, July 03, 2010
Where ‘nice’ Obama has got us
Why would Ahmadinejad take him seriously when even Karzai flips him the finger?
by Mark Steyn on Thursday, July 1, 2010 8:00am
http://www2.macleans.ca/
ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images
In 1939, Capt. Peter Sanders, serving with the Tochi scouts on the Afghan-Indian border, was blown up by a Waziri booby trap and lost his right arm. Shortly afterwards, he accepted an invitation to lunch from the tribesman who’d planted the bomb. Awfully decent of the chap, and not a bad spread, all things considered.
Not everyone cares for the old stiff upper lip: “I spit on your British phlegm!” as the Khazi of Kalabar remarked in what remains the seminal work on Afghanistan, Carry on up the Khyber. But imperialism requires a certain dotty élan. Without it, it’s no fun. You’re just a guy holed up in a Third World dump occasionally venturing out in the full RoboCop to pretend to implement some half-assed multilateral “nation-building” strategy that NATO defence ministers all agreed to at some black-tie banquet in Brussels and then promptly forgot about. Instead of the Tochi scouts—Pathan irregulars commanded by British officers—we now have Afghan units “trained,” or at any rate funded, by Western governments. A headline in the Washington Post captures the general malaise: “Afghan forces’ apathy starts to wear on U.S. platoon in Kandahar.” On a recent patrol through the city, 1st Lieut. James Rathmann stopped at a police checkpoint and found them all asleep in a nearby field.
It’s not just the natives who are dozing. In London recently, Robert Gates, the U.S. defence secretary, complained that the allies’ promised 450 “trainers” for the expanded Afghan National Army had failed to materialize. These are not combat roles, so in theory even the less gung-ho NATO members should have no objection. Supposedly, 46 nations are contributing to the allied effort in Afghanistan, so that would work out at 10 “trainers” per country. Yet even that modest commitment is too much. So the Afghan army will fill up with time-servers and Taliban sympathizers.
Colonial administration was always a cynic’s field. In Lisbon last week, I was admiring the beauty of the jacarandas when David Pryce-Jones, the scholar and novelist, reminded me of the words of Lord Lloyd, British high commissioner in Egypt in the twenties: “The jacarandas are in bloom,” he observed. “We shall soon be sending for the gunboats.” When the weather heats up, so do the natives. In Lloyd’s day, we were cynical about the locals. Now we’re starry-eyed about the locals—marvellous chaps, few more trainers and they’ll do splendidly—while they’re utterly cynical about us. Hamid Karzai has just fired his two most pro-American cabinet ministers and is making more and more pro-Taliban noises. This is a man who for the last nine years has been kept alive only by U.S. military protection. A throne in Kabul may not be much, but, such as it is, he owes it entirely to his patrons in Washington. Why would Putin, Ahmadinejad or the ChiComs take Barack Obama seriously when even a footling client such as Hamid Karzai can flip him the finger?
“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse,” said Osama bin Laden many years ago, “by nature they will like the strong horse.” The world does not see President Obama as the strong horse. He has announced that U.S. troop withdrawals will begin in 12 months’ time. Karzai takes him at his word, and is obliged to prepare for a post-American order in Afghanistan, which means reaching his accommodations with those who’ll still be around when the Yanks are over over there. The new government in London takes him at his word, too. Liam Fox, the defence secretary, wants as rapid a British pullout as possible. When Obama announced an Afghan “surge” dependent on such elements as mythical NATO trainers and then added that, however it went, U.S. forces would begin checking out in July 2011, he in effect ruled out the possibility of victory. Over 1,000 American troops have died in Afghanistan, 300 British soldiers, 148 Canadians. What will our soldiers be dying for in the sunset of the West’s Afghan expedition? What is Obama’s characteristically postmodern “surge” intended to achieve? More Afghan police sleeping in fields? Greater opportunities for women? Take Your Child Bride to Work Day in Kandahar? British troops, said Liam Fox, are not in Afghanistan “for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country.” And, even if they were, in certain provinces “education policy” seems to be returning to something all but indistinguishable from Mullah Omar’s days. The New York Post carried a picture of women registering to vote in Herat, all in identical top-to-toe bright blue burkas, just as they would have looked on Sept. 10, 2001.
