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December 31, 2005

Russia at the Gugg: Impressions


Here's a first in series of my "impressions" from the exhibit at the Guggenheim.
I have rarely seen such a disorganized, poorly documented, exhibited, curated random collection of works from 6 centuries without any underlying reason to be together except for a country of origin (which in the course of these centuries, went from a collection of lands to an empire, to a socialist country and back to whatever it is right now).
But some pictures did leave a certain impression on me. Some by their unfamiliriaty, some by painful intimacy. Here is one painter, whom I have not heard much about it, except for his famous painting of Alexander Nevsky.

Pavel Korin - a great website is here







December 30, 2005

LRB: What I heard about Iraq in 2005

 

A great article by Eliot Weinberg that appeared in a recent issue of the London Review of Books. Not being a big fan of the Iraq war, I was still searching for some (even rhetorical) reason to justify all the bloodshed, all the damage we are doing to that country, and how much money we are throwing down the drain of the good old corporations who win no matter what.. All because the British Empire and France decided to postpone the solving of the problem some 80 years ago. By the time I reached the third page of the printed issue of the magazine, I became numb. Let me know at what point it happened to you. Leave comments. Here is a little excerpt:

I heard a US soldier talk about his photographs of the 12 prisoners he had shot with a machine-gun: ‘I shot this guy in the face. See, his head is split open. I shot this guy in the groin. He took three days to bleed to death.’ I heard him say he was a devout Christian: ‘Well, I knelt down. I said a prayer, stood up, and gunned them all down.’
 
read more....

December 19, 2005

NYT: Light Wallet, Big City

Looking for an affordable hotel in New York? Not for yourself, of course, but for those wonderful friends and relatives who now insist on coming to New York, since they have someone there... Well, here are some links:


Affinia Dumont
150 E 34 St. 212 481 7600 From $199
A business and pet-friendly spot with gym and spa

Chelsea Hotel
222 W 23 St. 212 243 3700 From $195
The storied bohemian landmark

DoubleTree Metropolitan
569 Lexington Ave. (51th) St. 212 752 7000 From $159

Gershwin Hotel
7 E 27 St. 212 545 8000 From $119

Hotel QT
125 W 45 St. 212 354 2323 From $125


December 18, 2005

RS: George Clooney

It was fun to be doing stuff I really believed in," George Clooney says. "You want to raise a little hell while you can." In 2005, Clooney turned forty-four and found new ways to spend the capital of his seemingly effortless old-school Hollywood charm. First was Good Night, and Good Luck, his second film as a director: the story of journalist Edward R. Murrow fearlessly taking on commie witch hunter Joseph McCarthy in 1954 -- with some pointed implications for the toothless state of TV news today. Then came Syriana, for which Clooney was executive producer and and star -- a dense, intense drama about the stranglehold that oil has on our lives and our politics.
Clooney literally broke his back to make Syriana. His character (CIA agent Bob Barnes), in Lebanon to plan the assassination of a Mideast prince, gets captured and tortured. Shooting that scene, Clooney suffered an injury and started leaking spinal fluid through his nose. Even today, he has headaches and short-term memory loss.

Visiting New York on a break from filming The Good German for director Steven Soderbergh, Clooney looks healthy and slender, having dropped the thirty pounds he gained for Syriana. He glows with the passion of the politically righteous -- or maybe that's just really good skin. And he hasn't lost his wicked, deadpan sense of humor. When he called Pat Robertson to recruit him (successfully) for the One campaign for Africa, he called him "Reverend Robertson." The televangelist preferred a different title: "Call me Dr. Robertson." Clooney's response: "OK, you can call me Dr. Ross."

When you look back on this year, what will you remember?
It was my best year and my worst year. It's funny how hard it is to enjoy things when you really, truly hurt. My brother-in-law: perfectly healthy, stood up, dropped dead of a heart attack. My grandmother fell down and broke her hip and died a couple of weeks later. But creatively, it was my best year by far. It's certainly a year that I won't forget. [Half-joking] I may forget it, because it's in my brain -- and I'm losing my brain.

With Good Night, and Good Luck and Syriana, you nailed the two main forces driving the United States right now: media and oil.
We got lucky in our timing. It was about two and a half years ago when we were getting these things made. And believe me, no one was encouraging us to do it at that point. I was sick of the idea that any sort of dissent would be considered unpatriotic. To me, the most patriotic thing you could do was question your government. We're a whole country based on dissent. It's actually your duty to question authority.


read more

You got a lot of heat for criticizing the Iraq War.
It was fascinating to be called a traitor and told that your career is over because of your political views. But that's fine, I can handle that. You can't sit around demanding freedom of speech and then say, "But don't say bad things about me." Just don't say that raising these questions is unpatriotic. There will be people who say we're saying in Syriana that bombers are good people, but clearly we're not. All we're saying is if you're going to fight a war against an idea -- terrorism -- as opposed to a state, then you're going to have to understand how such evil, horrible things happen.

Very few people wake up in the morning and say, "I'm going to do some evil today."
Yeah, I think they believe in what they're doing and that they're going to get seventy virgins after they die -- but, really, who wants seventy virgins? I want eight pros.

How did you end up in the movie?
The studio was willing to take it on politically, but like any studio, they needed a star. It didn't matter whether I was going to be fat and bearded, they still needed a star.

Get me a fat, bearded star!
Get me Burl Ives! Get me Raymond Burr! So I called up [director Stephen] Gaghan and he said, "I really don't want a movie star in this role." I agreed: I said I can play this part, but I'm going to need thirty days to change a little bit. So I shaved my hairline back about an inch and a half, grew a beard and put on thirty pounds in thirty days. And when we told Warners that we were going to do it for no money, it's hard to say no to that.

Your accountant must love you.
I don't want to take out $20 million upfront -- then you don't see it on the screen. To me, the idea is to gamble on yourself. Take no money, have a percentage of the back end -- if the movie makes money, you make money. If not, well, you've made the movie. And your tendency then is to do films you believe in, as opposed to saying, "Well, it's a really crappy film, but I'm getting 20 million bucks." Good Night, and Good Luck, literally without exaggeration, the craft-services guy was paid more than I was to write, direct and act. But we made the movie we wanted, so who cares?

Did coming to fame relatively late in life --
It was a big help. If I was as famous as some people are at eighteen years old, I would have been shooting crack into my throat. But you can't remain famous like that over a long period of time. Lindsay Lohan is going to have a downtime in her career.

No!
I don't know her at all; she may be completely together. But at that point, I wouldn't have been prepared for the down period if I hadn't gone through it for a long time beforehand. You realize there are other elements, including luck. I'm no better an actor in Out of Sight than I was in Batman and Robin, which I had shot six months earlier. And I was killed for Batman and Robin and praised for Out of Sight. The second and third rounds in your career are the ones that define you.

What did you learn this year?
Any time I think I'm smart, I'm not. There's a great movie, Out of the Past, where Robert Mitchum says, "I never found out much listening to myself." So what I'm learning more every year is to listen to other people. We talked to John McCain for a while when we were in Washington, and he talks about how the polarization of the Senate really happened in '94. Guys stopped spending the weekend in town having drinks and solving each other's issues.

So the problem with Congress is that they don't drink enough?
We're going to have to get these guys doing shots of Jagermeister. I want to see Orrin Hatch downing some Goldschlager.

What else would you like to see?
Everybody says, "Look at how bad these guys [the Bush administration] are." Well, that's easy, they're beating themselves into the ground. But we can't just be the party of "I disagree." We have to be the party of "here's the way out." These Democratic senators voted for the war and say they were misled. They weren't misled, they were afraid of being called unpatriotic. Who's the guy or girl who's going to step up and say, "We're going to run out of oil sooner or later, so let's take the bull by the horns and say ten years from now, no cars built that run on internal combustion"? It's going to happen at some point, so why don't we take the lead? Then we don't have to bomb people in Middle Eastern countries -- we just don't need their product.

Are you hopeful about the future?
I think we're really great at this as a country: We do dumb things, and then we fix them. 1941, Pearl Harbor: We grab all the Japanese-Americans and throw them in detention camps. Well, that's not very sporting of us, but we fix it. In the Fifties, we grab people because they read a newspaper and bring them in for investigation. Pretty dumb. Vietnam? Pretty stupid. But there seems to be a tide turning. The Democrats aren't providing the answers, but the Republicans aren't getting free passes on everything. You don't get to say you're either with us or with the enemy anymore. So I'm an optimist about the United States.

GAVIN EDWARDS

December 17, 2005

'Syriana' - What a Mess of a Movie






It is quite baffling to see so much talent wasted on screen in a supposedly smart movie about the Middle East and the oil, and the law firms, and the United States... - you know the kind. Here's a great review of that movie (it does reveal certain plotlines, so if you plan on seeing it, you may want to stay away from reading it).

December 16, 2005

я спросил у яндекса... **ru

Наташа Тэпо

я спросил у яндекса где моя любимая...
яндекс регистрацию попросил на сайт..
я спросил у рамблера...где моя любимая...
рамблер...ящик выдал мне...двадцать килобайт...
я спросил у гугола....где моя любимая...
гугол...ссылку в аську мне..может там ...мелькнет...
в мсн настукивал...где моя любимая...
камера наушники. ночи напролет...

я спросил у яндекса...
я спросил у рамблера...
у яху я спрашивал...
гугол ссылку в аську мне...

кенфромпарис)))

NYT: What's the Big Idea?

Questions for Peter Watson
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON
Published: December 11, 2005

Q: Your ambitious new book, 'Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, From Fire to Freud,' claims to chronicle all the major ideas in the world since the invention of the hand ax two million years ago. Are you trying to be a polymath?
My wife says I am the know-it-all from hell.

How does one go about deciding which ideas to put in and which to leave out? As they say, even taxi drivers have ideas.
Yes, taxi drivers have ideas. They have ideas about how to get from Eighth Street to 81st Street by missing the Midtown traffic. But what we are talking about here - let's be sensible - are ideas that have an impact on the lives of many people. We're not talking about just little ideas, are we? On the other hand, not all big ideas are good ideas. In fact, most big ideas are probably terrible ideas.

What do you think is the single worst idea in history?
Without question, ethical monotheism. The idea of one true god. The idea that our life and ethical conduct on earth determines how we will go in the next world. This has been responsible for most of the wars and bigotry in history.

But religion has also been responsible for investing countless lives with meaning and inner richness.
I lead a perfectly healthy, satisfactory life without being religious. And I think more people should try it.

It sounds as if you're starting your own church.
Not at all. I do not believe in the inner world. I think that the inner world comes from the exploration of the outer world - reading, traveling, talking. I do not believe that meditation or cogitation leads to wisdom or peace or the truth.

