Washington is reeling from the latest WikiLeaks document dump. The foreign-policy wonks insist that there are few, if any, major surprises. “Much of what we’ve seen thus far,” opined Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, “confirms more than it informs.” And what these documents confirm is that President Obama’s foreign policy is a mess.
Even if you’re supportive of Obama’s foreign-policy efforts, the WikiLeaks dump is a bigger deal than the know-it-alls are suggesting. It’s one thing to believe something as a generality; it’s another to dispel plausible deniability for all concerned.
Everyone may know that the Saudis are worried about the Iranian bomb. But knowing that isn’t quite the same as learning that the Saudi monarchy has implored the U.S. to attack Iran and “cut off the head of the snake,” in the words of a Saudi envoy. Egypt and other Arab states have called the Iranian program an “existential threat” and have begged the U.S. to use military force to stop it. (Of course, if the U.S. did take out the program, these same regimes, not to mention countless domestic critics of Israel, would insist that the U.S. was doing the bidding of the Israel lobby.)
Around the globe, diplomats, dignitaries, and potentates feel betrayed and exposed. Certainly, the news that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ordered American diplomats at the United Nations to spy on other delegations will make lunchtime at the Turtle Bay commissary a bit awkward.
Politically, the one advantage for the White House is the sheer volume of the leaks. If these stories came out one by one, there’d be room for them to flare up as full-fledged controversies, but with a quarter of a million documents, each story robs oxygen from the next.
Still, the (relative) lack of surprises is hardly an exoneration for anybody — not for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has declared himself an enemy of the United States, nor for the Obama administration, which seems utterly lost about how to deal with him.
The administration’s formal response to the revelations was to have State Department attorney Harold Koh pen a tersely worded cease-and-desist letter to Assange, asking him to pretty please stop publishing thousands of state secrets. When lawyers run your foreign policy, this is what passes for a blistering counterattack.
Indeed, with the important and complicated exception of Afghanistan, such high-minded legalism is par for the course.
Ever since his bizarre campaign stop in Berlin and his primary debate promise to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “without preconditions,” Obama has consistently stressed his preference for soft diplomacy and gauzy platitudes about international cooperation. For instance, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany proved, according to then-candidate Obama, that “there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one” — an incomprehensible claim that would earn an F from any high-school history teacher.
Since then, on issue after issue, Obama’s rhetorical globaloney has met the grinder. Perversely, his best moment was when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and felt compelled to explain why he didn’t deserve it — yet — and give a legitimately stirring defense of military action.
It is certainly true that Obama inherited many of his foreign-policy challenges. Iran was pursuing nukes back when he was in the Illinois state Senate, and North Korea has been crazy since before he was born. But Obama insisted that his would be the better way. Engagement, dialogue, and Kumbaya would all win the day.
And yet they keep losing. A month after his inauguration, the North Koreans tested a ballistic missile. Since then, they’ve revealed yet another nuclear program and attacked South Korea just weeks after Obama’s embarrassing failure to win a trade deal from Seoul during an official visit. Meanwhile, according to WikiLeaks and other sources, the North Koreans have been selling ballistic missiles to the Iranians.
And what are Obama’s global priorities? The START treaty, Israeli settlements, and climate change.
The irony is that Assange represents a purer form of Obama’s own idealism. According to Assange’s dangerous utopianism, in governance purity must determine means, not just ends. He is convinced that he has revealed the hypocrisy and corruption of U.S. foreign policy, when in reality all he has revealed is that pursuing foreign-policy ideals is messier and more complicated in a world where bad people pursue bad ends. We can hope that Obama has been learning that lesson. Assange, meanwhile, is simply blind to it.
FAIL TO forcefully confront a thug and you generally guarantee that his thuggish behavior will continue. That’s true of schoolyard bullies and urban criminals; it’s no less true of rogue states run by barbaric gangsters. Yet when it comes to the pathological regime in North Korea, the conventional wisdom throws up its hands and laments that there are no good options for confronting Kim Jong-il over his aggressive provocations.
North Korea’s attack on a South Korean island last week — a 50-minute barrage that left four people dead and reduced dozens of homes to smoking ruins — was an act of war. It marked the first direct artillery attack on South Korean territory since the 1953 armistice that halted the Korean War. And what price has Pyongyang paid for its lethal assault? So far, none.
The shelling of Yeonpyeong Island was only the latest outrage for which North Korea has gone unpunished. A few days earlier there’d been the revelation of its new, state-of-the-art uranium enrichment plant. Stanford University nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker returned from the North to report that the “astonishingly modern’’ facility contains as many as 2,000 centrifuges capable of being “readily converted to produce highly enriched uranium bomb fuel.’’ And it was just eight months ago that a North Korean torpedo sank the Cheonan, a gunboat patrolling South Korean waters. The attack came without warning, and killed 46 South Korean sailors.
Yet for none of these crimes and provocations has there been any meaningful reprisal — just as there was none last year when North Korea illegally detonated a nuclear weapon and launched ballistic missiles in violation of a UN Security Council ban.
Yes, the United States last week dispatched an aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington, to take part in naval exercises with South Korean forces in the Yellow Sea. And yes, South Korea’s president fired his defense minister and warned of “enormous retaliation’’ to ensure that North Korea “cannot make provocations again.’’ But whatever resolve those actions conveyed was promptly undercut by US Ambassador Stephen Bosworth, the Obama administration’s special envoy on North Korea, who told reporters in Beijing that US and Chinese authorities agreed “on the subject of how . . . to bring about a resumption of the Six-Party process.’’
That, however, is exactly what Kim Jong-il wants: a return to a diplomatic dog-and-pony show that confers prestige on his regime, yet never actually derails Pyongyang’s nuclear procurement and proliferation.
Isn’t talking about talks — and feckless talks, at that — an impotent way to respond to such a deliberate and deadly aggression? Well, yes, say the foreign-policy “realists,’’ but what else can be done? “Ultimately, you have to talk with them,’’ a specialist at the Carnegie Endowment told The New York Times. “You have to bargain, because if you don’t, this is what they do. They make things worse. They create a crisis.’’
Happily, there are signs that the Obama administration is beginning to have second thoughts about the wisdom of engagement. It has resisted China’s call for “emergency’’ talks with North Korea, on the grounds that reopening negotiations would amount to a reward for bad behavior.
Giving the diplomatic cold shoulder to Kim Jong-il’s regime is an important step in the right direction. But there is much more that the president can do.
He can require financial institutions worldwide doing business with the United States to freeze any North Korean assets. He can order the Navy to interdict all North Korean vessels in international waters, vigorously enforcing Security Council resolutions that authorize the North’s shipping to be searched for illicit weapons. He can step up support for North Korean defectors and activists working to put pressure on the regime. He can send stealth fighters to fly over Pyongyang — a reminder to Kim Jong-il, as John Noonan suggests in the Weekly Standard, “that we have the means to bypass his massive military infrastructure.’’
Above all, he can tell the inconvenient truth: The thugs who rule North Korea commit atrocities with impunity because the civilized world has been unwilling to confront them. It is time for that unwillingness to end, and for America and its allies to seek regime change in Pyongyang.
Guess who said the following: “It is incredible that a system of taxation which permits a man with an income of $1,000,000 a year to pay not one cent to his Government should remain unaltered.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt? Ted Kennedy? Nancy Pelosi?
Not even close. It was Andrew Mellon, secretary of the Treasury under conservative Republican president Calvin Coolidge.
What was Mellon’s point? That high tax rates do not necessarily result in high tax revenues to the government. “It is time to face the facts,” he said. Merely having high tax rates on large incomes will not bring in more tax revenues to the Treasury, because of “the flight of capital away from taxable investments.”
This was all said in 1924, in Mellon’s book, Taxation: The People’s Business. Yet here we are, more than 80 years later, still not facing those facts.
It is not just a question of what Andrew Mellon said. It is a question of hard facts, easily checked in official documents available to all — and ignored all these years.
