What is propaganda?  The Holocaust Museum defines it as “biased information designed to shape public opinion and behavior.”   The word itself, unsurprisingly, derives from Latin.  It originally referred to the biological reproduction of flora and fauna, as in their propagation, but took on a new meaning in the 17th century when the Vatican established the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (propaganda fide), a PR shop to promote Catholicism in the face of Protestantism’s growing popularity. 

Propaganda continued to be refined and honed over the centuries.  By World War One it had become a veritable art form employed by all the major belligerents to demonize their enemies and shore up public support.  One former low-ranking German officer saw its potential.   “Propaganda,” Hitler wrote shortly after the war, “is a truly terrible weapon in the hands of an expert.”

Hitler’s expert was Joseph Goebbels.  Like much of the Nazi’s top brass, the diminutive, club-footed Goebbels did not fit the image of a robust Aryan.  Made Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in 1933—the Nazis pulled no punches—Goebbels deployed to great effect the “Big Lie” technique.  Hitler candidly elaborated on the technique in Mein Kampf, saying that a lie, if sufficiently audacious and repeated often enough, will be believed. 

The exhibit at the Holocaust Museum chronicles the many dimensions of Nazi myth making, from posters portraying Hitler as a veritable demigod to the ubiquitous images of the perfidious, hook-nosed Jew.  The scope is remarkable.  Nazi messaging blanketed German society by way of massive stage-managed processions, youth groups, children’s books, posters, radio broadcasts, newsreels, movies, and countless other ways and means.  Even Hitler’s grandiose gesticulations during his orations were carefully choreographed for maximum demagogic effect.  It remains a mystery that such strikingly crude methods proved so effective.  How could the same culture that produced Goethe and Beethoven throw in its lot with Hitler?

Many didn’t.  But Goebbels understood that political power is captured by those who can successfully manipulate base populist sentiments.  “Whoever can conquer the street,” Goebbels observed, “will one day conquer the state, for every form of power politics and every dictatorship-run state has its roots in the street.”  And how better to conquer than shameless flattery?  According to the narrative, Germans, excluding Jews and other untermenschen, of course, formed an exalted race.  “Nazi propaganda,” the exhibit explains, “was crucial in selling the myth of the national community to Germans longing for unity, national pride and greatness, and a break with the social stratification of the past.”  Here the power of the repetition was key.  The greatness of the German people, it went ad infinitum, was being undermined, principally by Jews.  Eliminate the Jews, and eliminate the barriers to national greatness. 

The exhibition makes clear that propogandistic techniques out of Goebbels’ playbook continue to crop up like poisonous weeds.  The genocide in Rwanda, for one, demonstrated this at great cost.  In the lead-up to the massacre, Radio Rwanda, a government owned station, called for the extermination of the Tutsi minority, who were characterized as cockroaches, echoing Nazi characterization of Jews as vermin.  Indeed, a UN tribunal convicted several Rwandans for their roles in the genocide using legal principles developed after World War Two to hold leading Nazi propagandists responsible for their incitement.  

Such examples are stark.  But there are other paler echoes of propagandizing closer to home.  The Big Lie technique of repeating audacious falsehoods is seen in the oft-trumpeted claim that health care reform will lead to death panels for the elderly or regular assertions of Obama’s foreign birth.  Decry the incipient socialization of the country with enough persistence and Tea Partiers will emerge to defend freedom, liberty, and the red, white, blue from those, as Sarah Palin famously said, who aren’t from “Real America.”  “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”  These are the Hitler’s words but they could be the credo of the angry right.

Dale’s agent Sandy wrote to us pleading for more work.  It was arranged that every fourteen or fifteen months we would return to New York where I would produce another batch of Broza’s happy sculptures for Sandy.  For the next five years this artist, in spite of my distain for his work, remained our loyal patron.  But he eventually met his final demise from an overdose of the highest form of flattery: imitation.  Incredibly, cheap copies of his sculptures were appearing in galleries.  By then I was ready to see him go.  My serious work was beginning to sell and it was time to take the plunge and try to live on my serious art.