Then I don't understand why you would want to write a history of ideas, since inner reflection and dreaminess surely count at least as much as scientific experiment in the formation of new ideas"
To paraphrase the English philosopher John Gray, it is more sensible to look out on the world from a zoo than from a monastery. Science, or looking out, is better than contemplation, or looking in.

If that were true, how would you explain a novelist like Virginia Woolf, whose achievement was based on the rejection of the panoramic outward view in favor of inner sensibility?
The rise of the novel generally is a great turning in. But I don't think it has given a lot of satisfaction to people. It has not achieved anything collective. It's a lot of little personal turnings that lots of people love to connect with. But these are fugitive, evanescent truths. They don't stay with you very long or help you do much.

You strike me as deeply unanalyzed. Have you ever considered seeing a psychiatrist?
I was a psychiatrist. I left because I thought Freud was rubbish.

Where did you train?
The Tavistock Clinic in London. I left in the late 60's because I thought Freudian therapy was a waste of time. I don't believe there is any such thing as the unconscious or the id.

In that case, where do you think ideas come from?
I don't think they come out of daydreaming. Everybody who has had a great idea or made a great realization has been working very hard at it, and they often have failed many times. You don't go from nothing to a great idea without doing a lot of work.

I find I seldom have ideas away from my desk.
That is because ideas come from other ideas. I used to sleep with a piece of paper by my bed. But I never had an idea in bed. The other thing I noticed is that when you are out to dinner and you have a good idea and write it down, the next day when you're sober, it's terrible.

Perhaps if you went out less, you would have better ideas.
I think the interesting thing in life is not having an idea, but realizing it.

December 15, 2005

Communists for Kerry!





Please visit this funny site with funny pictures

Классовая Борьба **ru


На самом деле, все мы делимся не на белых и черных, мужчин и женщин или
евреев и антисемитов. Мы делимся на отличников и двоечников. И между нами
веками длится классовая борьба.

Отличники встают рано, причем далеко не всегда потому, что они - жаворонки.
Они встают рано потому, что им надо. Если рано им случайно вставать не надо,
они встают поздно. Поздно - это в десять утра. Ну ладно, в одиннадцать.
Самый край - в двенадцать, со словами <сколько можно спать>. Отличникам
вообще свойственно задавать самим себе и окружающим риторические вопросы.
Например, <когда, если не сегодня, я буду это делать?>, <сколько твоё
безделье может продолжаться?> и <неужели ты не понимаешь, что:>. <Неужели ты
не понимаешь?> - ключевой вопрос отличников. Они не понимают, как можно не
понимать.

Двоечники не понимают.

Отличники работают в системах. Им это важно. При этом им важно, чтобы в
системе, где они работают, их ценили. Если в системе, где они работают, их
не ценят, отличники ищут новую систему. Самая большая награда для отличника
- когда система их сначала не ценила, а теперь ценит. Самое страшное
наказание - провалиться в глазах системы. Если отличника спросить <кто ты>,
он честно ответит: <инженер-технолог>.

Если спросить <кто ты> двоечника, он ответит <Вася>.

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Основная причина всех действий отличника - убежденность, что так надо. Надо
хорошо учиться, надо получать хорошие оценки за экзамены, надо найти хорошую
работу (а как же иначе?), а на этой хорошей работе надо сделать карьеру,
потому что карьеру делать надо. Да, ещё по той же причине они моют грязную
посуду.

Двоечники тоже моют грязную посуду. Когда заканчивается чистая.
Первичное расслоение происходит в школе. Отличника узнать легко, и вовсе не
по очкам или по умному лицу. Отличник - это тот, кто Делает Уроки. Каждый
день. Приходит домой после школы, переодевается в домашнюю одежду,
разогревает обед, обедает - и садится. Иной отличник скор и легок, поэтому
садится он на полчаса, и за полчаса у него всё готово. Другой отличник
основателен и упорен, поэтому его уроки делаются целый вечер. Есть даже
такие, которые ежедневно делают Уроки на Послезавтра - но это особая
категория человечества, и речь сейчас не о них.

Сделав уроки, отличник улыбается и потягивается. Если он - Истинный
Отличник, он может после этого ещё и собрать портфель. Впрочем, это
необязательно - я знала одного настоящего отличника, за которого все десять
школьных лет портфель собирала мама.

А теперь быстро поднимите руку те, кто регулярно строчил домашнюю математику
на подоконнике в туалете напротив кабинета химии на пятом этаже. С вами всё
ясно. Вы наверняка ещё помните, что на средней величины домашнее задание
нужна обычная перемена (десять минут) в пятом классе, и большая (двадцать) -
в восьмом. Что? Не <строчил>, а <сдувал>? Сами вы <сдувал>. Чтобы спокойно
списать задание по любому предмету, не нужна никакая перемена. Нужна
последняя парта и урок биологии. Можно литературы.

Но сдувание - это детский сад. Высший пилотаж двоечника - сделать домашнее
задание самому, причем на том самом уроке, на который он задан. Желательно
сидя не на последней, а на первой парте. Сделать блестяще, с выдумкой, с
переподвыподвертом и, сделав, немедленно вызваться отвечать. Ответить так,
что преподаватель заплачет от восторга, получить законную пятерку с бантиком
и, сев на место, углубиться наконец в чтение второго тома сочинения Освальда
Шпенглера <Закат Европы>. Ради которого и нужно было ответить добровольно,
чтоб потом не дергали. На такое способен только истинный, глубинный, не
побоюсь этого слова, духовный двоечник. Которому в общем-то все равно, чем
заниматься, лишь бы было интересно и не дергали. К сожалению, сочетание
<интересно> и <не дергали> в школе (да и в жизни) бывает редко, поэтому ради
своего смысла жизни двоечнику приходится трудиться куда упорней, чем
отличнику. Если он, конечно, достаточно трудолюбив, чтобы это делать.

Оценки не говорят нам ни о чем. На доске <Гордость школы> висят вперемешку
как портреты отличников, так и портреты двоечников. У последних ничуть не
меньше высоких оценок, похвальных грамот и побед на физико-математических
олимпиадах, а среди первых есть масса хмурых середнячков. Дело не в баллах,
дело в подходе.

Отличник на любое
- Зачем?
отвечает
- Надо!

Двоечник на любое
- Надо!
отвечает
- Зачем?

* * *

По окончании школы отличники и двоечники выкатываются в большую жизнь.
Отличникам там легко, слово <надо> ведёт их за собой. Двоечникам сложнее: им
приходится изо всех сил думать, как бы выкрутиться так, чтобы ничем не
поступиться. Поступаться двоечники не любят. Это, пожалуй, второе
существенное различие между двумя классами: отличник твёрдо знает, чем нужно
и должно поступиться, дабы достичь того, чего Надо достичь. Двоечник
абсолютно уверен, что поступаться не имеет смысла ничем, поэтому поступается
он только тем, что ему неважно. Ему многое неважно. Собственно, ему
по-прежнему важно исключительно чтобы было интересно и особо не дёргали. В
слове <особо> проявляется последняя уступка, которую двоечник делает
обществу.

Отличник работает как плуг: равномерно пашет, оставляя за собой глубокую
борозду.

Двоечник работает как взрыв. Пусто, пусто, пусто, покер.

И отличники, и двоечники бывают талантливыми. И двоечники, и отличники
бывают блестящими. Из блестящих отличников получаются миллионеры и
президенты корпораций, а из блестящих двоечников - писатели-поэты,
программисты-инженеры и прочая творческая соль земли, не отягощенная
излишней социализацией.

Из нормальных способных отличников выходят хорошие специалисты с приличной
зарплатой. Из нормальных способных двоечников получаются люди свободных
профессий, работающие на себя и получающие то штуку в день, то фигу в месяц.
К тому же, в любой системе исправно кормится довольно большое количество
двоечников, которые время от времени подают более или менее гениальные идеи,
за что им сквозь зубы прощают постоянные опоздания, отпуска в самый
неподходящий момент и непрерывные кончины любимых родственников во все
остальное время.

Из неудачных отличников всё равно получаются неплохие специалисты с
нормальной зарплатой - просто потому, что абсолютно неудачных отличников не
бывает. Отличники так устроены: они не в состоянии работать плохо.
А вот что получается из неудачных двоечников, не знает никто. Потому что кто
же из гордых двоечников сознается даже себе самому в том, что именно он -
неудачный?

Два класса, как и положено, испытывают друг к другу классовую ненависть.
Отличники считают двоечников везучими бездельниками, получающими дары от
жизни за красивые глаза. Если при этом конкретный двоечник хотя бы неудачлив
в той сфере, которая кажется отличнику наиболее важной (скажем, у него
постоянно нет денег, потому что он не готов работать в системе, или он лишен
личной жизни, потому что кто ж пойдет за такое счастье), отличники готовы
отнестись к нему снисходительно. Но если двоечник живет, как считает нужным,
работает, как ему нравится, имеет за это много денег и счастливо влюблён -
любой отличник при виде него испытает законное возмущение. Лучше всего
двоечнику быть пьяницей - тогда отличники будут его любить. Потому что сами
они, разумеется, никогда.

Двоечники, со своей стороны, убеждены, что отличники - примитивные зануды,
не умеющие вставать не по будильнику и жить не по указке. Смягчить их
отношение может, допустим, явное отвращение отличника к собственной работе.
Или небольшая клиническая депрессия, а ещё лучше - нервный срыв. Или хотя бы
осознание отличником бедности своей серенькой дорожки перед вершинами
горного пути свободного двоечника. Если же отличник занят важным и
интересным делом, получает большие деньги, здоров и хоть убей не понимает,
чем его жизнь хуже жизни Ван Гога без ушей - гордая птица двоечник будет его
презирать. Это презрение сродни тому, которым обливает веснушчатый пацан с
дыркой на штанах и пальцами в чернилах аккуратного мальчика с челочкой и
носовым платком.

Зато тот, с веснушками, может бегать по лужам и пинать консервные банки.
Зато этого, с челочкой, постоянно ставят ему в пример. В глубине души оба
класса смутно завидуют друг другу - потому что та, вторая сторона, умеет то,
чего не умеет эта.

* * *

Отличница точно знает, что в доме должна быть еда, в холодильнике -
продукты, а полы в квартире надо мыть хотя бы раз в неделю.
Двоечница считает, что между мужчиной и женщиной должно быть равноправие.
Равноправие выражается в том, что она выходит за него замуж, а он делает за
неё всё остальное.

Отличница заводит детей, потому что она женщина, воспитывает их - потому,
что она мать, и помогает родителям, потому что она дочь.
Двоечница заводит детей, потому что интересно, какие у них будут рожи, не
воспитывает их вообще, потому что и так сойдет, и помогает родителям, потому
что иначе они не отстанут.