Osama bin Laden’s strong horse/weak horse shtick is a matter of perception as much as anything else. On Sept. 12, 2001, the United States of America had just as many cruise missiles and aircraft carriers as it had 48 hours earlier. The only difference is that the world understood that, for once, America was prepared to use them. That’s why Moscow acceded to Washington’s “request” to use its old bases in Central Asia for northern access to Afghanistan. That’s why General Musharraf took seriously the Bush administration’s “shockingly barefaced” threat to bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” if it didn’t get everything it wanted out of Islamabad. By contrast, a couple of days before, Mullah Omar and the Taliban appear to have agreed to let their al-Qaeda tenants strike America with nary a thought for the consequences to their own country.
Let’s suppose that the evacuation of the twin towers had not been quite as efficient and that the death toll was way up over 10,000. Let’s also suppose that Flight 93 had not been stymied by the vagaries of scheduling and the bravery of its passengers and had succeeded in hitting the White House and decapitating the regime. America was the most powerful nation on the planet, yet Mullah Omar evidently was unperturbed by the possibility of total, devastating retaliation against his toxic backwater.
The toppling of the Taliban was an operation conducted with extraordinary improvised ingenuity and a very light U.S. footprint. Special forces on horseback rode with the Northern Alliance and used GPS to call in air strikes: they’ll be teaching it in staff colleges for decades to come. But then the Taliban scuttled out of town, and a daring victory settled into a thankless semi-colonial policing operation, and then corroded further under the pressure of the usual transnational poseurs. After 2003, Afghanistan became the good war, the one everyone claimed to have supported all along, if mostly retrospectively and for the purposes of justifying their “principled moral opposition” to Bush’s illegal adventuring against Saddam. Afghanistan was everything Iraq wasn’t: UN-approved, NATO-backed, EU-compliant. It’d be tough for even the easiest nickel ’n’ dime military incursion to survive that big an overdose of multilateral hogwash, and the Afghan campaign didn’t. Instead of being an operation to kill one of the planet’s most concentrated populations of jihadist terrorists, it decayed into half-hearted nation-building in which a handful of real allies took the casualties while the rest showed up for the group photo. The 2004 NATO summit was hailed as a landmark success after the alliance’s 26 members agreed to put up an extra 600 troops and three helicopters for Afghanistan. That averages out at 23.08 troops per country, plus almost a ninth of a helicopter apiece. As it transpired, the three Black Hawks all came from one country—Turkey—and within a year they’d all gone back. Those 600 troops and three helicopters made no practical difference, but the effort expended on that transnational fig leaf certainly contributed to America’s disastrous reframing of its interests in Afghanistan.
And so here we are, nine years, billions of dollars and many dead soldiers later, watching the guy we’ve propped up with Western blood and treasure make peace overtures to the Taliban’s most virulently anti-American and pro-al-Qaeda faction in hopes of bringing them back within the government. Being perceived as the weak horse is contagious: today, were Washington to call Moscow for use of those Central Asian bases, Putin would tell Obama to get lost, and then make sneering jokes about it afterwards. Were Washington to call Islamabad as it did on Sept. 12, the Pakistanis would thank them politely and say they’d think it over and get back in 30 days. The leaders of Turkey and Brazil, two supposed American allies assiduously courted and flattered by Obama this past year, flew in to high-five Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The new President wished to reposition his nation by forswearing American power: he thought that made him the nice horse; everyone else looked on it as a self-gelding operation—or, as last week’s U.S. News & World Report headlined it, “World sees Obama as incompetent and amateur.”