Internal Revenue Service data show that there were 206 people who reported annual incomes of one million dollars or more in 1916. But, as the tax rate on high incomes skyrocketed under the Woodrow Wilson administration, that number plummeted to just 21 people reporting a million dollars a year in income five years later.
What happened to all those millionaires? Did they flee the country? Were they stricken with fatal diseases? Did they meet with foul play?
Not to worry. Right after Congress enacted the cuts in tax rates that Mellon had been urging, there were suddenly 207 people reporting taxable incomes of a million dollars or more in 1925. As Casey Stengel used to say, “You could look it up.” It is on page 21 of an Internal Revenue publication titled “Statistics of Income from Returns of Net Income for 1925.”
Where had all the income of those millionaires been hiding? In tax-exempt securities like state and local bonds, among other places. Mellon had urged Congress to end tax exemptions for such securities, even before he got them to cut tax rates. But he succeeded only with the latter, and only after a political struggle with those who made the same kinds of arguments that are still being made today by those who cry out against “tax cuts for the rich.”
Still, one out of two is not bad, when it comes to getting Congress to do something that makes sense economically, rather than something that looks good politically.
The government, which collected less than $50 million in taxes on capital gains in 1924, suddenly collected well over $100 million in capital gains taxes in 1925. At lower tax rates, it no longer made sense to keep so much invested in tax-exempt securities, when more money could be made by investing in the economy.
As for “the rich” — who really were rich in those days, when $100,000 was worth more than a million dollars is worth today — those in the highest income brackets paid 30 percent of all taxes in 1920 and 65 percent of all taxes by 1929, after “tax cuts for the rich.”
How can that be? Because high tax rates on paper — which many people avoid — often do not bring in as much tax revenue as lower tax rates, which more people actually pay, because it is safe to come out of tax shelters and earn higher rates of taxable income.
The investors do this because it makes them better off, on net balance, even after they pay more money in taxes on incomes that have gone up. More important, the economy benefits when there is more investment in things that create more jobs and greater output.
None of this was unique to the 1920s. The same scenario played out again in later years, during the Kennedy, Reagan, and Bush 43 administrations.
But economic success is not the same as political success. As former House majority leader Dick Armey put it, “Demagoguery beats data.”
As long as the voters keep buying the “tax cuts for the rich” demagoguery, politicians will keep selling it. And it will keep selling as long as it goes unanswered. The question is whether today’s Republicans understand that as well as Andrew Mellon did back in the 1920s.
By Stephen Hazan Arnoff Published November 22, 2010 from the December 03, 2010 issue of The Jewish Daily Forward. http://www.forward.com/
Bob Dylan in America By Sean Wilentz Doubleday, 400 pages, $28.95
Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968–2010 By Greil Marcus PublicAffairs, 512 Pages, $29.95
Choose almost any critical approach — biographical, political, religious, literary, musical, philosophical or historical — and chances are it already has been used to try to explain Bob Dylan and his work. Hundreds of books, thousands of articles and an ever-expanding universe of listservs, websites, magazines, academic courses and conferences sing Dylan’s loyal chorus of commentary. A few months away from turning 70 (May 2011), and primed to enter his sixth decade on the public stage, Dylan continues to wave his baton in every direction, urging the chorus onward — even though we know he’s not much for choruses.
Consider Dylan’s activity in the months of September and October alone: The fall leg of his Never Ending Tour crisscrossed North America again. No major artist of his standing plays as much. Columbia Records rereleased his first eight albums, as well as “The Witmark Demos: 1962–1964,” the ninth installment of his officially sanctioned outtakes, live performances and oddities, in “The Bootleg Series.” An exhibition of Dylan’s original paintings, titled “The Brazil Series,” opened in Denmark’s largest art museum.
New contributions by two writers in the first row of the Dylan chorus of commentary have arrived this fall, as well: “Bob Dylan in America” by Sean Wilentz, and “Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968–2010.” The almost simultaneous release of works by Wilentz, an esteemed Princeton University scholar of American history and “historian-in-residence” at www.bobdylan.com, and Marcus, the most creative and lucid of all thinkers about Dylan, provides an opportunity to take stock again of the question people have been asking about Dylan since he arrived in New York City in 1961 “already a legend,” in the words of former partner Joan Baez. So, what is the best way to understand him?
Because Dylan has been one of the most influential artists of the past century, refining the critical approach to his work has repercussions not only for those of us still fascinated by his continuing contribution to popular culture, but also for anyone who cares about how popular culture is seized by the world.
In “Odysseus’ Scar,” the first chapter of his study “Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature” (1953), Erich Auerbach presents the history of Western literature as a choice between two creative paths. “It would be difficult” he writes, “to imagine styles more contrasted than those of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts.” The first epic mode is that of Homer, a realm where the narrator shines an overwhelmingly bright light on the characters and situations of his story. There are no gaps in the Homeric narrative. No details of circumstance or motivations of characters are left unexplained.
The second mode is biblical. Here, Auerbach finds a storytelling tradition dependent on gaps and fragments “fraught with background.” For biblical literature and its narrative descendants, motivation and detail are purposely obscured so that a life of interpretation and commentary thrives continually. While biblical scribes and their rabbinic heirs cluster around laconic narratives that leave the burden of imagination to interpreters, the Homeric mode prefers richly detailed depictions of reality in which the responsibility for imagination lies primarily with the storyteller.
In context of Auerbach’s grand theory, it is useful to think of Wilentz, a historian, as a Homeric Dylan commentator, while Marcus, a cultural critic, takes the midrashic role. Both authors mine the gaps of Dylan’s world, shedding light on his work to understand where this material comes from, how it works and what it means. Yet for the most part, the light each writer shines reveals different things. Wilentz uses history to smooth and explain the invitingly deep contours of Dylan’s work. Marcus seeks out those places where Dylan’s work demands commentary, weaving imaginative, unexpected interpretations. He often widens those gaps further, allowing the echoes within them to resonate in new ways.
Wilentz describes in the book’s introduction his motivation for writing “Bob Dylan in America”:
I have been curious about when, how, and why Dylan picked up on certain forerunners, as well as certain of his own contemporaries; about the milieu in which those influences lived and labored and how they evolved; and about how Dylan, ever evolving himself, finally combined and transformed their work. What do those tangled influences tell us about America? What do they tell us about Bob Dylan? What does America tell us about Bob Dylan and what does Dylan’s work tell us about America?
Beginning with the Popular Front social movement of the 1930s and ’40s — well-traveled ground for thinking about Dylan’s roots, but distinctive in proposing Aaron Copland as a key figure — Wilentz traces Dylan’s antecedents and mentors through the Beats, particularly Allen Ginsberg. The book continues somewhat haphazardly, landing in “selected and arbitrary but far from random moments.” From chapters on concerts at the New York Philharmonic in 1964 and in New Haven, Conn., in 1975 (apparently, an important criterion for Wilentz’s choices of historical focus are events he attended), to a stellar chapter on the making of 1965’s “Blonde on Blonde,” through the foggy folk narratives of Dylan’s turnaround albums in the 1990s, up to his most recent work, Wilentz assembles a tableau of facts and influences upon which Dylan’s story and oeuvre fit neatly. Yet, providing copious detail of Dylan’s life and times forces into the background many of the powerful shadows of allusion, unpredictability and ambivalence that give power to Dylan’s work.
Though Marcus has earned a place as one of America’s most prominent cultural critics by extending his rock interests into literature, politics, history, religion and art, “Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968–2010” traces the path of his career through perhaps his favorite topic — Bob Dylan. Particularly in the sections “New Land Sighted, 1993–1997” and “New Land Found, 1997–1999,” Marcus grounds Dylan in an understanding of American myth out of which all else, including American history itself, is a result. These sections represent the period during which Marcus wrote “Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes” (now titled “The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes”), mining the relationship between Dylan’s musical mythology of America and the mystic amalgam of traditional folk, blues and country from the first half of the 20th century, represented by the recordings on Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music.” In his 1998 review of “Invisible Republic” in the magazine Dissent, Wilentz wrote that “the critic and the artist have locked into some strange, empathetic communication. Either Marcus has been reading Dylan’s mind or Dylan has read Marcus’s book — or, maybe, both things have happened. Whatever the case, ‘Invisible Republic’ ranks as the most brilliant study of Dylan’s work to date….”