So far this birth story has been mostly about financial survival.  To explain the birth of an artist let me take you back to the Hrvastska.  Crossing the ocean by boat is a wonderful way of appreciating the vastness of the world.  We traveled for fifteen days, for the most part over a flat sea featureless and dull except for the moments of excitement when we caught sight of a whale in the distance or a passing ship on the horizon.  We all knew that beneath this calm, under the waves, was another great and vast world full of beautiful and exciting things, unknown to us pinned only to its surface.  The sea we observed from over the ship’s sides, and the greater unseen world below our keel, makes a perfect metaphor for the artist’s life we were about to live.  Once we set up our studio and started to work, we fell into a lifestyle that, to the outside observer, would appear as flat, boring, and featureless as the surface of an unchanging sea.

If this were an attempt to be an accurate depiction of my becoming an artist, my next blog, succeeding blogs, blogs beyond the gigabits even a super- computer could hold, would be filled with just the words, “Today I worked on my sculpture.”  Seemingly boring and repetitious, day followed similar day—a routine so fixed and unvaried that had it not fulfilled some deep hidden need, it would appear to have been imposed by some sadistic sea captain.  At the start of this journey, the works of which I was proud were depressingly few.  Translating a concept into reality is an imperfect process and to continue to work at it requires first learning to expect much less of oneself. 

Most often, those occasional triumphs would be transformed over time into failures as my skill improved and expectations rose.  Works I once thought successful and cast into bronze I would later cut up and be happy to see disappear back into the crucible of melting bronze.  In spite of this, day after day I sailed on, seven days a week, four weeks a month, twelve months a year. But beneath that apparently dull surface, I was swimming in a vast hidden sea of exciting adventure, a world where things never seen before lived.  Undeterred, I persisted, sure that along some ocean bottom lay oysters that someday I would be able to pry open revealing wonderful perfect pearls.

When I first started this long-distance swimming, the effort was so great that I would have to take naps in the afternoon from mental exhaustion.  Eventually over the years the effort became less tiring, more pleasurable, and this routine was to become as natural to me as breathing.  The routine itself was possible because I shared it with another artist and it included the basic necessities of living: friendships, exhibition visits, the business of selling and promoting art, working at the foundry, and eventually children.  Financial concerns remained and remain a constant worry, especially when forced to travel aboard the bizarre and erratic “Ship of Fools” that is the current art scene.

In art one never knows if the journey will be a success, but you have the dream that your ship will sail on and, even without you, may arrive at some distant shore where its cargo will be treasured.

Pugnacious conservative lawmakers, who neither heard nor saw evil for seven years as Afghanistan went to seed, are now throwing a tantrum over Obama’s alleged dithering over whether to double down in the country.  The barracking from the backbenchers echoes the “weakness is provocative” claptrap trotted out to expedite the spectacularly misguided invasion of Iraq.  While the careful deliberation stands in welcome contrast to what passed as the policy making process in the previous administration, it’s unclear whether the right questions are being asked.

The US and its allies need a credible partner in Kabul in order to defeat the Taliban insurgency.  But a credible partner in Islamabad is also critical.  Therein lies the rub.  Pakistan, which is dependent on US foreign and military aid, sustains its own unholy alliances with militant Islamic groups in the Punjab and the tribal regions bordering Afghanistan.  For years they have served as useful surrogates, a tool of the country’s foreign policy to counter the Indian threat.  Such Faustian bargains are too clever by half.  They rarely work.

Homegrown militants have turned on the Pakistani government, killing Benazir Bhutto, taking over the Swat Valley, and launching a countrywide terror campaign.  Universities, army installations, and most recently a marketplace in Peshawar have all come under attack.  Still, the rogue upstarts enjoy broad support from the Pakistani government, as do the Afghani Taliban that are creating such a headache for the US across the border.