Отличница никогда не пустит своего мужа на работу в грязной рубашке.
Двоечница не считает нужным проверять, надел ли он рубашку вообще.
Отличница скорее удавится, чем подаст семье на ужин сосиски.
Двоечница скорее удавится, чем задумается об ужине.

Да, а ещё отличницы умеют гладить. Бельё. Утюгом. Двоечницы, как правило,
считают, что <чистое> означает <красивое>, а гладят чаще всего голую кожу.
Рукой. Впрочем, это отличницы тоже умеют - когда находят время, свободное от
дел.

А зато отличница следит за модой, за фигурой, за лишним весом и за
репутацией семьи.

А зато двоечница не знает, что слово <оргазмы> существует в единственном
числе.

Логично было бы предположить, что межклассовых браков почти не бывает, но
это не так. Двоечники часто любят отличниц - потому как порядок в доме и без
вопросов ясно, кто у нас в паре блин творческая личность. Отличники порой
влюбляются в двоечниц - потому что стирать носки невелико искусство, а вот
настолько искренне улыбаться, спрашивая <милый, что у нас на ужин?>, умеет
далеко не всякий.

Создаются, безусловно, и идеальные пары. Двое отличников, живущие вместе,
могут достичь невиданых карьерных высот, заработать миллионы, выстроить
огромный дом и вырастить кучу румяных детей. А влюбленные двоечники способны
изобрести вечный двигатель, соорудить из него ероплан и улететь куда-нибудь
к такой-то матери и всеобщему удовлетворению.

Но двоим отличникам при этом часто невыносимо скучно друг с другом.
А пара двоечников зарастёт грязью по уши и умрёт от голода, потому что ни
один из них не согласится встать пораньше, чтобы пойти и получить на вечный
двигатель патент. Точнее, один согласится, но проспит. А второй пообещает
его разбудить, но забудет.

* * *

Вы считаете, я преувеличиваю?

Ну да. Я и самa так считаю.

Но попробуйте вспомнить, в котором часу вы сегодня вставали. И кто при этом
лежал с вами рядом. И что он делал. И что вы о нем подумали.

NYT: The Rock Star's Burden, or why Ireland is like Malawi




By PAUL THEROUX
Hale'iwa, Hawaii

THERE are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment. If Christmas, season of sob stories, has turned me into Scrooge, I recognize the Dickensian counterpart of Paul Hewson - who calls himself "Bono" - as Mrs. Jellyby in "Bleak House." Harping incessantly on her adopted village of Borrioboola-Gha "on the left bank of the River Niger," Mrs. Jellyby tries to save the Africans by financing them in coffee growing and encouraging schemes "to turn pianoforte legs and establish an export trade," all the while badgering people for money.
It seems to have been Africa's fate to become a theater of empty talk and public gestures. But the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit. Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.

I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts like the Malawi Children's Village. I am speaking of the "more money" platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for - and this never happens. Dumping more money in the same old way is not only wasteful, but stupid and harmful; it is also ignoring some obvious points.
read more

If Malawi is worse educated, more plagued by illness and bad services, poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early 60's, it is not for lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of financial aid, and yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state.

In the early and mid-1960's, we believed that Malawi would soon be self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that rather than sending a limited wave of volunteers to train local instructors, for decades we kept on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated. When Malawi's university was established, more foreign teachers were welcomed, few of them replaced by Malawians, for political reasons. Medical educators also arrived from elsewhere. Malawi began graduating nurses, but the nurses were lured away to Britain and Australia and the United States, which meant more foreign nurses were needed in Malawi.

When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing.

Mr. Gates has said candidly that he wants to rid himself of his burden of billions. Bono is one of his trusted advisers. Mr. Gates wants to send computers to Africa - an unproductive not to say insane idea. I would offer pencils and paper, mops and brooms: the schools I have seen in Malawi need them badly. I would not send more teachers. I would expect Malawians themselves to stay and teach. There ought to be an insistence in the form of a bond, or a solemn promise, for Africans trained in medicine and education at the state's expense to work in their own countries.

Malawi was in my time a lush wooded country of three million people. It is now an eroded and deforested land of 12 million; its rivers are clogged with sediment and every year it is subjected to destructive floods. The trees that had kept it whole were cut for fuel and to clear land for subsistence crops. Malawi had two presidents in its first 40 years, the first a megalomaniac who called himself the messiah, the second a swindler whose first official act was to put his face on the money. Last year the new man, Bingu wa Mutharika, inaugurated his regime by announcing that he was going to buy a fleet of Maybachs, one of the most expensive cars in the world.
Many of the schools where we taught 40 years ago are now in ruins - covered with graffiti, with broken windows, standing in tall grass. Money will not fix this. A highly placed Malawian friend of mine once jovially demanded that my children come and teach there. "It would be good for them," he said.

Of course it would be good for them. Teaching in Africa was one of the best things I ever did. But our example seems to have counted for very little. My Malawian friend's children are of course working in the United States and Britain. It does not occur to anyone to encourage Africans themselves to volunteer in the same way that foreigners have done for decades. There are plenty of educated and capable young adults in Africa who would make a much greater difference than Peace Corps workers.

Africa is a lovely place - much lovelier, more peaceful and more resilient and, if not prosperous, innately more self-sufficient than it is usually portrayed. But because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth. Such people come in all forms and they loom large. White celebrities busy-bodying in Africa loom especially large. Watching Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie recently in Ethiopia, cuddling African children and lecturing the world on charity, the image that immediately sprang to my mind was Tarzan and Jane.

Bono, in his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a 10-gallon hat, not only believes that he has the solution to Africa's ills, he is also shouting so loud that other people seem to trust his answers. He traveled in 2002 to Africa with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, urging debt forgiveness. He recently had lunch at the White House, where he expounded upon the "more money" platform and how African countries are uniquely futile.

But are they? Had Bono looked closely at Malawi he would have seen an earlier incarnation of his own Ireland. Both countries were characterized for centuries by famine, religious strife, infighting, unruly families, hubristic clan chiefs, malnutrition, failed crops, ancient orthodoxies, dental problems and fickle weather. Malawi had a similar sense of grievance, was also colonized by absentee British landlords and was priest-ridden, too.

Just a few years ago you couldn't buy condoms legally in Ireland, nor could you get a divorce, though (just like in Malawi) buckets of beer were easily available and unruly crapulosities a national curse. Ireland, that island of inaction, in Joyce's words, "the old sow that eats her farrow," was the Malawi of Europe, and for many identical reasons, its main export being immigrants.

It is a melancholy thought that it is easier for many Africans to travel to New York or London than to their own hinterlands. Much of northern Kenya is a no-go area; there is hardly a road to the town of Moyale, on the Ethiopian border, where I found only skinny camels and roving bandits. Western Zambia is off the map, southern Malawi is terra incognita, northern Mozambique is still a sea of land mines. But it is pretty easy to leave Africa. A recent World Bank study has confirmed that the emigration to the West of skilled people from small to medium-sized countries in Africa has been disastrous.

Africa has no real shortage of capable people - or even of money. The patronizing attention of donors has done violence to Africa's belief in itself, but even in the absence of responsible leadership, Africans themselves have proven how resilient they can be - something they never get credit for. Again, Ireland may be the model for an answer. After centuries of wishing themselves onto other countries, the Irish found that education, rational government, people staying put, and simple diligence could turn Ireland from an economic basket case into a prosperous nation. In a word - are you listening, Mr. Hewson? - the Irish have proved that there is something to be said for staying home.

Paul Theroux is the author of "Blinding Light" and of "Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town."

How to Prepare a Kiwi




December 13, 2005

War in Africa


My friend from Florida just sent me a collection of photos from "Somewhere in Africa" that is very disturbing by its sheer quiet uneventfulness - it feels like a typical day in the life of all these teenagers. You have to see 'em to believe 'em. All 31 photos can be found here

Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't.


By Carl Zimmer

I drove into New Haven on a recent morning with a burning question on my mind. How did my daughter do against the chimpanzees?
A month before, I had found a letter in the cubby of my daughter Charlotte at her preschool. It was from a graduate student at Yale asking for volunteers for a psychological study. The student, Derek Lyons, wanted to observe how 3- and 4-year-olds learn. I was curious, so I got in touch. Mr. Lyons explained how his study might shed light on human evolution.
His study would build on a paper published in the July issue of the journal Animal Cognition by Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten, two psychologists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten described the way they showed young chimps how to retrieve food from a box.
The box was painted black and had a door on one side and a bolt running across the top. The food was hidden in a tube behind the door. When they showed the chimpanzees how to retrieve the food, the researchers added some unnecessary steps. Before they opened the door, they pulled back the bolt and tapped the top of the box with a stick. Only after they had pushed the bolt back in place did they finally open the door and fish out the food.
Because the chimps could not see inside, they could not tell that the extra steps were unnecessary. As a result, when the chimps were given the box, two-thirds faithfully imitated the scientists to retrieve the food.
The team then used a box with transparent walls and found a strikingly different result. Those chimps could see that the scientists were wasting their time sliding the bolt and tapping the top. None followed suit. They all went straight for the door.
read more