Christopher Ricks’s “Dylan’s Visions of Sin” (Ecco, 2004) and Dylan’s own memoirs, “Chronicles: Volume One” (Simon & Schuster, 2004), now share the title of “Brilliant Studies of Dylan’s Work” because they model how Dylan — a combination of market-savvy rocker, Homeric bard and biblical seer — has carved out a place in popular culture for art “fraught with background.” As captured in a rich anthology ranging from reflections of a few lines to full essays, Marcus’s journey with Dylan has shown how music and myth live in the vision of an artist whose traditional, even ancient approach to art merges best with a midrashic rather than a historical critique.
So how best to understand Bob Dylan? Miles Davis, another modern master of American music, once said, “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.” Playing what’s there and what’s not there as a critic — a mode familiar to Dylan playing out his influences as an artist, as well — Marcus allows Dylan’s work to be heard thicker, stranger, more boldly and with more imagination than we could hear it on our own.
Stephen Hazan Arnoff is the executive director of Manhattan’s 14th Street Y, which December 5 hosts “Bob Dylan and the Band: What Kind of Love Is This?” a symposium, gallery exhibition and all-star concert celebrating the music of Bob Dylan and the Band.
A couple of weeks ago, on the occasion of the annual hajj, in which 2.5 million Muslim pilgrims fulfill their obligations to travel to Mecca, prominent Muslim clerics from Asia, Africa, and Europe, along with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq, denounced violence in the name of Islam and issued a manifesto, signed by all, declaring that “murder of innocents is never justified and violates the teachings of Islam.”
If you haven’t heard about this, it’s because it never happened. I conjured it to clarify the nature of the problem. Well-intentioned non-Muslims never tire of asserting that Islam is a religion of peace. Muslims themselves are a lot less forthright. (The Council on American-Islamic Relations has issued formal denunciations of terrorism, but coming from an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror-financing case, such pious declarations are worthless.)
Still, before considering the response to the latest outrage, perpetrated by a jihadi convinced that mass murdering Americans gathered to light the Portland Christmas tree would land him in Paradise, it’s important to pause and notice that while Muslim leaders leave a lot to be desired, average Muslims are heroes in this story.
Photo of Mohamed Osman Mohamud released Nov. 27, 2010 by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office. (AP Photo/Multnomah County Sheriff's Office)
The L.A. Times reports that the FBI was alerted to 19-year-old, Somali-born Mohamed Osman Mohamud’s increasing radicalization by someone who knew him well. Other sources suggest that Mohamud had quarreled with his family and felt “betrayed” that they did not support his violent ambitions. Reading between the lines, it seems likely that one or both parents (both of whom, by the way, are described as loving America) alerted the FBI.
Further, the elaborate sting orchestrated by the FBI had to involve agents posing as Islamic radicals. I’m guessing here, but it seems unlikely that the agents were non-Muslims. There are probably too many subtle things a non-Muslim would get wrong. So kudos to whoever tipped the FBI to the danger, and to the (presumably) Muslim agents who saw the thing to fruition and arrest.
On the other hand, those Americans who think that respecting the majority of non-violent Muslims requires a mealy-mouthed denial of reality are doing no one any favors.
Some criminal lit a fire at a Corvallis mosque a day or so after Mohamud’s arrest. This elicited a scolding declaration from U.S. Attorney Dwight Holton. Did he denounce the resort to violence by anyone? No. He intoned, “The fact is that violent extremists come from all religions and no religion at all. For one person to blame a group, if that’s what happened here, is uniquely anti-American and will be pursued with the full force of the Justice Department.” Of course whole groups should not be blamed for the actions of individuals. Yes, the Justice Department should pursue the arsonist. And, yes, violent extremists can be motivated by all sorts of things. But it is fatuous to pretend that Islam is no more likely than Buddhism or Christianity or Judaism to produce mass killers. When a Christian says “Praise God,” people nod politely or in agreement. When a Muslim shouts “Allahu Akbar,” everybody ducks.
If a Christian or a Jew suddenly becomes more devout, there is very little chance that he or she will become violent. Quite the contrary. But religious zeal among Muslims is often expressed with bombs and the blood of innocents. Thousands of imams worldwide preach violent jihad, Islamic schools instill contempt for other faiths, and terrorists actively recruit killers willing to commit massacres for Allah.
Yet Attorney General Eric Holder could not bring himself to say, under questioning before Congress, that terrorists might be motivated by “radical Islam.” The State Department and the Department of Homeland Security banned the words “jihad” and “mujahideen” from official statements about terrorism. And the president removed the term “Islamic extremism” from the National Security Strategy.
Why is it so hard to tell the truth? The truth is that while the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful and law-abiding, there is a powerful strain within the religion that encourages murder and mayhem. Muslims, sooner or later, must deal with this, along with the rest of the world. But to suggest that acknowledging Muslim extremism amounts to bigotry, as this administration seems to, is both dishonest and cowardly.
In 1955, when "The Night of the Hunter" opened to mixed reviews and poor box office, the film was already a throwback: steeped in the luxuriant gloom of German Expressionism and the heightened poetics of D.W. Griffith (and set to boot in rural Depression-era America). But in reaching back to the primordial enchantment and promise of silent-era cinema, director Charles Laughton created something timeless — "a nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale," as he put it, but also an American Gothic variation on an Old Testament parable.
Released this week in a two-disc DVD edition from the Criterion Collection (in both standard-definition and high-definition Blu-ray formats), "The Night of the Hunter" was famously the only film Laughton directed. He was in his mid-50s at the time, a British stage star who became a flamboyant character actor in Hollywood. He won an Academy Award for "The Private Life of Henry VIII" (1933), played his share of memorable monsters (Quasimodo, Dr. Moreau) and, before making his film directing debut, had earned acclaim as a theater director.
Laughton's manager acquired the rights to "The Night of the Hunter," a novel by first-time author Davis Grubb, mere months before it became a bestseller in 1954. One of Laughton's first moves was to approach Robert Mitchum, among film noir's most iconic tough guys, to play the embodiment of charismatic evil at the dark heart of the story. Mitchum's Harry Powell has since become one of film history's most indelible villains: a psychotic preacher, packing a switchblade and spewing fire and brimstone, seducing and terrorizing a young widow ( Shelley Winters) and her two children, in possession of their dead father's stolen loot.
The screenplay was assigned to James Agee, the journalist who, with photographer Walker Evans, had produced a vivid paean to Depression-era tenant farmers in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." Agee had also been a film critic in the '40s, and he co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for John Huston's "The African Queen."
The standard line on Agee's participation in "The Night of the Hunter" is that the writer, struggling with alcoholism, turned in an unfilmable doorstop of a screenplay. But Michael Sragow, editor of the Library of America's Agee anthologies, writing in the Criterion booklet, makes a persuasive case for Agee's contributions, citing the film's poetic intensity and psychological complexity. (Jeffrey Couchman, author of the 2009 book "'The Night of the Hunter': A Biography of a Film," draws similar conclusions.) Laughton, who cut Agee's overambitious script to a manageable scale, also worked closely with Grubb, who provided sketches of several scenes in his novel.
The cinematography, at once sensuous and austere, is by Stanley Cortez, who also worked with Orson Welles and Samuel Fuller. (The Criterion supplements include an archival interview with Cortez, new interviews with scholars and authors, as well as a 21/2-hour making-of, pieced together from outtakes and rushes.) To watch "The Night of the Hunter" is to have some of its images forever imprinted on one's mind: Winters' character dead at the bottom of the river, her hair rippling in the current like seaweed; Mitchum on horseback in silhouette, seen from afar; the escaped children's moonlit, downstream drift past a woodland menagerie.