If the Taliban return to even partial power in Afghanistan, the unctuous State Department spokesmen will make the best of it. But the symbolism will be profound, and devastating in what it says about American will.
by Mark Steyn on Thursday, July 1, 2010 8:00am
http://www2.macleans.ca/
ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images
In 1939, Capt. Peter Sanders, serving with the Tochi scouts on the Afghan-Indian border, was blown up by a Waziri booby trap and lost his right arm. Shortly afterwards, he accepted an invitation to lunch from the tribesman who’d planted the bomb. Awfully decent of the chap, and not a bad spread, all things considered.
Not everyone cares for the old stiff upper lip: “I spit on your British phlegm!” as the Khazi of Kalabar remarked in what remains the seminal work on Afghanistan, Carry on up the Khyber. But imperialism requires a certain dotty élan. Without it, it’s no fun. You’re just a guy holed up in a Third World dump occasionally venturing out in the full RoboCop to pretend to implement some half-assed multilateral “nation-building” strategy that NATO defence ministers all agreed to at some black-tie banquet in Brussels and then promptly forgot about. Instead of the Tochi scouts—Pathan irregulars commanded by British officers—we now have Afghan units “trained,” or at any rate funded, by Western governments. A headline in the Washington Post captures the general malaise: “Afghan forces’ apathy starts to wear on U.S. platoon in Kandahar.” On a recent patrol through the city, 1st Lieut. James Rathmann stopped at a police checkpoint and found them all asleep in a nearby field.
It’s not just the natives who are dozing. In London recently, Robert Gates, the U.S. defence secretary, complained that the allies’ promised 450 “trainers” for the expanded Afghan National Army had failed to materialize. These are not combat roles, so in theory even the less gung-ho NATO members should have no objection. Supposedly, 46 nations are contributing to the allied effort in Afghanistan, so that would work out at 10 “trainers” per country. Yet even that modest commitment is too much. So the Afghan army will fill up with time-servers and Taliban sympathizers.
Colonial administration was always a cynic’s field. In Lisbon last week, I was admiring the beauty of the jacarandas when David Pryce-Jones, the scholar and novelist, reminded me of the words of Lord Lloyd, British high commissioner in Egypt in the twenties: “The jacarandas are in bloom,” he observed. “We shall soon be sending for the gunboats.” When the weather heats up, so do the natives. In Lloyd’s day, we were cynical about the locals. Now we’re starry-eyed about the locals—marvellous chaps, few more trainers and they’ll do splendidly—while they’re utterly cynical about us. Hamid Karzai has just fired his two most pro-American cabinet ministers and is making more and more pro-Taliban noises. This is a man who for the last nine years has been kept alive only by U.S. military protection. A throne in Kabul may not be much, but, such as it is, he owes it entirely to his patrons in Washington. Why would Putin, Ahmadinejad or the ChiComs take Barack Obama seriously when even a footling client such as Hamid Karzai can flip him the finger?
“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse,” said Osama bin Laden many years ago, “by nature they will like the strong horse.” The world does not see President Obama as the strong horse. He has announced that U.S. troop withdrawals will begin in 12 months’ time. Karzai takes him at his word, and is obliged to prepare for a post-American order in Afghanistan, which means reaching his accommodations with those who’ll still be around when the Yanks are over over there. The new government in London takes him at his word, too. Liam Fox, the defence secretary, wants as rapid a British pullout as possible. When Obama announced an Afghan “surge” dependent on such elements as mythical NATO trainers and then added that, however it went, U.S. forces would begin checking out in July 2011, he in effect ruled out the possibility of victory. Over 1,000 American troops have died in Afghanistan, 300 British soldiers, 148 Canadians. What will our soldiers be dying for in the sunset of the West’s Afghan expedition? What is Obama’s characteristically postmodern “surge” intended to achieve? More Afghan police sleeping in fields? Greater opportunities for women? Take Your Child Bride to Work Day in Kandahar? British troops, said Liam Fox, are not in Afghanistan “for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country.” And, even if they were, in certain provinces “education policy” seems to be returning to something all but indistinguishable from Mullah Omar’s days. The New York Post carried a picture of women registering to vote in Herat, all in identical top-to-toe bright blue burkas, just as they would have looked on Sept. 10, 2001.