The researchers turned to humans. They showed the transparent box to 16 children from a Scottish nursery school. After putting a sticker in the box, they showed the children how to retrieve it. They included the unnecessary bolt pulling and box tapping.
The scientists placed the sticker back in the box and left the room, telling the children that they could do whatever they thought necessary to retrieve it.
The children could see just as easily as the chimps that it was pointless to slide open the bolt or tap on top of the box. Yet 80 percent did so anyway. "It seemed so spectacular to me," Mr. Lyons said. "It suggested something remarkable was going on."
It was possible, however, that the results might come from a simple desire in the children just to play along. To see how deep this urge to overimitate went, Mr. Lyons came up with new experiments with the transparent box. He worked with a summer intern, Andrew Young, a senior at Carnegie Mellon, to build other puzzles using Tupperware, wire baskets and bits of wood. And Mr. Lyons planned out a much larger study, with 100 children.
I was intrigued. I signed up Charlotte, and she participated in the study twice, first at the school and later at Mr. Lyons's lab.
Charlotte didn't feel like talking about either experience beyond saying they were fun. As usual, she was more interested in talking about atoms and princesses.
Mr. Lyons was more eager to talk. He invited me to go over Charlotte's performance at the Yale Cognition and Development Lab, led by Mr. Lyons's adviser, Frank C. Keil.
Driving into New Haven for our meeting, I felt as if Charlotte had just taken some kind of interspecies SAT. It was silly, but I hoped that Charlotte would show the chimps that she could see cause and effect as well as they could. Score one for Homo sapiens.
At first, she did. Mr. Lyons loaded a movie on his computer in which Charlotte eagerly listened to him talk about the transparent plastic box.
He set it in front of her and asked her to retrieve the plastic turtle that he had just put inside. Rather than politely opening the front door, Charlotte grabbed the entire front side, ripped it open at its Velcro tabs and snatched the turtle. "I've got it!" she shouted.
A chimp couldn't have done better, I thought.
But at their second meeting, things changed. This time, Mr. Lyons had an undergraduate, Jennifer Barnes, show Charlotte how to open the box. Before she opened the front door, Ms. Barnes slid the bolt back across the top of the box and tapped on it needlessly. Charlotte imitated every irrelevant step. The box ripping had disappeared. I could almost hear the chimps hooting.
Ms. Barnes showed Charlotte four other puzzles, and time after time she overimitated. When the movies were over, I wasn't sure what to say. "So how did she do?" I asked awkwardly.
"She's pretty age-typical," Mr. Lyons said. Having watched 100 children, he agrees with Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten that children really do overimitate. He has found that it is very hard to get children not to.
If they rush through opening a puzzle, they don't skip the extra steps. They just do them all faster. What makes the results even more intriguing is that the children understand the laws of physics well enough to solve the puzzles on their own. Charlotte's box ripping is proof of that.
Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions.
As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn't understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate.
Not long ago, many psychologists thought that imitation was a simple, primitive action compared with figuring out the intentions of others. But that is changing. "Maybe imitation is a lot more sophisticated than people thought," Mr. Lyons said.
We don't appreciate just how automatically we rely on imitation, because usually it serves us so well. "It is so adaptive that it almost never sticks out this way," he added. "You have to create very artificial circumstances to see it."
In a few years, I plan to explain this experience to Charlotte. I want her to know what I now know. That it's O.K. to lose to the chimps. In fact, it may be what makes us uniquely human.

December 11, 2005

Extraordinarily Graceful Exits from Power


Rob McBroom-The Death of George Washington
by Nicholas Guyatt

His Excellency George Washington by Joseph Ellis
[ Buy from the London Review Bookshop ] ·
Faber, 320 pp, £20.00

The current US president likes to talk about his predecessor ‘the first George W.’, but it’s hard to imagine two politicians with more different styles. George Bush invites world leaders to barbeques at his Texas ranch, and gives nicknames to the members of his cabinet. (‘Pablo’ for the hapless Paul O’Neill; ‘Z-Man’ for Robert Zoellick.)
George Washington, on the other hand, was so aloof that even his contemporaries tried to make light of the fact. According to one story, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Alexander Hamilton dared his fellow delegate Gouverneur Morris to clap General Washington on the shoulder and offer him a hearty greeting.
It’s easy to imagine the response of President Bush to such an approach: Morris would have received a warm embrace, or perhaps a punch to the gut, and a friendly word or two. The first George W. was not so forthcoming. Morris placed his hand on Washington’s shoulder, and declared that he was happy to see his ‘dear General’ looking so well; Washington removed his hand and silently glared at him. Morris retreated into the crowd.
read more

Washington occupied and defined the two most important roles in America’s early history: he led the Continental Army between 1775 and 1783, and was the first president of the United States, from 1789 to 1797. During this time, the 13 colonies established their independence from Britain, and the new constitution was ratified and put into practice. But Washington’s reputation is also dependent, to an unusual extent, on what he refused to do as a leader. In 1783, he resigned his commission and returned to his plantation at Mount Vernon in Virginia, declining either to direct the new civilian government or to convert the military into an instrument of political control, although the Continental Congress was in disarray, and some of his fellow officers believed that a military coup might be in the nation’s best interests. Again in 1796, as he neared the end of his second term as president, Washington opted for retirement rather than another four years of executive office, so setting a precedent for the regular rotation of the presidency that survived until Franklin Roosevelt’s third election victory of 1940. (In 1951, the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution ensured that FDR would be the only exception to Washington’s rule.) If his 1783 resignation preserved the infant republic from the threat of military dictatorship, Washington’s retirement in 1797 confirmed that American presidents could never emulate the monarchs of Europe. Both acts of personal renunciation were formative to the development of the United States, but these dignified retreats do not tell us much about Washington’s activities on the battlefield or in the presidential mansion. How should historians present a man whose fame rests partly on his disappearing acts, and whose character is shrouded by an almost painful formality? It’s no surprise that Joseph Ellis should now venture an answer to this question, having already produced biographies of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, as well as a book about the 1790s, Founding Brothers, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001.

Like many Americans, George Washington took arms against Britain in 1775 resignedly. He was 43, a veteran of the Seven Years’ War and a participant in the Atlantic economy. He had made his name (and his fortune) in the early 1750s, inheriting a plantation from his half-brother Lawrence and leading military expeditions intended to prise the Ohio Country from the French and their Native American allies. In the ensuing decade, he’d come to believe (correctly) that the British didn’t have much respect for colonial militias and their ambitious leaders, and to suspect (wrongly) that his London agent was bilking him both on his tobacco exports and on the fancy goods imported to embellish his mansion. The Washingtons were hardly natural revolutionaries: Lawrence had urged George to join the Royal Navy (his mother intervened), and he named the family plantation after Admiral Edward Vernon, the hero of Porto Bello. But Washington had had long experience of that combination of arrogance and condescension which defined British policy towards the mainland colonies in the two decades before the Declaration of Independence. When the eventual confrontation between the Redcoats and the colonists took place in Massachusetts in 1775, he was a natural choice to command the new Continental Army. Unlike many of his peers, he knew something about leading troops; better yet, as a Virginian, his appointment would demonstrate to the British that their colonial dispute extended further than fractious New England. In selecting Washington, over a year before the Declaration of Independence, the Congress demonstrated America’s national ambition.

Ellis’s account of the Revolutionary War is invigorating, even if he comes uncomfortably close to arguing that it was God who secured the victory. Divine intervention seems necessary because Ellis’s Washington is refreshingly fallible. He knew little about artillery or cavalry at the start of the conflict, and he displayed a recklessness that would surely have led to disaster, had it not been for the hyper-cautiousness (and, often, incompetence) of the British commanders. The pivotal battle of the war – at Saratoga in the Hudson Valley in October 1777 – was won by the maverick commander Horatio Gates, aided by a motley crew of New England militia. (For Washington, who hated Gates, the militia and New England, this was a bittersweet victory.) The prerequisite for the ultimate American victory was the intervention of France, made possible by the victory at Saratoga and by Benjamin Franklin’s diplomacy in Paris. The French proved to be maddening allies, forever scampering off to the Caribbean to protect their West Indian possessions or shrugging enigmatically at Washington’s overzealous plans for recapturing New York City. But the climactic encounter of the war – the siege of Yorktown in the autumn of 1781 – simply could not have taken place without the work of French engineers, and the almost cinematic good timing of the French navy. Washington had shown himself to be an unyielding commander, but it was Gates and France who provided the foundation for his victory.

Of all the founding fathers, Washington had travelled and read the least. Hamilton was born on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean and, after dazzling local merchants with his grasp of bookkeeping, was sent at their expense to what is now Columbia University in New York. Franklin spent nearly two decades in Britain and France after the Seven Years’ War. Jefferson was the US ambassador to France after the War of Independence, while Adams occupied the same post in London. Washington, by contrast, never left the North American mainland, save for an unfortunate visit to Barbados in 1751 which resulted in his contracting smallpox and the death of his half-brother Lawrence. Similarly, the other founders derived from their prodigious reading vibrant and often discordant ideas about how a society should be organised. Madison emerged as a champion of balanced government; Jefferson indulged a flamboyant belief in personal liberty; Adams produced several exhaustive defences of the new constitution; and Hamilton developed a financial system that would (he claimed) set the United States on the path to global domination. Washington, meanwhile, said and wrote little on the great issues of the
day.

This reticence might seem appropriate in a military commander, but not in the leader of a nation that spent at least two decades after 1783 trying to decide what kind of a republic it wanted to be. The Articles of Confederation of 1781 affirmed the union of the states, but only just. Congress struggled to pay the Continental Army’s salaries and pensions, to settle war debts and to secure foreign credit. In 1787, on the initiative of Madison and Hamilton, delegates from all the states (save for dyspeptic Rhode Island) met in Philadelphia to draft a new constitution. Most of the delegates said something; some said a great deal. Washington, who presided over the convention, said nothing at all. Only on the last day of proceedings did he rise to support a minor clause on Congressional representation, and even this intervention was probably designed to make him seem like an architect (rather than a spectator) of the ‘miracle at Philadelphia’.

The same pattern emerged during his presidency, though with less happy results. In 1787, Hamilton and Madison were in agreement on the need for a stronger union, and collaborated closely to promote ratification of the new constitution. By 1790, however, the nationalist camp had split. Hamilton believed that a strong central government and financial sector were the keys to national development. With an eye on the great innovations of the 1690s – the stock market and the Bank of England – he traced British success in the 18th century to the emergence of a financial class. But Madison and Jefferson saw things differently: the United States, unlike Britain, possessed limitless territory for the creation of an agrarian republic, and while the British countryside was still scarred by the inequities of feudalism and enclosure, white farmers in the United States could prosper without the help of speculators and bankers. Hamilton sought to make the states subservient to a single, national model of development; Madison, and Jefferson even more, believed that the federal government should merely support states and individuals in an agrarian expansionism that was already underway.

During Washington’s two terms in office, this philosophical difference grew into a national crisis. Hamilton presented a financial plan that confirmed the federal government as the nation’s economic master, and Philadelphia hummed with the activity of lobbyists, financiers and other moneyed interests who sensed opportunity. Madison and Jefferson became increasingly critical of Hamilton’s vision, and sought to counter his influence in Washington’s cabinet: first by trying to sway the president himself, and then by creating the Democratic-Republican Party to counter the Federalists. Washington had the authority to resolve this dispute; instead, he deferred to Hamilton – with whom he had served in the Revolutionary War – in ways that bewildered Jefferson and Madison, and eventually persuaded them that the president had lost his grip on affairs.

Ellis employs two strategies to protect Washington’s reputation from this charge. First, he maintains that Washington was a superb manager of men, and that his decision to delegate finance to Hamilton was the act of a great general who realises that he can’t be on every battlefield at once. Perhaps; but it’s worth remembering that Washington failed to preserve unity among the members of his cabinet, and to persuade Jefferson and Madison to share his enthusiasm for Hamilton’s genius. More troublingly, he retained his confidence in Hamilton even as the latter strayed into very murky waters after the presidency had been turned over to John Adams in 1797. In the middle of a ‘quasi-war’ with France, Hamilton devised a plan to create a massive new army to counter the supposed French threat. Washington not only agreed to lead the army but insisted on Hamilton as his deputy, in spite of widespread and well-founded rumours that Hamilton might use the military against the Democratic-Republicans, or march into Florida and Latin America in a pre-emptive attack against Napoleon’s purported American ambitions. Adams’s bold decision in 1799 to sue for peace with France put a stop to this decidedly un-republican scheme, but it’s clear that Washington had placed an alarming amount of faith in his protégé.