Early in the film, Mitchum's preacher puts on a good-versus-evil pantomime for the kids, locking together his hands with their L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E knuckle tattoos. An elemental fable of sin and salvation, a study in light and shadow, "The Night of the Hunter" is built on stark dualities. It applies a child's-eye view to a fallen adult world. It juxtaposes the crazed religiosity of Mitchum's false prophet with the biblical benevolence of Lillian Gish's maternal shepherdess, tending to a flock of suffering little children. And it combines a folkloric lyricism that is deeply American with a primal darkness profoundly out of sync with the self-image of Eisenhower-era America, which may account for the film's failure at the time.
"The Night of the Hunter" has grown in stature since, recuperated as a cult favorite and eventually acknowledged as a masterpiece, a movie with many descendants (from David Lynch to Terrence Malick) but few real precedents. Laughton, who died in 1962, was so crushed by the disappointment that he swore off directing — a tragedy that only reinforces his film's aura of singularity.
The Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton's only film, influenced Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, and the Coen brothers.
By Elbert Ventura http://www.slate.com/ Posted Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2010, at 10:12 AM ET
"When I first went to the movies, audiences sat in their seats straight. Now they slump down with their heads back, or eat candy and popcorn," said esteemed actor Charles Laughton when it was announced that he would be directing his first feature film. "I want them to sit up straight again." But when The Night of the Hunter opened in 1955, critics remained slumped in their seats while moviegoers barely filled the seats at all. The film came and went, and its failure broke Laughton's heart. He would never direct another film.
Fast-forward to this week's Criterion canonization of Laughton's film. In the years since his death in 1962, Night of the Hunter has grown larger in the cultural memory, first as a cult movie, then as a bona fide classic. It has earned an unusual place in cinema lore, perhaps the greatest one-off in movie history, and become one of the most quoted American films—traces of its DNA can be found in the films of Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, the Coen brothers, and Spike Lee. You can see what draws them to it: Equal parts Griffith and German Expressionism, Capra and Grimm, it is also thoroughly American, a collage of fragments from our collective dream life. The irony is that it took a British director to give us the most magical filmed portrait of the dread and dream of the American pastoral.
Laughton had been a popular actor in the '30s and '40s, but by the '50s his star had dimmed. A turn to directing for the stage soon led to his first opportunity to make a movie. Laughton had been entranced by Davis Grubb's bestseller The Night of the Hunter, a gothic fairy tale set in rural West Virginia. To a foreigner, Grubb's book must have been an eye-popping fantasia, an inflation of all that he thought he knew about this eccentric, unruly country. Laughton's movie is steeped in Americana plucked from the source novel: hymns, homilies, revivals, superstitions, and sayings make up its tapestry of Depression Era life. The landscape is at once lush and pestilential, an idyllic America marred by the evil of men and mobs.
That evil is personified by a preacher: Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a homicidal villain whom David Thomson rightly called "one of the most compelling studies of evil in American cinema." When we first meet Preacher (as he is referred to in the script), he is driving on a country road, fresh off a recent murder and talking to God. "Well, now, what's it to be, Lord? Another widow? How many has it been?" he asks. An emblem of American piety and certitude, Preacher sees his path as ordained by the divine. "You say the word, Lord. I'm on my way."
Into his life comes Ben Harper. An outlaw on the run from the police, Ben is arrested for robbery and murder—but not before he hides his loot and tells his children, 8-year-old John (Billy Chapin) and 5-year-old Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce), not to reveal the hiding place to anyone, not even their mother (a touchingly vulnerable Shelley Winters). Ben ends up in the same cell as Preacher, who has been arrested for auto theft, and spills the secret while talking in his sleep that the $10,000 he stole is still out there. After Ben is executed, the Preacher is set free, and the hunt for the money—really, the children—begins.
Shot by the great Stanley Cortez, the cinematographer on Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, The Night of the Hunter is a magic lantern of a movie. Cortez remarked that only two directors he worked with understood light, "that incredible thing that can't be described": Welles and Laughton. Refracted through the prism of a child's nightmare, it is a movie of skewed perspectives and shadow play. Preacher's entry into John and Pearl's lives, one of the great first encounters in movies, is a baroque coup:
John's nightmare will only get worse. As Preacher insinuates himself in the children's hometown, only the boy intuits the evil within. Pauline Kael called it "one of the most frightening films ever made," but its scares come not from Grand Guignol horrors or gotcha moments. There's something deeply primal at work here: The subterranean charge coursing through the picture is our childhood terror of having no grown-up left to turn to. The fatherless John sees his mother meet and fall in love with the Preacher; the townspeople are no less captivated by the charismatic madman. In perhaps the movie's most famous scene, the Preacher tells a parable that also gestures toward Laughton's grand theme:
In memory, The Night of the Hunter stands out as a chase movie—which is strange because much of it actually stays put. But there's a good reason for that trick of the mind. At the movie's heart is a pursuit, as the children, abandoned by adults, escape from the Preacher and drift downriver on a skiff. Evoking biblical legend and American lore, the river sequence is one of the greatest in all of cinema:
At the end of that ride is refuge. Like Moses rescued from the riverbank, John and Pearl are found by an old lady, Mrs. Cooper (the great Lillian Gish), a Mother Goose figure who becomes their guardian. (Further evidence of Laughton's film sense: when she first brings the children home, Mrs. Cooper walks briskly across the screen from right to left, the camera tracking along with her—in emphatic opposition to the left-to-right movement of the chase.)
It is with the appearance of Gish that Laughton's movie, already remarkable, deepens into a grander statement of formal and thematic purpose. Laughton considered Gish the lynchpin of the entire project. For Laughton, the way to get at truths was through the simplest forms: fairy tales, Bible stories, and, of course, the silent pictures. D.W. Griffith's greatest star, Gish was for Laughton a living, breathing avatar of the elemental power of the movies.
But Gish embodies more than that. Shimmering with righteousness and good American sense, her pious Mrs. Cooper is the crucial counterweight to Mitchum's Preacher. Her presence broadens the movie's scope, helping it rise above a mere critique of American parochial fundamentalism to an encompassing portrait of humanity's complexity. Just as LOVE and HATE both reside in the soul of man, so do faith and religion serve a corrosive purpose but an ennobling one as well. If Preacher (and, to a lesser extent, the sanctimonious townsfolk who can't spot iniquity when it's staring them in the face) represents blinkered zealotry and certainty, Mrs. Cooper redeems the purpose of faith, emblematizing Christian compassion and strength. Religion as double-edged sword reaches its expressive apogee in a climactic scene, with Preacher laying siege to Mrs. Cooper's house, singing a gospel hymn—only to be joined in song by the old lady, singing her own words of devotion:
Laughton's refusal to be reductive can be easily missed because of his movie's apparent simplicity. But though it harks back to simpler forms of expression, The Night of the Hunter complicates all that it touches—Laughton keeps undercutting the movie it could have become. Its Capra-esque platitudes by themselves can be mawkish; sitting next to images of stark surrealism, they bloom into moving affirmations of American innocence amid American corruption.
Preacher himself embodies Laughton's efforts to tell something richer and stranger. Flamboyantly threatening though he is, he actually falls short of demonic. From some angles, Preacher can appear a force of nature, a close kin of the Judge in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. But Laughton keeps puncturing his menace. He instructed Mitchum to inject some buffoonishness into the role, and Mitchum garnishes his devilish turn with cartoonish curlicues—an odd yip here, a clumsy tumble there. Gish reportedly disagreed with Laughton's deflation of Preacher—and she may have had a point—but Laughton was just as interested in showing a human fraud as he was in a superhuman villain.
The result is, finally, something of an oddity—sui generis, and thoroughly ours. The movie's highlights echo through the work of our best artists. That river trip, with its wide-eyed view of indifferent nature, seems to hold the key to Malick's cinema; its impeccably composed mayhem appears in the Coens' movies (a corpse at the bottom of the river in The Man Who Wasn't There will look mighty familiar to Hunter fans); Scorsese's remake of Mitchum's own Cape Fear (1962) seems to take as much from the original as it does from Hunter. Perhaps its most prominent quotation comes from another movie that recognized how deeply enmeshed good and evil are in the American soul:
Laughton never lived to see his movie become the touchstone that it is. His only other shot at directing was an aborted film version of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. The great James Agee, who wrote the script, died two months before the movie's 1955 premiere, his last work for the screen as indelible a vision of the world of children as his A Death in the Family. As unshakeable as last night's dream, their movie still speaks to us across the decades: a primeval spook story, a tribute to childhood, and a plaintive American prayer against the devil inside that we will never quite exorcise.