The Taliban’s reliance on a Pakistani government dependent on the US yields a dangerously bizarre outcome.  As Steve Coll of the New Yorker put it, “the United States is essentially waging a war against its own ally.  The Taliban are a proxy of the government of Pakistan.  We’re an ally of the government of Pakistan.  We’re fighting the Taliban.  In the end, the Taliban will be defeated strategically when the government of Pakistan makes a strategic decision that its future doesn’t lie with a partnership with Islamic extremists.”  Has that decision been taken?

Apparently not.  Tariq Fatemi, who briefly served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the US in 1999, claims the Pakistani government has no intention of fully taking on the militants.  Although government forces are now battling militants in South Waziristan, Fatemi told the New York Times that the army, unsure of the US’ commitment in Afghanistan and of India’s intentions, seeks only to cut them down “to size.”  The goal is eliminating the militants’ leadership, not the groups themselves.  It is an astounding admission given the backdrop of the militants’ ongoing bloody campaign, an existential threat to the Pakistani regime.   

Islamabad may be key to salvaging Afghanistan but so is Riyadh.  Saudi Arabia, like Pakistan, is playing double game, supporting militants abroad.  It’s a reckless strategy, but the House of Saud knows that the shifting Arabian sands may well envelop it lest it prove its Islamic bona fides by providing succor to most retrograde standard bearers of the faith.  The real sucker is the US. 

Twin suicide blasts in Baghdad earlier this week prompted the Iraqi government to call for a UN investigation into foreign support of the insurgency.  The Iraqi government suspects Syria and Iran of meddling, but Saudi Arabia’s deep pockets are also critical.  While the US labors to build ties to Riyadh for the sake of oil, Riyadh builds madrassas in Pakistan propagating hate.  The Talibs (“students”) of the petrodollar-financed Jihad factories fill the ranks of the Taliban.  And it’s not just indirect government support.  Wealthy Middle Eastern patrons, many from Saudi Arabia, finance the Taliban.  The CIA estimates that the insurgency received $106 million from sources outside Afghanistan this past year.  The donations eclipse opium as the Taliban’s single largest source of revenue.  The vicious circle validates the oft-made observation that the US is financing both sides in the war on terror.

In Frankenstein, the monstrous creation darkly promises that if he cannot inspire love he’ll inspire hate.  Most US alliances in the Middle East were always out of convenience.  Love was never expected.  But neither was hate.  However, that’s what you get when you strike bargains with Frankenstates.

Slipping into the corridors of power quietly so as not to disrupt the pleasant daydreaming of Obama’s credulous minions is, as The Who sang, the same boss as the old boss.  There’s not one boss, of course, but a multitude.  But the herd is one breed and that breed comes from the same bonus-besotted financial institutions that have played craps with the global economy.  

As widely reported, many of top officials orchestrating the administration’s response to the financial crisis come from the same Wall Street firms responsible for it.  Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, whose role in the lead-up to the crisis while head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York deserves closer scrutiny, has brought on a series of well-heeled advisors that includes Gene Sperling.  Sperling made $887,727 last year from Goldman Sachs.  His pay, according to the Financial Times, was for “work on a philanthropic project.”

Sperling supplemented his curiously lucrative humanitarian work by making rounds on the Wall Street lecture circuit.  Some of his patrons included Houston-based Stanford Group headed by Allen Stanford, who stands accused of running a seven billion dollar ponzi scheme.  This might sound like guilt by association until one considers the number of such associations.

Mathew Kabaker, another Geithner protégé, earned $5.8 million at the prominent private equity firm Blackstone Group just before going into government while Lewis Alexander, yet another Treasury advisor, previously plied his trade at TARP-dependent Citigroup.  And let’s not forget Larry Summers, Obama’s chief economic advisor, who struck gold at a hedge fund ahead of his appointment.  Summers’ previous stint at Treasury during the Clinton Administration was defined by his laissez-faire views, including towards derivatives, those complex financial instruments that Warren Buffet memorably called “financial weapons of mass destruction.”  Closing the incestuous loop is Mark Patterson, Geithner’s Chief of Staff, who previously lobbied on behalf of Goldman.