Ellis complements his argument about Washington’s skills of delegation by pointing to the president’s successes in the three areas where he took the reins himself: foreign policy, Indian affairs and the creation of the new federal capital. But Ellis’s claims here are also open to question. American foreign policy was held captive by the consequences of the French Revolution, and distorted by the fact that the emerging political parties picked sides in the fight. Washington’s lasting fame as a foreign policy guru derives from his Farewell Address, with its Kissinger-like cadences about the primacy of self-interest in international affairs; yet it was an act of almost sublime disinterest – Adams’s decision to send negotiators to France – that ranks as the most visionary act of foreign policy of the 1790s. Adams knew that he would divide the Federalist party (and ruin his chances of re-election) by suing for peace, but he stunned Hamilton and Washington by doing so anyway.

Ellis presents Washington as a principled defender of Indian rights who was undone by the acquisitiveness of the settlers. In fact, he was always on the side of the settlers, and played a leading role in the long war to take control of the Ohio Valley: a war conditioned, in large part, by the needs of American nationalism. Washington wanted to minimise the continuing British influence over the western frontier, and to use federal troops and legislation to bind white settlers to the new United States. But the war was also waged to secure the commercial potential of the vast interior for the new republic, and in this sense Washington aligned himself (and the federal government) against the native inhabitants.

The construction of the new Federal City was not his finest hour, either. The decision to locate a national capital on the Potomac River was part of a 1790 compromise to persuade Southern representatives to accept Hamilton’s controversial financial plans in Congress. Washington then transferred responsibility for building the capital from the legislature to the executive, and personally directed the project without Congressional oversight. He hired the French architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant, and marked out the site (just a few miles from Mount Vernon) himself. But building a capital on a muggy tidewater turned out to be more difficult than he had imagined. L’Enfant’s design, inspired rather incongruously by Versailles, was wildly overambitious. Washington held a series of auctions for the prized plots which virtually no one attended. In an early episode of Franco-American misunderstanding, L’Enfant protested to Washington that the national capital should be funded by the federal government rather than by speculators, and was subsequently fired. If he had lived past 1799, perhaps the president would have enjoyed the irony that the first long-term inhabitants of the Federal City were his Republican opponents. After John Adams suffered a miserable few months in the unfinished executive mansion in 1800, it was Jefferson and Madison who had to tramp through the mud and drive snakes out of their offices. But the city that bore Washington’s name was a backwater throughout the 19th century, and it was only after Congress dusted off L’Enfant’s plans in 1902 that the American capital attained its current soulless majesty.

If Washington wasn’t a particularly accomplished president, or a genius on the battlefield, are we left with much beyond those two glorious exits? One quality that deserves attention is his indomitableness, the sticking power that enabled him to hold together the Continental Army and the United States during trying times. But this isn’t quite enough for Ellis, who seems reluctant to strip away too many layers of varnish in case there’s nothing underneath. Hence the book’s unsatisfying approach to the vexed issue of slavery. More than 300 slaves toiled at Mount Vernon; in his retirement, Washington would rise at dawn to ensure that they were fully occupied for the day. He provided in his will for the eventual emancipation of his slaves, but he pursued runaways without remorse and, when the federal government moved from New York to Philadelphia in 1790, he devised an elaborate plan to shuttle his slaves back and forth to Mount Vernon every six months to ensure that they didn’t win their freedom under Pennsylvania’s gradual abolition laws.

One might argue that Washington was fairly liberal by the standard of his time: slavery was an integral part of the early republic, and very few white men had the vision or courage to imagine its abolition. Ellis tells a different story: Washington was a committed opponent of slavery, but also a passionate believer in the transformative potential of the United States. Ellis’s Washington chose to put union before abolition. In 1790, Pennsylvania Quakers forced a debate in Congress over the future of slavery; Washington pushed for the dismissal of their petitions, not because he was a defender of slavery but because he realised that the issue could divide the nation. Thus Ellis implies that his apparently blithe dismissal of abolition was a kind of moral triage. First the United States should develop a strong national government, then that government could impose universal liberty on intransigent states, slaveholding individuals and other miscreants out of step with the nation’s original intent.

This isn’t entirely persuasive. In its early decades, the republic did an impressive job of converting land into opportunity for white people, and in promoting liberty and democracy among white men in particular. But this opportunity was secured by the systematic subjugation or expulsion of non-whites. Washington and the other founders crafted a government that was, in effect, a machine for transferring liberty and opportunity from non-whites to whites; and they did this knowingly, though not without occasional pangs of conscience. To reach this conclusion is not to argue that Washington or the other founders were without their merits, but instead to restore them to their political and moral context.

The problem with His Excellency George Washington, as with many books on the founders, is its tendency to assume an essential moral unity in American history. In Ellis’s book, this is achieved by imagining Washington as a closet abolitionist, even a Lincoln-in-waiting, who championed federal power but believed that slavery could only be abolished when the time was right. Jefferson and Madison, meanwhile, become the advocates of a phony nationalism intended to prop up the interests of Virginia or, at best, the South. Ellis has approached this topic before, in Founding Brothers, and buried in that book’s endnotes is the explicit (and extraordinary) claim that ‘a reincarnated Washington would have gone with Lincoln and the Union in 1861.’ This has the virtue of bridging the chasm of the Civil War and bringing today’s Americans into full moral communion with their first president. But it encourages a belief in the integrity of American history that obscures the meaning and distinctiveness of the founding period.

In 1805, John Adams and Benjamin Rush – two of the founders who’d fallen on hard times, relatively speaking – began an occasional and droll correspondence about the national obsession with George Washington. There were sour grapes here, for sure: Adams liked to claim that he was the brains behind the Farewell Address, and both men were amazed that Franklin and Washington had parlayed their Revolutionary fame into extraordinary wealth while other founders and veterans had slipped into penury and obscurity. But their correspondence returned over and over to the abuses of history. Of the first president, Adams observed that ‘I know of no character to which so much hypocritical adulation has been offered.’ Rush, meanwhile, abandoned his plan to write a history of the Revolution: ‘From the immense difference between what I saw and heard of men and things during our Revolution, and the histories that have been given of them, I am disposed to believe with Sir Robert Walpole that all history (that which is contained in the Bible excepted) is a romance, and all romance the only true history.’

These jaded correspondents believed that history was being abused by individuals on the make. Rush declared in 1805 that ‘there are very few true Americans in the United States,’ and he decried the pseudo-patriots who saw in the Union (and in the federal government) the possibility of personal gain. We don’t need to accept this cynicism to take issue with romantic histories of the founding fathers. Perhaps it was necessary in the 1790s, and even in the 1800s, to monumentalise Washington in order to secure America’s uncertain future. To observe that he himself was complicit in this process is not to condemn him; those two extraordinarily graceful exits from power have protected the United States from a Napoleon (or a Tony Blair) and will ensure that the second George W. will leave the White House in January 2009. But the desire felt by Americans in the 21st century to imagine their history as an unbroken enterprise – to touch Lincoln’s mystic chords of memory and hear a founder’s voice – tends towards a sentimentalisation of the early republic that serves neither history nor the needs of the present.


Nicholas Guyatt teaches history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Another American Century? came out in 2003.

December 10, 2005

New Yorker: Everybody's an expert

by LOUIS MENAND
Putting predictions to the test.
Issue of 2005-10-05
Posted 2005-11-28


Prediction is one of the pleasures of life. Conversation would wither without it. “It won’t last. She’ll dump him in a month.” If you’re wrong, no one will call you on it, because being right or wrong isn’t really the point. The point is that you think he’s not worthy of her, and the prediction is just a way of enhancing your judgment with a pleasant prevision of doom. Unless you’re putting money on it, nothing is at stake except your reputation for wisdom in matters of the heart. If a month goes by and they’re still together, the deadline can be extended without penalty. “She’ll leave him, trust me. It’s only a matter of time.” They get married: “Funny things happen. You never know.” You still weren’t wrong. Either the marriage is a bad one—you erred in the right direction—or you got beaten by a low-probability outcome.

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It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones.

“Expert Political Judgment” is not a work of media criticism. Tetlock is a psychologist—he teaches at Berkeley—and his conclusions are based on a long-term study that he began twenty years ago. He picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends,” and he started asking them to assess the probability that various things would or would not come to pass, both in the areas of the world in which they specialized and in areas about which they were not expert. Would there be a nonviolent end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Would Canada disintegrate? (Many experts believed that it would, on the ground that Quebec would succeed in seceding.) And so on. By the end of the study, in 2003, the experts had made 82,361 forecasts. Tetlock also asked questions designed to determine how they reached their judgments, how they reacted when their predictions proved to be wrong, how they evaluated new information that did not support their views, and how they assessed the probability that rival theories and predictions were accurate.

Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.

Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”

People who are not experts in the psychology of expertise are likely (I predict) to find Tetlock’s results a surprise and a matter for concern. For psychologists, though, nothing could be less surprising. “Expert Political Judgment” is just one of more than a hundred studies that have pitted experts against statistical or actuarial formulas, and in almost all of those studies the people either do no better than the formulas or do worse. In one study, college counsellors were given information about a group of high-school students and asked to predict their freshman grades in college. The counsellors had access to test scores, grades, the results of personality and vocational tests, and personal statements from the students, whom they were also permitted to interview. Predictions that were produced by a formula using just test scores and grades were more accurate. There are also many studies showing that expertise and experience do not make someone a better reader of the evidence. In one, data from a test used to diagnose brain damage were given to a group of clinical psychologists and their secretaries. The psychologists’ diagnoses were no better than the secretaries’.

The experts’ trouble in Tetlock’s study is exactly the trouble that all human beings have: we fall in love with our hunches, and we really, really hate to be wrong. Tetlock describes an experiment that he witnessed thirty years ago in a Yale classroom. A rat was put in a T-shaped maze. Food was placed in either the right or the left transept of the T in a random sequence such that, over the long run, the food was on the left sixty per cent of the time and on the right forty per cent. Neither the students nor (needless to say) the rat was told these frequencies. The students were asked to predict on which side of the T the food would appear each time. The rat eventually figured out that the food was on the left side more often than the right, and it therefore nearly always went to the left, scoring roughly sixty per cent—D, but a passing grade. The students looked for patterns of left-right placement, and ended up scoring only fifty-two per cent, an F. The rat, having no reputation to begin with, was not embarrassed about being wrong two out of every five tries. But Yale students, who do have reputations, searched for a hidden order in the sequence. They couldn’t deal with forty-per-cent error, so they ended up with almost fifty-per-cent error.