The latest WikiLeaks trove raises once more the following two issues — the circumstances of the release of classified documents and their contents. We won’t know the full extent of the diplomatic archives for days, but so far the particulars seem as embarrassing as they are underwhelming.
We are told that the Obama administration by hook or crook wanted to close Guantanamo, that occasionally U.S. diplomats spy, that Pakistan is unstable, that Saudi Arabia is duplicitous in wanting America to bell the Iranian nuclear cat while their elites subsidize al-Qaeda, that we are planning for the eventuality of North Korea’s fall, that China conspires against Google, that Libya’s Gaddafi had a hot blonde “nurse” with him, that the U.S. military was critical of the Brits, that the Royal Family is sometimes naughty, and all number of other things we would expect diplomatic missions to hear, gossip, editorialize, and intrigue about — and which usually find their way into the mainstream press sooner or later.
The danger of releasing these confidential diplomatic cables, then, is probably not their content per se but the destruction of the trust and reputations of many American diplomats who on future occasions, in far more critical contexts, will lament the loss of their access, friendships and credibility.
Second, the how, why, and when of the leak of over 250,000 diplomatic communications raises fundamental, worrisome, and even ironic issues. For instance, how in the world does one Pfc. Bradley Manning, the alleged twentysomething Army leaker, become an “intelligence analyst” (e.g., how long does one have to be in the army, what sort of education is requisite, and what prior skills must be demonstrable) with access to the private correspondence of the top echelon of the American diplomatic corps? That the young private Manning was even near a computer with such confidential material is insane.
Under Bush, press discussion of leaks focused on their embarrassing contents (after all, it was supposedly a higher calling that made brave whistle-blowers release confidential communications emanating from the Bush-Cheney right-wing nexus). In contrast, the press now seems more interested in responses of “How dare they” to the WikiLeaks methodology — as in, how could one be allowed to break laws and leak things from the Obamian State Department, if doing so might harm liberal diplomats, human-rights activists, etc., and embarrass a progressive government?
So, should we laugh or cry that State Department legal eagle Harold Koh is now using the powers of his new office (quite rightly) to remind leakers of the harm that they do to the operations of the U.S. government? The Bush-era author of “Can the President Be Torturer in Chief?” is now writing briefs explaining why the Obama administration’s use of judge/jury/executioner Predator drones against suspected terrorists (and anyone who goes up in smoke in their vicinity) is sanctioned by U.S. law. (I’d prefer to be waterboarded at Guantanamo by live questioning inquisitors than blown up by a no-questions-asked robot in Waziristan.)
Finally, Julian Assange is worse than a fraud, he is an abject hypocrite. Unilaterally he establishes supposed moral guidelines that determine the nature of his disclosures, but provides no proof that the enemies of, say, exposed Afghan and Iraqi civilian informants will not seek deadly retribution. And, of course, Assange would not wish to see published the private e-mail, telephone transcripts, and internal discussions of the WikiLeaks board, though these would give us the neccessary “context” to form opinions about the motivations and methodology of such leaks. Much less would Assange like someone to leak the complete confidential judicial proceedings against him by the Swedish government, which has now issued a warrant for his arrest on sexual coercion and molestation charges. In short, once Assange destroys the protocols of confidentiality, there is no such refuge for anyone — himself especially.
And why should Assange limit himself largely to Europe and the United States? As he jets about the secure Western world disclosing to free presses the secrets of Western military and diplomatic services, he might ponder whether he would like to move on to a new career working with Iranian, Russian, Chinese, Syrian, and Hezbollah dissidents who could help him expose the far more lethal and dangerous covert activities of their authoritarian governments.
What’s it like inside the Obama White House? A lot like what you’d guess from outside the Obama White House.
In “Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside Obama’s White House,” MSNBC analyst Richard Wolffe, a writer sympathetic to the president, reports the prosaic backroom details of the White House struggles from early this year, but occasionally stumbles upon an off-the-cuff revelation that’s much more interesting.
One staffer was conspicuously overweight. The president, in an incident that Wolffe believes proves how caring the man is, took it upon himself to present the aide with a salad for lunch — “then listened to him protest that he could take care of his own health. ‘I love you, man,’ Obama said. ‘I want you to look after yourself. Eat the salad.’ ”
I love you, man. Eat the salad. That is the Obama presidency in a plastic see-through clamshell. (Hold the ranch dressing!) The president loves us. He knows what’s best for us. We should bow to his superior wisdom.
Jimmy Carter obsessed over the White House tennis court schedule. President Obama wants to be your life coach, guidance counselor and spouse, kicking your shins under the dinner table when you order chocolate cake instead of steamed celery.
The president has to deal with transnational terrorism, arms control, unemployment, the deficit, health care and limiting damage from the Joe Biden Gaffe-u-tron. Add in the possibility of North Korea throwing a nuclear tantrum, and it seems unlikely that Obama is going to have time to follow me into Wendy’s. Yet there he is, pushing for all restaurant chains to post calorie counts, as already required in New York. Like much of liberalism, this little nudge isn’t a terrible idea, but it does impose a cost on business with little apparent benefit.
The “eat the salad” command is echoed throughout the book, which finds Obama in emergency mode at all times and always convinced that his combination of charisma, intelligence and moral authority makes him uniquely qualified to solve any problem that has bedeviled humanity for any number of generations. As Obama sees the hapless White House underling — an oaf who has never heard of salad and has been waiting for a visionary to guide him to the land of arugula — he sees the world.
When an earthquake strikes Haiti, Obama demands immediate action: “Make sure we are moving fast and aggressively,” he says. “I don’t want to hear any excuses.” Excuses? Wolffe morosely cites “the inability of the White House, or any government, to ease Haiti’s suffering.”
Never mind, Obama is off to the START negotiations with the Russians, negotiating obscure details himself. He sprints through the process and pronounces the treaty done, delivering on his promise to move to “a nuclear-free world.” Now it seems to have as many structural wobbles as Haiti.
A signature Obama line — economic policy “has less to do with big government or small government than it has to do with smart government” — amounts to proclaiming, “I must be right because I’m brilliant.” Obama evidently feels that his tireless brainwork tidied up the war-peace problem for the ages in his Nobel Prize speech (peace, we learned, is desirable but war is sometimes necessary) and that he wrought a profound new balance on civil liberties by largely retaining Bush anti-terror policies with the major fix being that, this time, he is the one in charge (a position Wolffe ably summarizes as, “In other words, trust me”).
Obama’s self-regard is at its most resplendent when he delivers a remark attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “I am not bound to win, but I’m bound to be true. I’m not bound to succeed, but I’m bound to live up to what light I have.” That the words are actually those of Ronald Reagan is an amusing but trivial detail.
What’s telling is that Obama set up the remark by saying he takes great pleasure in the White House library, and that he stumbled upon the remark in the process of searching out the wisdom of his predecessors. This was not a true statement. In fact Obama later admitted to Wolffe that he had found the quotation while reading one of his own diaries, in which he had mistakenly attributed the Reaganism to Lincoln.
So: In times of worry and strife, Obama looks for comforting inspiration in the sacred, timeless words of . . . Obama!
Presidents are often accused of surrounding themselves with yes-men and retreating from the world. This president doesn’t even need the yes-men. He lives in a hall of mirrors, and he’s awed by the view.
In “Frank: The Voice,” James Kaplan’s riveting 786-page biography of Frank Sinatra’s early years, the author pinpoints the moment in 1943 when the crooner’s new publicist, George B. Evans, came up with his first defining sobriquet.
Fourth billed at the Paramount Theater in New York, below Benny Goodman and His Famous Orchestra, and two comedy duos — the Radio Rogues and Moke and Poke — Sinatra’s name was accompanied by a slogan, “The Voice That Has Thrilled Millions.” The creakiness and sexlessness of those words made Evans cringe.