Osama bin Laden’s strong horse/weak horse shtick is a matter of perception as much as anything else. On Sept. 12, 2001, the United States of America had just as many cruise missiles and aircraft carriers as it had 48 hours earlier. The only difference is that the world understood that, for once, America was prepared to use them. That’s why Moscow acceded to Washington’s “request” to use its old bases in Central Asia for northern access to Afghanistan. That’s why General Musharraf took seriously the Bush administration’s “shockingly barefaced” threat to bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” if it didn’t get everything it wanted out of Islamabad. By contrast, a couple of days before, Mullah Omar and the Taliban appear to have agreed to let their al-Qaeda tenants strike America with nary a thought for the consequences to their own country.
Let’s suppose that the evacuation of the twin towers had not been quite as efficient and that the death toll was way up over 10,000. Let’s also suppose that Flight 93 had not been stymied by the vagaries of scheduling and the bravery of its passengers and had succeeded in hitting the White House and decapitating the regime. America was the most powerful nation on the planet, yet Mullah Omar evidently was unperturbed by the possibility of total, devastating retaliation against his toxic backwater.
The toppling of the Taliban was an operation conducted with extraordinary improvised ingenuity and a very light U.S. footprint. Special forces on horseback rode with the Northern Alliance and used GPS to call in air strikes: they’ll be teaching it in staff colleges for decades to come. But then the Taliban scuttled out of town, and a daring victory settled into a thankless semi-colonial policing operation, and then corroded further under the pressure of the usual transnational poseurs. After 2003, Afghanistan became the good war, the one everyone claimed to have supported all along, if mostly retrospectively and for the purposes of justifying their “principled moral opposition” to Bush’s illegal adventuring against Saddam. Afghanistan was everything Iraq wasn’t: UN-approved, NATO-backed, EU-compliant. It’d be tough for even the easiest nickel ’n’ dime military incursion to survive that big an overdose of multilateral hogwash, and the Afghan campaign didn’t. Instead of being an operation to kill one of the planet’s most concentrated populations of jihadist terrorists, it decayed into half-hearted nation-building in which a handful of real allies took the casualties while the rest showed up for the group photo. The 2004 NATO summit was hailed as a landmark success after the alliance’s 26 members agreed to put up an extra 600 troops and three helicopters for Afghanistan. That averages out at 23.08 troops per country, plus almost a ninth of a helicopter apiece. As it transpired, the three Black Hawks all came from one country—Turkey—and within a year they’d all gone back. Those 600 troops and three helicopters made no practical difference, but the effort expended on that transnational fig leaf certainly contributed to America’s disastrous reframing of its interests in Afghanistan.
And so here we are, nine years, billions of dollars and many dead soldiers later, watching the guy we’ve propped up with Western blood and treasure make peace overtures to the Taliban’s most virulently anti-American and pro-al-Qaeda faction in hopes of bringing them back within the government. Being perceived as the weak horse is contagious: today, were Washington to call Moscow for use of those Central Asian bases, Putin would tell Obama to get lost, and then make sneering jokes about it afterwards. Were Washington to call Islamabad as it did on Sept. 12, the Pakistanis would thank them politely and say they’d think it over and get back in 30 days. The leaders of Turkey and Brazil, two supposed American allies assiduously courted and flattered by Obama this past year, flew in to high-five Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The new President wished to reposition his nation by forswearing American power: he thought that made him the nice horse; everyone else looked on it as a self-gelding operation—or, as last week’s U.S. News & World Report headlined it, “World sees Obama as incompetent and amateur.”
If the Taliban return to even partial power in Afghanistan, the unctuous State Department spokesmen will make the best of it. But the symbolism will be profound, and devastating in what it says about American will.
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