The expert-prediction game is not much different. When television pundits make predictions, the more ingenious their forecasts the greater their cachet. An arresting new prediction means that the expert has discovered a set of interlocking causes that no one else has spotted, and that could lead to an outcome that the conventional wisdom is ignoring. On shows like “The McLaughlin Group,” these experts never lose their reputations, or their jobs, because long shots are their business. More serious commentators differ from the pundits only in the degree of showmanship. These serious experts—the think tankers and area-studies professors—are not entirely out to entertain, but they are a little out to entertain, and both their status as experts and their appeal as performers require them to predict futures that are not obvious to the viewer. The producer of the show does not want you and me to sit there listening to an expert and thinking, I could have said that. The expert also suffers from knowing too much: the more facts an expert has, the more information is available to be enlisted in support of his or her pet theories, and the more chains of causation he or she can find beguiling. This helps explain why specialists fail to outguess non-specialists. The odds tend to be with the obvious.

Tetlock’s experts were also no different from the rest of us when it came to learning from their mistakes. Most people tend to dismiss new information that doesn’t fit with what they already believe. Tetlock found that his experts used a double standard: they were much tougher in assessing the validity of information that undercut their theory than they were in crediting information that supported it. The same deficiency leads liberals to read only The Nation and conservatives to read only National Review. We are not natural falsificationists: we would rather find more reasons for believing what we already believe than look for reasons that we might be wrong. In the terms of Karl Popper’s famous example, to verify our intuition that all swans are white we look for lots more white swans, when what we should really be looking for is one black swan.

Also, people tend to see the future as indeterminate and the past as inevitable. If you look backward, the dots that lead up to Hitler or the fall of the Soviet Union or the attacks on September 11th all connect. If you look forward, it’s just a random scatter of dots, many potential chains of causation leading to many possible outcomes. We have no idea today how tomorrow’s invasion of a foreign land is going to go; after the invasion, we can actually persuade ourselves that we knew all along. The result seems inevitable, and therefore predictable. Tetlock found that, consistent with this asymmetry, experts routinely misremembered the degree of probability they had assigned to an event after it came to pass. They claimed to have predicted what happened with a higher degree of certainty than, according to the record, they really did. When this was pointed out to them, by Tetlock’s researchers, they sometimes became defensive.

And, like most of us, experts violate a fundamental rule of probabilities by tending to find scenarios with more variables more likely. If a prediction needs two independent things to happen in order for it to be true, its probability is the product of the probability of each of the things it depends on. If there is a one-in-three chance of x and a one-in-four chance of y, the probability of both x and y occurring is one in twelve. But we often feel instinctively that if the two events “fit together” in some scenario the chance of both is greater, not less. The classic “Linda problem” is an analogous case. In this experiment, subjects are told, “Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” They are then asked to rank the probability of several possible descriptions of Linda today. Two of them are “bank teller” and “bank teller and active in the feminist movement.” People rank the second description higher than the first, even though, logically, its likelihood is smaller, because it requires two things to be true—that Linda is a bank teller and that Linda is an active feminist—rather than one.

Plausible detail makes us believers. When subjects were given a choice between an insurance policy that covered hospitalization for any reason and a policy that covered hospitalization for all accidents and diseases, they were willing to pay a higher premium for the second policy, because the added detail gave them a more vivid picture of the circumstances in which it might be needed. In 1982, an experiment was done with professional forecasters and planners. One group was asked to assess the probability of “a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983,” and another group was asked to assess the probability of “a Russian invasion of Poland, and a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983.” The experts judged the second scenario more likely than the first, even though it required two separate events to occur. They were seduced by the detail.



It was no news to Tetlock, therefore, that experts got beaten by formulas. But he does believe that he discovered something about why some people make better forecasters than other people. It has to do not with what the experts believe but with the way they think. Tetlock uses Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor from Archilochus, from his essay on Tolstoy, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” to illustrate the difference. He says:

Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess.


A hedgehog is a person who sees international affairs to be ultimately determined by a single bottom-line force: balance-of-power considerations, or the clash of civilizations, or globalization and the spread of free markets. A hedgehog is the kind of person who holds a great-man theory of history, according to which the Cold War does not end if there is no Ronald Reagan. Or he or she might adhere to the “actor-dispensability thesis,” according to which Soviet Communism was doomed no matter what. Whatever it is, the big idea, and that idea alone, dictates the probable outcome of events. For the hedgehog, therefore, predictions that fail are only “off on timing,” or are “almost right,” derailed by an unforeseeable accident. There are always little swerves in the short run, but the long run irons them out.

Foxes, on the other hand, don’t see a single determining explanation in history. They tend, Tetlock says, “to see the world as a shifting mixture of self-fulfilling and self-negating prophecies: self-fulfilling ones in which success breeds success, and failure, failure but only up to a point, and then self-negating prophecies kick in as people recognize that things have gone too far.”

Tetlock did not find, in his sample, any significant correlation between how experts think and what their politics are. His hedgehogs were liberal as well as conservative, and the same with his foxes. (Hedgehogs were, of course, more likely to be extreme politically, whether rightist or leftist.) He also did not find that his foxes scored higher because they were more cautious—that their appreciation of complexity made them less likely to offer firm predictions. Unlike hedgehogs, who actually performed worse in areas in which they specialized, foxes enjoyed a modest benefit from expertise. Hedgehogs routinely over-predicted: twenty per cent of the outcomes that hedgehogs claimed were impossible or nearly impossible came to pass, versus ten per cent for the foxes. More than thirty per cent of the outcomes that hedgehogs thought were sure or near-sure did not, against twenty per cent for foxes.

The upside of being a hedgehog, though, is that when you’re right you can be really and spectacularly right. Great scientists, for example, are often hedgehogs. They value parsimony, the simpler solution over the more complex. In world affairs, parsimony may be a liability—but, even there, there can be traps in the kind of highly integrative thinking that is characteristic of foxes. Elsewhere, Tetlock has published an analysis of the political reasoning of Winston Churchill. Churchill was not a man who let contradictory information interfere with his idées fixes. This led him to make the wrong prediction about Indian independence, which he opposed. But it led him to be right about Hitler. He was never distracted by the contingencies that might combine to make the elimination of Hitler unnecessary.



Tetlock also has an unscientific point to make, which is that “we as a society would be better off if participants in policy debates stated their beliefs in testable forms”—that is, as probabilities—“monitored their forecasting performance, and honored their reputational bets.” He thinks that we’re suffering from our primitive attraction to deterministic, overconfident hedgehogs. It’s true that the only thing the electronic media like better than a hedgehog is two hedgehogs who don’t agree. Tetlock notes, sadly, a point that Richard Posner has made about these kinds of public intellectuals, which is that most of them are dealing in “solidarity” goods, not “credence” goods. Their analyses and predictions are tailored to make their ideological brethren feel good—more white swans for the white-swan camp. A prediction, in this context, is just an exclamation point added to an analysis. Liberals want to hear that whatever conservatives are up to is bound to go badly; when the argument gets more nuanced, they change the channel. On radio and television and the editorial page, the line between expertise and advocacy is very blurry, and pundits behave exactly the way Tetlock says they will. Bush Administration loyalists say that their predictions about postwar Iraq were correct, just a little off on timing; pro-invasion liberals who are now trying to dissociate themselves from an adventure gone bad insist that though they may have sounded a false alarm, they erred “in the right direction”—not really a mistake at all.

The same blurring characterizes professional forecasters as well. The predictions on cable news commentary shows do not have life-and-death side effects, but the predictions of people in the C.I.A. and the Pentagon plainly do. It’s possible that the psychologists have something to teach those people, and, no doubt, psychologists are consulted. Still, the suggestion that we can improve expert judgment by applying the lessons of cognitive science and probability theory belongs to the abiding modern American faith in expertise. As a professional, Tetlock is, after all, an expert, and he would like to believe in expertise. So he is distressed that political forecasters turn out to be as unreliable as the psychological literature predicted, but heartened to think that there might be a way of raising the standard. The hope for a little more accountability is hard to dissent from. It would be nice if there were fewer partisans on television disguised as “analysts” and “experts” (and who would not want to see more foxes?). But the best lesson of Tetlock’s book may be the one that he seems most reluctant to draw: Think for yourself.

Brazilian Butt Fill?



LRB: Operation Barbarella




by Rick Perlstein

Jane Fonda’s War: A Political Biography of an Anti-war Icon by Mary Hershberger [ Buy from the London Review Bookshop ] · New Press, 228 pp, £13.99

You don’t know America if you don’t know the Jane Fonda cult. Or rather, the anti-Fonda cult. At places where soldiers or former soldiers congregate, there’ll be stickers of her likeness on the urinals; one is an invitation to symbolic rape: Fonda in her 1980s ‘work-out’ costume, her legs splayed, pudenda at the bulls-eye. Every night at lights-out midshipmen at the US Naval Academy cry out ‘Goodnight, bitch!’ in her honour. They’ve learned, Carol Burke writes in her study of military folklore, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane and the High-and-Tight, what you learn at all the service academies: ‘that being a real warrior and hating Jane Fonda are synonymous.’* When Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial was built on the Washington Mall, well-organised veterans who criticised it as the ‘gook monument’ – Lin is Chinese-American – were allowed to open their own kiosks nearby. These became the cult’s temples, the places to buy its sacraments and phylacteries; bumper stickers, for example, saying ‘Jane Fonda: John Kerry with Tits’. Phyllis Schlafly and Tom Wolfe have both described the memorial wall as a ‘monument to Jane Fonda’.

A set of urban legends has sprung up around her visit to Hanoi in the summer of 1972: a prisoner of war, ordered by his captors to describe his ‘lenient and humane’ treatment to the visiting actress, spat on her instead and was beaten almost into blindness; prisoners secretly gave her their social security numbers to prove their existence to the outside world – Fonda turned the numbers over to their captors and men were supposed to have died from the beatings that followed. The reliability of such tales is suggested by a piece that appeared in the Washington Times, a right-wing daily, in 1989: a former pow, Air Force Major Fred Cherry, recalled Fonda’s voice ringing out over the prison public address system during an ‘extended torture siege’ in 1967. Fonda didn’t speak out against the war until 1970.
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The cult matured in the 1980s when America finally began to accept that it had lost a war which hadn’t been worth fighting in the first place. This was around the time Ronald Reagan observed: ‘Boy, I saw Rambo last night. Now I know what to do next time this happens.’ The moment had come to fix the blame where it properly belonged: not on Lyndon Johnson, not on Richard Nixon, but, as Burke points out, on the oldest story in the world, ‘the seductive woman who turns out to be a snake’.