Certain he could come up with something better, Evans closed his eyes and imagined what drove Sinatra’s fans in bobby socks into a frenzy and suddenly realized he didn’t have to add anything. “All he had to do was subtract. Frank was just ... the Voice.”
Frank Sinatra performing in a benefit concert for Italian relief at Manhattan Center in 1945. (AP)
If “the Voice” was later superseded by “the Chairman of the Board” and “Ol’ Blue Eyes,” it was the only major nickname to focus on the indispensable ingredient of Sinatra’s success. “Chairman” connotes power and “Ol’ Blue Eyes” longevity; “the Voice” evokes the intangible, mystical alchemy of sound, technique and emotion that fused when the skinny young Sinatra murmured tender endearments into a microphone.
The biography offers an almost day-by-day account of Sinatra’s volatile life and times from his difficult birth in 1915 to the evening in 1954 when his comeback from a severe career downturn was secured, and he was handed an Oscar for best supporting actor in “From Here to Eternity.”
The book does music history a huge favor by reminding us that from his days with Tommy Dorsey to the twilight of his Columbia years, Sinatra was a singularly incandescent vocal phenomenon.
Because in those years pop records were monaural, and the LP and commercial television arrived only in 1949 and ’51 respectively, the considerable Sinatra legacy from the ’40s and early ’50s seems small beside the tonnage of material from his last three decades now inundating the marketplace. The newest addition is a seven-DVD “Concert Collection” that amasses 14 hours of concert and television performances from the late ’50s through the ’80s, when Sinatra the ardent crooner had given way to the imperial swinger.
Although Sinatra went on to make his greatest records for Capitol in the mid-1950s and early ’60s — a period alluded to but not covered in the biography — even on the album widely regarded as his all-time masterpiece, “In the Wee Small Hours,” his singing is tinged with a noirish worldliness and a slight huskiness that steadily coarsened into the hard, punchy sound of the later years.
The continuing deluge of material from a period when everything was recorded, filmed and videotaped explains why generations of younger listeners are mostly familiar with the combative Rat Pack cutup and arena performer and remain only dimly aware of the transcendently beautiful sound of Sinatra in his prime.
The Voice didn’t emerge from nowhere. Sinatra, who had a prescient sense of his destiny along with unlimited ambition, immediately knew what he wanted when he encountered it and badgered fellow performers to teach him what he needed to know (Gene Kelly for dancing in the movie “Anchors Aweigh” and Montgomery Clift for acting in “From Here to Eternity”).
Bing Crosby, his primary inspiration to become a crooner, Mr. Kaplan writes, possessed a “matchlessly rich baritone” that was “simultaneously romantic and (ever so slightly) ironic” and adds, “While Bing’s power was his cool warmth, Frank’s was his unabashed heat.”
On a whim Sinatra attended a Jascha Heifetz concert at Carnegie Hall in 1940 and was captivated by the way “he could get to the end of the bow and continue without a perceptible missing beat in the motion.”
But his most important role model and father figure was the autocratic bandleader and trombonist Tommy Dorsey, whose long-lined phrasing and velvety timbre he strove to emulate.
“Sinatra had heard other singers, even very good ones, take a breath in the middle of a phrase, and he thought it sounded lousy — it showed artifice,” Mr. Kaplan writes. “Singing the phrase straight through showed he really understood, and meant, the words. He saw the way the girls stared at him as he sang. He was telling them something, a story of love, and they were listening.”
The biography doubts the myth that Sinatra built up his lung power, as Dorsey had, by swimming laps underwater. It also debunks another myth that blames Mitch Miller, Columbia Records’ head of artists and repertory, for sabotaging Sinatra’s career during its downswing. Sinatra was not forced to record novelties like “Mama Will Bark,” his notorious duet with the television personality Dagmar, in which he barked like a dog. Far from being Miller’s persecuted victim, Sinatra, in his desperate search for hits, eagerly went along with such stunts.
Another crucial contribution to the magic was the refining of Sinatra’s Hoboken diction with the aid of John Quinlan, a vocal coach and tenor who helped him to “stop sounding like a stevedore.”
“Week in and week out, Frankie did the vocal exercise: ‘Let us wander by the bay,’ running up the scale and back down in all 12 keys.” Quinlan “taught Sinatra that ‘brother’ had an ‘r’ at the end, a ‘th’ in middle. ‘While’ began with an exhalation, as if the ‘h’ came first.”
Without all of these elements, and the gorgeous hearts-and-flowers settings by his steady Columbia arranger Axel Stordahl, the alchemy of his two- or three-dozen greatest sides would not have gelled. But when it does, you are transported to a realm in the neighborhood of heaven.
You have only to listen to his recording of “Laura,” made on Oct. 22, 1947, to hear singing of surpassing beauty. Delivered as one long eloquent sigh of voice and strings, it is as intense a distillation of incorporeal yearning as pop music has produced.
An eminent Harvard law professor, James Thayer (1831-1902), argued that although the judicial function is "merely that of fixing the outside border of reasonable legislative action," this still gives courts "a great and stately jurisdiction." While patrolling that jurisdiction today, Supreme Court justices may be playing the video game "Postal 2," whose rich menu of simulated mayhem provoked California's legislature to pass a problematic law.[1]
During the oral argument about whether the law restricting children's access to violent video games violates First Amendment guarantees of free expression, the lawyer representing game manufacturers urged the court to remember America's history of moral panics, which he said included one in the early 1950s about comic books. Really? Yes, and the episode remains instructive.
An estimated 90 percent of children 8 to 13 then read 10-cent comic books, of which scores of millions were sold weekly. The worry du jour was juvenile delinquency. By 1957, delinquency - how quaint the term sounds - would be romanticized in "Romeo and Juliet" recast as "West Side Story." But by 1953, delinquency was considered an epidemic symptomatic of national decline, so the U.S. Senate established a juvenile delinquency subcommittee. It included Estes Kefauver, the spotlight-seeking Tennessean whose 1950-51 hearings on organized crime - the first congressional hearings to have a mass television audience - made him a presidential candidate and, in 1956, the Democrats' vice presidential nominee.
In 1954, Fredric Wertham brought science - very loosely defined - to the subject of juvenile crime. Formerly chief resident in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, he was politically progressive: When he opened a clinic in Harlem, he named it for Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law who translated portions of "Das Kapital" into French, thereby facilitating the derangement of Parisian intellectuals.
Without ever interviewing the convicted spy Ethel Rosenberg, Wertham testified on her behalf concerning what he called her "prison psychoses." Since 1948, he had been campaigning against comic books, and his 1954 book, "Seduction of the Innocent," which was praised by the progressive sociologist C. Wright Mills, became a bestseller by postulating a causal connection between comic books and the desensitization of young criminals: "Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry."[2]
Wertham was especially alarmed about the one-third of comic books that were horror comics, but his disapproval was capacious: Superman, who gave short shrift to due process in his crime-fighting, was a crypto-fascist. As for Batman and Robin, the "homoerotic tendencies" were patent.
Even before Wertham's book appeared, a committee of New York's legislature considered government licensing of comic-book publishers. More than a dozen states passed laws restricting sales of comic books - laws similar to the California one pertaining to video games. Some civic groups staged comic-book bonfires.
Comic-book publishers fended off such pressures by adopting a severe code of conduct. Soon even Betty and Veronica, those less-than-wanton femme fatales of the "Archie" comics, had their supposedly provocative protuberances made less so by donning looser-fitting blouses.
In 1956, fear of comic books was suddenly eclipsed by fear of Elvis Presley, whose pelvis would not be the last cause of moral panic. Pre-Presley panics had concerned ragtime music, "penny dreadful" novels, jazz, "penny theatres," radio and movies. By 1926, seven states and at least 100 municipalities had censors who pre-screened movies. In 1940, NBC radio banned more than 140 songs that were thought to encourage, among other evils, "disrespect for virginity." NBC would broadcast only the instrumental version of Cole Porter's "Love for Sale." Post-Presley panics about threats to children have concerned television (broadcast, then cable), rap music and the Internet.