It’s not just Treasury where Wall Street looms large.  The new Undersecretary of State for Economic, Energy, and Agricultural Affairs at the State Department, Robert Hormats, held a top post at Goldman while Philip Murphy, another high-flyer at Goldman, is now ambassador to Germany.  Yet another Obama appointee, Gary Gensler, who heads the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which plays a crucial financial oversight role, also cut his teeth at Goldman. 

Obama’s Wall Street-heavy lineup is not unusual.  Geithner’s predecessor, Henry Paulson, spent 32 years at Goldman, six more than Robert Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary.  Donald Regan resigned as Merrill Lynch’s CEO to become Reagan’s Treasury Secretary.  Poaching talent from Wall Street is justified on grounds that the expertise possessed by those in high finance is invaluable.  Who better to know the industry than those from it? 

The argument has some merit.  But the overwhelming preponderance of men (and it’s almost always men) with similar pedigrees overseeing the nation’s economy runs the risk of best and brightest groupthink.  And will an administration with such a monochromatic hue take on Wall Street when so many of its ranks include those who not only failed to foresee the financial market meltdown but in some cases helped facilitate it?  Obama promises that “we will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess that was at the heart of this crisis, where too many were motivated only by the appetite for quick kills and bloated bonuses.”  The problem is that he’s already gone back to those who supped greedily at the trough to craft a solution, a concern magnified by the apparent weakness of an administration white paper issued earlier this year detailing possible financial sector reforms.

The Democrats’ reliance on Wall Street largesse feeds the cynicism.  In recent years, the party of the workingman has raised far more from Wall Street than have Republicans.  This year alone, Democrats have netted $5.4 million from the finance industry compared with just $2.7 for the GOP.  The financing piece closes the loop: Wall Street barons are recruited into government to fix Wall Street while Wall Street barons finance the party in power promising to fix Wall Street.  Is this “Change We Can Believe In?”

The story goes that a Brit returning home after visiting the US was asked to describe America’s two great political parties.  One, he explained, resembles the Tories, and so does the other.  The anecdote might well be apocryphal, but given what we’ve seen so far from an administration promising to break with the ways of the past, it is spot on.

It wasn’t always so.  Not long ago Republicans had all the great ideas.  From the tired nostrums of the Great Society emerged a vibrant conservatism that hatched countless innovative proposals to tame the welfare state and unleash the redemptive powers of the market.  Sure, some that sounded too-good-to-be-true were.  Cutting taxes is not some miracle elixir prescribed in good times and bad.  But many of the right’s ideas stuck, sending the left in a dizzying tailspin.  So it was that a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, bowing to political reality, proclaimed the end of the era of big government.

What a difference a few failed wars and a financial meltdown make.  Only it’s not just George W. Bush’s fault.  The once-fresh conservatism that shaped the governing philosophy of both parties has passed its sell-by date.  Big government is back—not that it ever went away.  However inviting a target, the welfare state endures, even when conservatives control Washington.  The reason is simple: government entitlements are popular even if government is not.  Such is the unique capacity of Americans to embrace public services while rejecting the public institutions that distribute them.  But perception is reality and consequently the party most professing a fealty to the magical wonders of unfettered markets prevailed.

That was then. 

Today a hangover lingers from the GOP’s long ascendance.  There’s no shame in having the political pendulum swing in the opposite direction.  Being cast out of power even gives political parties the opportunity to rediscover their roots, get their groove back.  It’s like rehab.  Labour in Britain lingered in the desert for 18 years before Tony Blair returned it to the electoral promise land.  The Tories, for their part, are on the brink of retaking parliament after using their long sojourn in opposition to reinvent themselves.  The key is using the time wisely to develop and refine a governing philosophy that is politically viable.  Baying madly does no good.