Last year, the Fonda cult allowed thousands, even millions of anguished veterans and their sympathisers to hold onto their shaky faith in American innocence, while acting as the conduit for the character assassination of the Democratic presidential candidate. ‘They’re the men who served with John Kerry in Vietnam,’ the announcer said in the notorious TV commercial produced by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. ‘And they’re the men who spent years in North Vietnamese prison camps. Tortured for refusing to confess what John Kerry accused them of . . . of being war criminals.’ The tropes come straight from the Fonda mythology. A doctored photograph was circulated (it showed up in several newspapers) showing Kerry on a speakers’ platform with Fonda. The picture was found to be a fake, but the association had already been planted. ‘John Kerry with Tits’: five syllables full of implications for the politics of gender, power and anxiety in America.

In Jane Fonda’s War Mary Hershberger does a good job of describing how this state of affairs came about. The story begins with an apolitical young woman whose anti-Communist convictions were so conventional that in 1959 she accepted the ceremonial title of ‘Miss Army Recruiter’. A budding Method-trained actress, the daughter of an American icon, she fell in love with Roger Vadim, the Nouvelle Vague’s ‘pope of hedonism’, and assumed the particularly confining public role of sexually liberated woman. Thanks to Vadim’s productions, her naked image was consumed like no other American actress’s – in one case eight storeys high, on a billboard over a Broadway theatre promoting 1964’s Circle of Love. Barbarella (1968), starring Fonda as an instantly available space nymph, was pornography in all but name. The poster, the New York Times Saigon bureau chief A.J. Langguth later recalled, ‘was a favourite GI pin-up’.

In 1965 the pin-up shot a movie in Louisiana, during which the (racially mixed) cast received death threats. She saw the 1967 Pentagon protest on TV while living in Paris: ‘I watched women walking up to the bayonets that were surrounding the Pentagon and they were not afraid. It was the soldiers who were afraid. I will never forget that experience. It completely changed me.’ She watched the Tet Offensive unfold, and like many Americans, finally understood how badly she’d been lied to about Vietnam. She read. She gave birth to Vadim’s child, then separated from him and returned to the US to make They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? She decided to stay. By the spring of 1969 – they called it ‘finding yourself’ back then – she took off for a Wanderjahr around the country, and made university campuses and anti-war GI coffee houses the bases of her itinerary.

Hershberger writes in detail about these early months of Fonda’s anti-war activism. She never pulled rank as a celebrity. She sat on the floor of student lounges when she visited universities – listening, mostly. She was drawn to anti-war GIs and former GIs, not revolutionary ideologists: the most working-class part of the movement, the unglamorous, empirical witnesses. She gave her first formal speech only when begged to do so, under the pressure of events, after four students were shot dead at Kent State in Ohio on 4 May 1970. She would appear anywhere she was asked, no matter how small; she stuffed envelopes, manned phone banks, moved to grey Detroit when that was what it took to get the 1971 ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings off the ground, in which a procession of veterans described the atrocities they had seen or committed. ‘I was a little surprised by her manner – no dramatics, no hip slang, no affectation,’ a journalist is quoted as saying. ‘She conveyed optimism and faith in the democratic process. She got a standing ovation.’ Hershberger’s Fonda is not particularly radical, determinedly non-chic.

Another important detail: opposing the war, at this particular time, was not a radical thing to do. Vietnam was widely recognised across the political spectrum as a disaster. In one of her rare forays into cultural criticism, Hershberger usefully characterises They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, which was showing in the spring of 1970, as an allegory of American perceptions of the war. Fonda plays a contestant in a Depression-era marathon dance contest. ‘The marathon dancers are told that they can survive their ordeal by dancing to “victory” . . . The bodies of the downed dancers are like fallen soldiers on the battlefield, with doctors and nurses on the sidelines ready to patch them up and send them back to the dance floor, where they wear the glassy-eyed stare of the shell-shocked soldier.’

The security establishment began its battle against Fonda almost as soon as she started speaking out. Teams of FBI informants reported her every word, combed her speeches for violations of the 1917 Espionage Act, which criminalises incitement to ‘insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty in the military’, and ‘disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government of the United States’. She proved a disappointment. Profanity was not her style. As for incitement, we learn from one informant – a chaplain’s assistant – that she thought it ‘would not help the cause of peace’. He added that nothing she said ‘could be construed to be undermining the US government’.

The government got desperate. At Cleveland airport the FBI arranged for her to be stopped at customs. During her interrogation she pushed aside agents who refused her access to the bathroom, so they arrested her for assaulting an officer. She had in her possession mysterious pills marked B, L and D, so they also charged her with narcotics smuggling – for carrying vitamins to be taken with breakfast, lunch and dinner. Her daughter was followed to kindergarten. (America needed to know: did her school teach ‘an anti-law enforcement attitude’?) They investigated her bank accounts. They tapped their network of friendly media propagandists, like the future Senator Jesse Helms, then a TV editorialist, who supplied an invented quotation that still circulates as part of the Fonda cult’s liturgy. Supposedly asked – it isn’t clear where or by whom – how far America should go to the left, she said, according to Helms: ‘If everyone knew what it meant, we would all be on our knees praying that we would, as soon as possible, be able to live under . . . within a Communist structure.’ A death threat against her was sent to Henry Fonda’s house with a demand for $50,000. He took the letter to the same FBI office that was directing the campaign against his daughter. ‘The FBI files reveal no effort to find the sender of the letter,’ Hershberger remarks.

The campaign appears to have been co-ordinated with the White House, and underway long before Fonda went to Hanoi. Hershberger is an assiduous researcher, but she could have got a better idea of the extent of this co-ordination by studying the Nixon Oval Office tapes at the National Archives. On 2 May 1970, Nixon told his aides that protesters were to be accused of ‘giving aid and comfort to the enemy’. On 9 May, Nixon’s enforcer Chuck Colson told the FBI to send its Fonda files directly to the White House. ‘What Brezhnev and Jane Fonda said got about the same treatment,’ an aide later recalled.

Why the obsession? What threat did a pin-up pose? Timing is one clue. May 1970 was when Nixon, having won the presidency promising to draw down the war, expanded it into Cambodia instead. It was a massively unpopular move. Fonda popped up at a moment of maximum political danger, just when the president needed to isolate and destroy his critics.
Another thing to take into account is Fonda’s public image. It’s easy to lose sight now of the time when she was seen as all apple-cheeked patriotism and plain-spoken idealism – almost like Henry Fonda himself. There was a pattern: the first anti-war figure to become the object of excessive government attention was Dr Spock, whose massively popular child-rearing manual was read and trusted by millions of American mothers. American GIs associated Jane Fonda with their first blush of innocent adolescent sexuality – think of those Barbarella posters. It was through figures like them, not through mad bombers of the far left, that ordinary Americans might come to the dangerous conviction that their government was not innocent. They were the ones that had to go.

It’s remarkable how many things that we think of as permanent features of American culture can be traced back to specific political operations by the Nixon White House. We now take it as given, for example, that blue-collar voters have always been easy pickings for conservatives appealing to their cultural grievances. But Jefferson Cowie, among others, has shown the extent to which this was the result of a specific political strategy, worked out in response to a specific political problem. Without taking workers’ votes from the Democrats, Nixon would never have been able to achieve the ‘New Majority’ he dreamed of. But to do so by means of economic concessions – previously the only way politicians imagined working-class voters might be wooed – would threaten his business constituency. So Nixon ‘stood the problem on its head’, as Cowie says in Nixon’s Class Struggle (2002), ‘by making workers’ economic interests secondary to an appeal to their allegedly superior moral backbone and patriotic rectitude’. (One part of the strategy was arranging for members of the Teamsters to descend ‘spontaneously’ on protesters carrying Vietcong flags at Nixon appearances. Of course it’s quite possible that the protesters too were hired for the occasion.) It’s not that the potential for that sort of behaviour wasn’t always there. But Nixon had a gift for looking beneath social surfaces to see and exploit subterranean anxieties.

Most Americans opposed the war by the time Nixon started running for re-election; every candidate in 1972, including the dozen or so contenders for the wide-open Democratic nomination (among them Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, the neo-conservative hero), was promising to end it. Most citizens, even if they didn’t fully admit it to themselves, knew that America was losing. But there was something else: the nagging feeling that it was the inability of Americans to get behind the war mission that was causing America to lose. In other words, by 1972, a significant number of Americans – perhaps enough to elect a president – were full of doubts as to whether the imminent humiliation of the United States was partially their own fault. ‘The country’s behind you – 50 per cent,’ Bob Hope told soldiers in South-East Asia. It was funny because it was true. But he stopped telling the joke when it got too true: when more and more GIs counted themselves as members of the other 50 per cent. Soldiers were not a separate species of American; most of them were conscripts. You had to be a pretty dumb dogface not to understand at some level that this was different from the wars you’d been raised on: that it was morally and militarily useless, and that your team was losing – for the first time in American history. And if you were a soldier who suspected the war was wrong, you eventually found yourself wrestling with anger at having stabbed yourself in the back.

Hershberger doesn’t delve much into these matters, but her careful, straightforward account helps us put together the pieces to understand them. Nixon saw a way to bend American rage to his own ends. The pawns he used were people like Fonda, and American prisoners of war. The lot of American prisoners in Hanoi was in many ways worse than that of other pows in the 20th century. The enemy, pointing to America’s refusal to declare war, declared themselves outside the requirements of the Geneva Conventions. They tortured prisoners, at least until 1970, when, most experts agree, international pressure brought such treatment to an end. The lot of those incarcerated in the prisons of America’s South Vietnamese allies, however, was demonstrably worse. They were kept in ‘tiger cages’ that turned them, year by year (according to Time magazine, a reliably pro-Saigon organ, on their release in 1973), into ‘grotesque sculptures of scarred flesh and gnarled limbs . . . skittering across the floor on buttocks and palms’.

The tiger cages were exposed by the anti-war movement in 1969, the first year of Nixon’s presidency. Shortly afterwards, the Vietcong released two American prisoners. The Pentagon sent them on tour after briefing them to tell stories of torture that journalists demonstrated could not have been true. Lieutenant Robert Frishman said he’d been starved, for example, but he weighed the same after 18 months in the US as he did when he left captivity. Melvin Laird, the defense secretary, told stories of unmitigated horror. Seymour Hersh uncovered a Pentagon letter to pow families reassuring them that this was only a stratagem: ‘We are certain that you will not become unduly concerned over the briefing if you keep in mind the purpose for which it was tailored.’ Hersh also quoted something about Lieutenant Frishman that is key to understanding the Fonda cult as it emerged. An official suggested why Frishman was so useful to the government: ‘He played ball the most’ with his captors, ‘and therefore was the most torn.’ He’d stabbed himself in the back, and was ready to do his penance.