Concern for children's sensibilities is admirable. The coarsening of the culture is a fact with many causes, but its consequences are unclear. And it can bring out a Puritan streak in progressivism.
The lawyer for the video-game industry warned the Supreme Court that "the land is awash" with contemporary versions of Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), the crusader for censorship of indecency, as he spaciously defined it. "Today's crusaders," the lawyer said, "come less from the pulpit than from university social science departments, but their goals and tactics remain the same."
Progressivism is a faith-based program. The progressives' agenda for improving everyone else varies but invariably involves the cult of expertise - an unflagging faith in the application of science to social reform. Progressivism's itch to perfect people by perfecting the social environment can produce an interesting phenomenon - the Pecksniffian progressive.
As long as the head of the TSA, Long Dong Silver, refuses to get rid of the intrusive, possibly dangerous airport searches, how about requiring members of Congress to go through the same security screening in order to enter hallowed congressional office buildings?
Not just Barney Frank -- I mean all members of Congress. "We've patted you down twice, Congressman Frank. Why don't you just go to your office now?"
The Rayburn House Office Building is a far more likely target for a terrorist attack than a random flight out of a random American airport. But every passenger on every flight in America must allow a TSA agent to get to second base with them, in some cases third base, or appear live in a nude video in order to board the plane.
If that's necessary to keep us airline passengers safe, why not use the same security procedures to protect members of Congress?
According to the FAA, there were about 37,000 commercial flights per day in 2008. A mere six buildings contain the offices of every member of our country's entire legislative branch.
So why shouldn't the people entering those tempting terrorist targets be given the same security screenings as the roughly half-million Americans taking random commercial flights every day?
It can't be because Capitol Hill security guards recognize members of Congress and their staff. TSA agents presumably recognize lots of people going through airport security. Ten to 20 percent of passengers are frequent fliers taking the same routes over and over again, year after year.
In addition, TSA agents will recognize their neighbors of 40 years, their hometown mayor, their children's teachers, local and national celebrities, actors, athletes and other famous personalities. Some TSA agents probably recognize Christian Slater as that guy who sometimes has a gun in his carry-on bag.
But all those people have to take their shoes off, remove their computers from their luggage and be subjected to a pat-down because TSA agents are prohibited by the Homeland Security Department from using an ounce of common sense.
In June 2002, Al Gore got searched at an airport. Gore may have a forgettable face, but at that point, he had been vice president of the United States for eight of the previous 10 years, had run for president, and then had made a spectacle of himself by demanding a recount when he lost.
I've seen James Caan in an airport security line. Is James Caan less recognizable than Rep. Steve Rothman? (Tip for the TSA: When your agents are asking passengers for their autographs, you're probably not on the verge of nabbing Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.)
Why are members of the ruling class the only Americans for whom it's possible to design a security system that takes the obvious into account?
If security guards at a big, fat terrorist target like the U.S. Capitol can be expected to figure out that members of Congress aren't a threat, why don't we trust TSA agents to figure out that little grandmothers, nuns and 8-year-olds aren't a threat either?
Nancy Pelosi is more likely to engage in a terrorist attack on America than any grandmother or 8-year-old. Just look at what she did to our health care.
Pelosi opposed the Gulf War on the grounds that it would be bad for the environment. She voted to reduce funds for the B-2 intercontinental bomber and repeatedly voted against a missile defense system. She voted to end Radio Marti broadcasts to Cuba. She voted against war in Iraq. She voted against a constitutional amendment to permit school prayer and against allowing state and local governments to display the Ten Commandments.
No wonder she has a 100 percent congressional rating from al-Qaida.
And yet Pelosi is not only able to breeze into the U.S. Capitol without a search, but she can usually board a commercial airline without submitting to the groping or nude body scan that awaits the rest of us. Members of Congress and government officials are generally exempted from the TSA's airport screenings.
Does TSA administrator John "Long Dong Silver" Pistole get searched at an airport? How about Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano? FBI Director Robert Mueller? Michelle Obama and the kids?
No, of course not. TSA agents are busy X-raying James Caan's shoes and feeling up nuns.
I'd feel safer if Pistole and Napolitano had the full body cavity search than Grandma. Anyone involved in the creation of an airport security system that requires pilots to be checked for weapons has got to be removed from any government job and promptly institutionalized, as he is a danger to himself and others.
We're talking about the pilot. Is there anyone in the government who can tell us why the pilot doesn't need a box-cutter to seize control of the airplane and kill everyone on it? You there, in the back -- the skinny guy with the big ears behind the teleprompter: Wanna take a guess? Bueller? Anyone? Bueller?
I'm for any program that requires Nancy Pelosi and Janet Napolitano to either be felt up or videotaped nude every morning by Jose, the $20-an-hour security guard -- just as they do for the rest of us.
It’s a lame-duck session. Time is running out. Unemployment is high, the economy is dangerously weak, and, with five weeks to go, no one knows what tax they’ll be paying on everything from income to dividends to death when the current rates expire Jan. 1. And what is the president demanding that Congress pass as “a top priority”? To what did he devote his latest weekly radio address? Ratification of his New START treaty.
Good grief. Even among national-security concerns, New START is way down at the bottom of the list. From the naval treaties of the 1920s to this day, arms control has oscillated between mere symbolism at its best to major harm at its worst, with general uselessness being the norm.
The reason is obvious. The problem is never the weapon; it is the nature of the regime controlling the weapon. That’s why no one stays up nights worrying about British nukes, while everyone worries about Iranian nukes.
President Barack Obama and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev sign the New START treaty, Thursday, April 8, 2010, at the Prague Castle in Prague. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
In Soviet days, arms control at least could be justified as giving us something to talk about when there was nothing else to talk about, symbolically relieving tensions between mortal enemies. It could be argued that it at least had a soporific and therapeutic effect in the age of “the balance of terror.”
But in post-Soviet days? The Russians are no longer an existential threat. A nuclear exchange between Washington and Moscow is inconceivable. What difference does it make how many nukes Russia builds? If they want to spend themselves into penury creating a bloated nuclear arsenal, be our guest.
President Obama insists that New START is important as a step toward his dream of a nuclear-free world. Where does one begin? A world without nukes would be the ultimate nightmare. We voluntarily disarm while the world’s rogues and psychopaths develop nukes in secret. Just last week we found out about a hidden, unknown, highly advanced North Korean uranium-enrichment facility. An ostensibly nuclear-free world would place these weapons in the hands of radical regimes that would not hesitate to use them — against a civilized world that would have given up its deterrent.
Moreover, Obama’s idea that the great powers must reduce their weapons to set a moral example for the rest of the world to disarm is simply childish. Does anyone seriously believe that the mullahs in Iran or the thugs in Pyongyang will in any way be deflected from their pursuit of nukes by a reduction in the U.S. arsenal?
Obama’s New START treaty, like the rest, is 90 percent useless and 10 percent problematic. One difficulty is that it restricts the number of delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons. But because some of these are dual-use, our ability to deliver long-range conventional weapons, a major U.S. strategic advantage, is constrained.
The second problem is the recurrence of language in the treaty preamble linking offensive to defensive nuclear weaponry. We have a huge lead over the rest of the world in anti-missile defenses. Ever since the Reagan days, the Russians have been determined to undo this advantage. The New START treaty affirms the “interrelationship” between offense and defense. And Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has insisted that “the unchangeability of circumstances” — translation: no major advances in U.S. anti-missile deployment — is a condition of the entire treaty.
The worst thing about this treaty, however, is that it is simply a distraction. It gives the illusion of doing something about nuclear danger by addressing a non-problem, Russia, while doing nothing about the real problem — Iran and North Korea. The utter irrelevance of New START to nuclear safety was dramatically underscored last week by the revelation of that North Korean uranium-enrichment plant, built with such sophistication that it left the former head of the Los Alamos National Laboratory “stunned.” It could become the ultimate proliferation factory. Pyongyang is already a serial proliferator. It has nothing else to sell. Iran, Syria, and al-Qaeda have the money to buy.