What’s left of the right is mindlessly skewering the left.  It is a wasted opportunity.  Perhaps Republicans can be forgiven, as the demise of their governing philosophy is an open wound.  It will take time to fashion new ideas appropriate for a new era with new challenges.  But the longer they wait the longer they guarantee their irrelevance.  As things stand, the modern Know Nothings, who seem to know only how to hurl insult and invective, capitalizing on darker sentiments in the same way as the original Know Nothings, have filled the vacuum.  The party’s worst instincts have gotten the better of it.  And there’s much bile to draw on.  Just 37 percent of Republicans believe that Obama was born in the US.  In other words, nearly two-thirds don’t believe in the president’s legitimacy.   

Some might characterize claims that the GOP has gone off the rails as false nostalgia.  Indeed, the right-wing demagogue is something of an American tradition, whose ignominious pantheon includes the likes of Joseph McCarthy and Father Coughlin.  The critical difference is that the yesterday’s soap box conservatives stood in contrast to mainstream conservatives, who at best tolerated the former as useful idiots.  Today’s supposedly mainstream conservative, by contrast, has migrated so far right that such distinctions are meaningless.  A debatable point?  Accusations of incipient socialism or death panels are not solely hurled by the bloviators on talk radio or Fox News, but also by “moderate” Republicans.  Nihilism is de rigueur.                

This may be news for Democrats but it is not good for the country.  One party democracy is no democracy at all, as the best and most enduring public policies result from a synthesis of ideas across the political spectrum.  Not that many died-in-the-wool conservatives will take notice.  Their attention is focused elsewhere.  And how could it be otherwise when a foreign-born Muslim with communist sympathies sits in the Oval Office?

No sooner had I set up my booth than everything sold.  Dazed, I left the show early and stayed up all night producing more.  Perhaps this was some crazy fluke, but the next day sales were equally brisk.  The contrast between the reception my serious work received and that garnered by Dale Broza defied comprehension.  Obviously, the first thing to do was to change his name, as it would not be long before somebody would catch on that it meant in Spanish, “give them garbage.” 

On the third day, I set up my booth with the same work but under a new name.  It was too late.  Dale Broza was already famous.  People were coming to the Show looking for his sculpture.  Word of mouth had had its effect and I was stuck with him.  By the end of the Show I, as Dale Broza, had earned enough money to support my serious sculpture until the next Outdoor Show. This success was to repeat itself for the next year and a half.  I’d work hard on my serious art pausing only a month or so before the next Outdoor Art Exhibit to produce Dale Brozas.

After one show, a woman approached me and asked if Dale Broza would be interested in having her represent him.  Sandy, an art agent with impressive credentials, had heard of Dale’s success and believed a market, beyond the Outdoor Show, existed in the gallery world.  Though skeptical, I created some Brozas for her to take on consignment.  Within a month she called to tell me that she had sold out and, even more astounding, had arranged for a large one-man show of his work in an upscale Manhattan department store. 

As happy as I was with this news, I resented that I would have to take time out from my fine art to produce what would be a large number of decorative sculptures.  I also resented that this Dale Broza, whose work I held in such low regard, was about to have a big one-man show while I and what I considered my serious work continued to be ignored.

While working on Brozas late one night in a mood of conflicted feelings and boredom at what by now was just factory labor, I got carried away.  The following morning, I had created three very different Brozas under the title, “Harlequin.”  Each of them was bizarre and unlike the rest of their joyous and adventurous brothers.  They had their heads slumped to one side and a thin rod rising upward representing the hangman’s rope.  I called them the “Hanging Harlequin Series” and realized that they were clearly un-salable.  They represented my revenge on this hack who cynically and without feeling was producing a product in great demand while his alter ego, me, the real artist, poured his soul into sculptures that went unnoticed.  Broza, at least with these works, would have his comeuppance.  Sandy loved them and sold them immediately.  Broza, it seemed, could do no wrong.  The department store proved a great success.  Sandy then made a surprising offer to buy all the Dale Brozas that I could produce.