By the time Fonda visited pows in Hanoi in 1972, many more were ‘playing ball’. Using the evidence of their senses, they had turned against the war – especially the bombing war that they, as captured pilots, had themselves prosecuted. Hershberger argues convincingly that ‘by 1971, as many as half of the officers in Hanoi were openly disillusioned about the war.’ Two months before Fonda went to Hanoi, and weeks after the most brutal bombing raids on North Vietnam since the spring of 1968, a group of pows sent a letter to ‘the United States Congress and to all Americans’ demanding a negotiated settlement to end the war. Stockholm Syndrome? Perhaps to some extent. Certainly not torture. These were college-educated, accomplished men, leaders, in a unique position to evaluate the assumptions of the American bombing strategy on its own terms – which were that it would destroy the will of the enemy and make possible an orderly American retreat. ‘No bombing of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam serves to make the withdrawal of American forces any safer,’ they wrote: ‘it only makes it more likely that they cannot be withdrawn at all’ and ‘risks the death and capture of many more Americans, as well as endangering the lives of those already held captive’.

The message was devastating to Nixon’s political goals. Massive bombing of North Vietnam, enough to keep the Communists from overrunning Saigon until after the American election, was the only way Nixon would be able to sell what he was calling ‘peace with honour’. ‘Vietnamisation’ was also calculated to shut down the momentum of the anti-war movement – and, to a certain extent, it did. Stalwarts like Fonda made themselves especially dangerous to Nixon by urging that American policy was now more evil, not less. It ‘removed the war from our minds while it is being inflicted on the bodies of others’, she said, asking: ‘Will the American people say “right on,” our hands are clean because our men aren’t being killed?’
This was the reason for Fonda’s trip. Again, the timing was devastating. She arrived as US bombers appeared to be making preliminary strikes against North Vietnam’s system of dikes, which if breached would destroy farmland and starve the population. The Pentagon denied the raids. At a press conference in Paris Fonda presented film proving that they had taken place. That same day, the State Department cancelled its scheduled rebuttal. One of the diplomats laid low by the humiliation was America’s UN envoy, George H.W. Bush. ‘I think that the best thing I can do on the subject is to shut up,’ he told the press, after promising them evidence of American innocence. No wonder Nixon was keen to attack Fonda.

Her visit to the pows provided the occasion. Fonda, who was carrying 200 letters from the pows’ families, was asked if she would like to meet any prisoners personally. All the captives she met were volunteers, all openly critical of the war. Of course this was the opposite of what the urban legends suppose: that they were tortured into seeing her. But that is the reason the urban legends exist. They are a prophylactic against the anxiety that these pows, the symbolic stand-ins for American innocence, had stabbed themselves in the back.
America was no longer fighting for anything palpable – let alone to contain China, the superpower with which Nixon had just, with great fanfare, established a friendship. The new rationale was entirely circular: we were fighting in order to protect those pows the war was creating. ‘Following the president’s lead,’ Jonathan Schell has written, ‘people began to speak as though the North Vietnamese had kidnapped 400 Americans and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them.’ The Eden this scenario presented to a guilty American conscience was too tempting to pass up – children began wearing bracelets with the names of pows stamped on them. Fonda was the Eve that threatened it.

The anti-war movement, Hershberger demonstrates, was good for pows. Sometimes it secured their early release. It also kept them in touch with their families, something the US government proved unwilling or unable to do: the government accommodated their needs mostly to the extent that they were useful. In one case, on learning that the Vietcong had released a prisoner, the Pentagon hurriedly sent his family a letter he had written two years earlier – two years during which his now enraged family presumed he’d been dead. The government claimed it had been studying the letter for ‘propaganda context’.

The pows were released in the spring of 1973 with the signing of the Paris accord – the same negotiated settlement that the anti-war pows had called for. A carefully selected group of hard-line returnees was paraded around the country in a Pentagon-scripted pageant called Operation Homecoming. These hard-liners were an interesting group. They were older officers, mostly, captured in the early years of the conflict, at a time when its insanity wasn’t quite so obvious. They treated their captivity as an extension of the battlefield. And as the mission to which they had pledged their lives collapsed around their ears, their attitude hardened, their resistance to their captors’ authority becoming ‘a mark of their personal heroism and endurance’. While the nation had been busy losing the war, they were ‘almost desperate’, Steven Roberts, the New York Times reporter who covered the repatriation, wrote, to ‘believe the Vietnam War was worth it and that the president would, in fact, gain “peace with honour”’. They were uniformed prophets of national redemption, preaching, to honour-starved congregations in America’s Knights of Columbus halls and school cafeterias, the message people needed to hear: ‘I want you all to remember,’ they said, ‘that we walked out of Hanoi as winners.’

This made their younger comrades, the kind that met with the likes of Fonda, no better than VC sappers. They were charged with collaboration. The pows who wished to preserve their honour by maintaining that the war was wrong and that they had had a right to criticise it were cast as the agents of American defeat. One, Abel Kavanaugh, facing a court martial, shot himself. Another, David Wesley Hoffman, had been one of the pows who volunteered to meet with Fonda. He hoped to remain in the military. He met with Pentagon officials on his release; then, on 13 April 1973, all three television networks covered a news conference in which he said he’d been hung from a hook by his broken arm until he agreed to meet with her. He may also have been threatened with court martial. To this day he refuses all requests for interviews. George Wald, a Nobel Prize winner in medicine, proved his claim was physiologically impossible. Senator William Fulbright demanded an investigation. The Pentagon refused.

In 1973, the Maryland Legislature pr0posed what would have been the first bill of attainder in its history to ban Fonda from the state and grant the government power to seize all money made from her films. ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to execute her, but I think we should cut her tongue off,’ one legislator argued. The floodgates had been opened. The urinal stickers would not be far behind. Every time Nixon ratcheted down the US commitment to the war, he launched an attack on the people who called on him to ratchet down the commitment. Che Guevara spoke of creating a New Socialist Man. The president’s upright vanguardists in the Operation Homecoming travelling circus did a much more effective job of inventing a new sort of capitalist subject: New Republican Man, willing to believe anything to preserve some semblance of faith in American innocence.

The problem with Jane Fonda’s War is that in place of the hegemonic legend of Jane Fonda as the mother of all sins, Hershberger represents her as St Joan, the perfect martyr: the American addiction to narratives of innocence infects those who would deconstruct them as well. Hershberger sets up the burden of her study right away: ‘The allegations that Fonda betrayed her country and caused harm to American pows in Hanoi are false.’ She nails the case only in its legalistic sense. Beyond that, she is on shaky ground. Hershberger’s Fonda is ever gentle, Quakerish, all hearts and flowers – a figure of absolute innocence. The portrait is undercut by her extensive quotations from Fonda’s broadcasts over Radio Hanoi, intended for the ears of American fliers. They were not seditious. They were, however, simple-minded. ‘These are peasants,’ Fonda said. ‘They grow rice and they rear pigs . . . Perhaps your grandmothers and grandfathers would not be so different from these peasants.’ ‘Are these people so different from our own children, our own mothers, or grandmothers?’ she asked, and answered: ‘They have a surer sense of why they are living and for what they are willing to die.’

Hershberger claims to be shocked that Vietnam veterans wouldn’t grant Fonda unconditional absolution. ‘If the Vietnamese could see the American people as potential friends, Fonda believed, Americans might also see the Vietnamese as such,’ she concludes. ‘She never told the pilots – or any of the GIs she met, for that matter – what to do. She only asked them to think.’ Anyone familiar with the films of Henry Fonda will recognise this way of thinking. Pauline Kael called it ‘liberal masochism’ – the fantasy of perfectly reasonable liberals, besieged on all sides by perfectly bigoted conservatives. Its purest form is the redemption narrative in which the pure-hearted liberal converts the bigots by the sheer force of reason – as in Twelve Angry Men. ‘I just want to talk!’ Henry Fonda’s character says, beginning the five or six reels of patient reasoning-through that eventually proves the accused boy couldn’t have committed the crime, as the right-wing jurors slink away in shame.

Jane – Henry once called her his ‘alleged daughter’ and said he would be the first to turn her in if she turned out to be a Communist – was her father’s daughter, or at least deeply desired to be her father’s daughter. ‘Marx said that shame is the only revolutionary sentiment,’ she says in her memoir.† She actually gets the quotation wrong. Marx said shame was a revolutionary emotion. In fact, the ideology for which shame is the only revolutionary emotion is the kind of sentimental liberalism that Hershberger, the characters played by Henry and the daughter played by Jane seem to share: the assumption that, if only the dialogue is open and honest enough, you can transcend the septic tanks of subconscious rage. If only.

In 1988, shortly after the release of a film called The Hanoi Hilton, which portrayed a bubble-headed actress performing a Manchurian Candidate-like turn at an enemy pow camp, and did much to cement the maximalist version of the anti-Fonda cult, Fonda travelled to Waterbury, Connecticut to shoot a movie. She was hanged in effigy from a local tree. ‘I knew in my heart I had never felt anything but compassion for the soldiers in Vietnam,’ she writes in her memoir, so she arranged to meet with the local veterans:
I wasn’t sure I would be able to communicate this to all of them, but I was confident that, at least for some, this face-to-face would have a positive effect . . . Some of them were in uniform. A few wore buttons and hats reading HANOI JANE and TRAITOR . . . Rich Roland wore a camouflage jacket and had an ace of spades in his pocket, the ‘death card’ . . . ‘I intended to throw the card in your face if I wasn’t happy with what happened in the meeting,’ Rich told me later, in 2003.

I took my place in the circle and suggested we go around the room and each tell our story . . . It was raw, angry and emotional . . . Instead of throwing his ace of spades in my face, Rich went out and threw it in the trash. ‘That was the beginning of my healing,’ he said.
They just wanted to talk, is the implication, and Fonda left behind in Waterbury truth and absolution where before there’d been only lies and recrimination. No more angry men. But it isn’t quite so simple: the vets in Waterbury still put on an annual display of tiger cages with GIs locked inside.

Footnotes

* Beacon, 288 pp., $18, May, 0 8070 4659 0.
† My Life So Far by Jane Fonda (Ebury, 601 pp., £18.99, May, 0 09 190610 5).


Rick Perlstein lives in Chicago. He is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.