Iran’s Islamic Republic lives to bring down the Great Satan. North Korea, nuclear-armed and in a succession crisis, has just shelled South Korean territory for the first time since the Korean armistice. Obama peddling New START is the guy looking for his wallet under the lamppost because that’s where the light is good — even though he lost the wallet on the other side of town.
One of my favorite television programs is How It’s Made on the Science Channel. The documentary series shows “how the everyday objects people use become the things they are.” From ketchup and flip-flops, to nail clippers and snare drums, to NASCAR engines, hydraulic cylinders, and motor homes, the show takes viewers on wondrous journeys of the mundane products we too often take for granted.
Though it originated in Canada, How It’s Made has become a global phenomenon and is largely a tribute to American ingenuity and American entrepreneurs. The show’s myriad episodes spotlighting U.S. inventions also serve as potent antidotes to the government-centric vision that reigns in the White House these days.
Last summer, President Obama opined that the proper role of private entrepreneurs is to fulfill “the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy” — and that “at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” Last month, Vice President Joe Biden boasted that “every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century, and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive.”
Such command-and-control narcissism is completely alien to the unique American culture and marketplace that have bred so many successful inventors. Consider the electric carving knife that so many of you will use without a second thought this Thanksgiving season. Jerome L. Murray, the New York City man who invented the ubiquitous kitchen appliance, was an insatiable tinkerer from his teens until his death in 1998 at the age of 85. He was driven not by a social-justice agenda or by the need to “grow the economy” to boost government-employment figures, but by a constant desire to solve problems, cut costs, satisfy his intellectual curiosities, and pursue the profit motive.
Murray funded his creative pursuits out of his own pocket, not with taxpayer dollars. And one moneymaking idea was never “enough.” According to his obituary in the New York Times, the prolific inventor “saw no sense in inventing something that could not be sold.” At the time of his death, Murray held an astounding 75 foreign and domestic patents:
● At 15, Murray manufactured a windmill that powered a radio generator and sold it to farmers in rural areas where regular electricity was unavailable.
● In 1951, after observing passengers descending airplane stairs in the rain at Miami International Airport, he came up with the idea for covered airplane-boarding ramps to protect travelers from inclement weather and to enable those in wheelchairs to enter their terminals without having to be fork-lifted off their planes. The walkways are now used in airports around the world.
● To save time and energy whenever he needed to climb onto the roof to adjust his television antenna for better reception, Murray crafted a television-antenna rotator by attaching two strings to the antenna and pulling them from his window. The invention evolved into the TV-antenna rotator, which Murray’s obituary reports “generated nearly $40 million in sales over several decades.”
● Murray also invented the audible pressure cooker, the powered car seat, a high-speed dental drill, and the peristaltic pump, which moves fluids through the body without damaging cells using contractions and expansions. The lifesaving pump paved the way for historic breakthroughs in open-heart surgery and kidney dialysis — and its technology has been applied by the food-processing, pharmaceutical-manufacturing, and chemical-processing industries.
● And to assist harried housewives in the post–World War II era, Murray combined the use of an interior-combustion motor with dual blades to create the electric carving knife. It was patented in 1964, and the same technology used to slice up your turkey was adopted to create medical and forensic tools now used in surgeries and autopsies.
Murray’s self-interested capitalist pursuits yielded untold benefits and conveniences for the rest of the world. In the tale of the mundane electric carving knife lies a profound lesson: Liberty, not “government vision,” yields innovation. For this priceless insight bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers, Americans should give eternal thanks.
Derek Jeter tosses in the area behind home plate during a baseball workout at Yankee Stadium in New York, Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2010. (AP)
This is the way the Yankees want the conversation about Derek Jeter to go: They have arrived at what they think is a fair contract for Jeter and if he doesn't accept it, he's being greedy and unreasonable and unrealistic and should go test the market. That is what Brian Cashman said Tuesday. What he is really saying to Jeter about the Yankees' offer to him - $45 million for three years - is take it or leave it.
So we're already there. I said a few weeks ago that the leverage the Yankees have in this matter, and they have most of it, mattered only if they were prepared to swing it like a baseball bat. That is what's happening now, in just about every news cycle.
You wonder how long Hal Steinbrenner - does the front office work for him or is it the other way around? - lets this go on.
As one American League East executive said Tuesday, "Out of all the guys in sports, they're going to take this kind of hard line on Jeter?"
Over the past few days the Yankees seem to have lost their minds because Jeter's agent, Casey Close, told me Saturday night that he finds the Yankees' negotiating strategy "baffling."
Not stupid. Not cheap. Not arrogant. Not insulting. Baffling. But in the thin-skinned world of the Yankees, they acted as if Close were Larry Lucchino of the Red Sox calling them the "Evil Empire" all over again.
The Yankees act as if Close is the one who ramped up the rhetoric, and not the other way around. You know when the rhetoric really started on this thing? When Hal Steinbrenner said a few weeks ago that the Jeter negotiation "could get messy" before it ever really began. And you know who's the only one who can fix this now? Hal Steinbrenner.
Could Close and Jeter have come into this looking for too much money, way too many years? I'm sure they have. Just because the Yankees are being the Yankees doesn't mean that the other side is the Vatican. Close and Jeter probably want a lot more than three years. And a lot more than $45 million. If you were Jeter, so would you. Nobody can say he's been stealing money over the last decade.
But how about this as an idea for both sides to look at, before this whole thing becomes more viral than it is? How about you take the average that Jeter just made over the last 10 years - it would work out to $18.9 million a year - and make that the three-year offer. And if Jeter is still hitting .300 at the end of that, a fourth year, for the same money, automatically kicks in.
That way Jeter isn't asked to take a salary cut after everything he has meant to the Yankees and continues to mean. You know what the difference is between $57 million for three years and what the Yankees are offering Jeter? It's just a little more than the Yankees paid Javy Vazquez last season.
The $45 million the Yankees are offering Jeter for three years? It happens to be $1 million less than the $46 million they paid to a scrub pitcher named Kei Igawa. You remember that deal, $20 million for five years and a $26 million posting fee in Japan.
It was no different with Igawa than anybody else: The Yankees are always greedy when they want somebody. Only now Jeter is supposed to be the greedy one if he doesn't take what they're offering. They put out their number and that's it and that's all, take it or leave it.
Test the market, Cashman says.
Come on. Brian Cashman knows better than anyone that the market is always different here. Especially here. Always here. The top market for CC Sabathia a couple of years ago was $100 million. That means the top market outside of the Bronx. Cashman paid him $161 million. Sabathia was an ascendant star at the time, you bet. Now the implication is that Jeter is in decline after his .270 year, even though he hit .334 in 2009 with 212 hits and the Yankees won the World Series.
As one former major-league player said the other day, "What, (Jeter) has one bad year and now it's going to be straight downhill from here?"
Always in this negotiation, of course, the elephant in the room is Alex Rodriguez. He opted out on the Yankees at the end of the 2007 World Series, but it appears that wasn't nearly as offensive to the Yankees as the word "baffling." Not long after that, the Yankees gave him an insane contract extension, justifying it at the time by telling themselves of the marketing possibilities of his growing home run totals. Then A-Rod turned out to be a juicer in an era of juiced home run hitters and the Yankees were shocked.
Now they want to talk about anything except A-Rod's contract. Jeter wants to talk about it, though. He saw what everybody saw last season, that A-Rod hitting his 600th home run didn't exactly set the big town on its ear. Jeter is also smart enough to know it will be a little different this season when he gets near 3,000 hits. There are a few legitimate milestones left in baseball. And legitimate stars. Derek Jeter is one of them, even at his current age. Even after hitting .270 at the worst possible time.
We now know, in great detail and absolute clarity, how much the Yankees think Jeter is worth. You just wonder how much all this will cost them in the end.
Washington is reeling from the latest WikiLeaks document dump. The foreign-policy wonks insist that there are few, if any, major surprises. “Much of what we’ve seen thus far,” opined Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, “confirms more than it informs.” And what these documents confirm is that President Obama’s foreign policy is a mess.