While I had been working on mass-producing Brozas, I met an artist who spoke of distant lands of opportunity. They were off in Europe where an artist, via the dollar’s powerful exchange rate, could, even on slender earnings, live and work just on his fine art.  My girlfriend was also an artist and if we were to pool our money a year of working in Europe only on our fine art was possible.  One more final push and it would be the end of Dale Broza, that hack, that robber of my creative time, that so generous patron of my art.  He would now go out in a blaze of glory having given his all so that a brother artist could go to Europe to learn his craft and return with works of wonderful art of which the late Mr. Broza, if he had any taste at all, would be proud. 

My girlfriend and I drank to his upcoming demise and made plans to sail off on a freighter across a vast ocean.

The Obama Administration will have to master the double game to succeed where others once played the Great Game.  It won’t be easy.  The US’ overarching goal in Afghanistan is preventing the country from becoming a safe haven for Al-Qaeda, which is likely if the Taliban return to power.  The fecklessness and corruption of the Karzai government frustrates the task.

General McChrystal thinks he can deliver results with 40,000 more troops, but as Stephen Holmes from New York University observed, “Turning an illegitimate government into a legitimate one is simply beyond the capacities of foreigners, however wealthy or military unmatched.”  Probably.  But Obama, who recently called Afghanistan a “war of necessity,” is likely to approve McChrystal’s plan or some variation of it.  No US leader could permit Kabul to fall, even if Kabul will never be able to stand on its own.  Such is the intractable logic of quagmires.

A complicated dance is sure to ensue, with a newfangled US-led counter-insurgency campaign unfolding at the same time as the country prods Karzai to get his act together.  The tactic is tantamount to speaking loudly without carrying a stick: Karzai knows that the US cannot abandon him because subsequent to his reelection, however fraudulent, he is, as Churchill said of Democracy, the worst alternative, with the exception of all others.  The US will try anyway.  It has no choice.

It is a similarly story next door in Pakistan.  There, the country’s real power brokers, the military, are wary of taking on its own monstrous creation, homegrown militants.  It’s a dangerous game.  But so far the military has not dramatically altered course.  So it is that Lashkar-e-Taiba, the radical outfit responsible for the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, still operates freely, receiving support from its patron, Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency.

The US is pushing Pakistan to seriously confront its own Taliban, which threatens the stability of the nuclear-armed country.  Pakistan’s military, however, sees India, not the Taliban, as its principle foe.  Consequently, 80 percent of the country’s military is deployed to counter the Indian menace even though the Pakistani Taliban threatens large swaths of the country.  Perception in this case is based on a twisted reality.  India has promised through back channels that another Mumbai will elicit a military response.  Since Pakistan will not reign in Lashkar-e-Taiba and other militants that it has traditionally seen as useful surrogates with which to bloody India’s nose, a war between the two countries is a real possibility. 

To summarize: the US needs Pakistan to forcefully confront radical militants in its midst that destabilize the region.  Pakistan, in turn, needs US military and economic support, so it will offer up some concessions, but not too many so as to imperil its ability to counter India.  Pakistan also knows well that the US’ attention span is short.  The country will eventually abandon the region.  India will not.  This fact, above all others, informs Pakistan’s thinking.  

The next puzzle piece is Iran, which takes the practice of duplicitous diplomacy to an art form.  Tehran is tantalizingly close to acquiring a nuclear weapon.  The Persian mullahs smell victory and will not back down easily.  They need just a little more time to keep the diplomatic wheels spinning in order to keep their uranium centrifuges spinning.  So their game is rope-a-dope.  If they can successfully dodge the international community for long enough, they’re home-free. 

The US knows Tehran’s game, as does Israel, which sees a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat.  Arab neighbors are only slightly less spooked by the prospect, though they can’t say so publicly.  But Russia is the real powerbroker here.  If Moscow agrees to pressure Iran, China is sure to follow.  The two counties, along with the other permanent members of the UN Security Council, could punish a recalcitrant Iran.  Will Russia get on board?  It’s not clear.  The mandarins in Red Square may see Middle East tension as a means of boasting oil prices.  Alternatively, they could be hesitant to imperil a lucrative trading relationship.  Yet another possibility is that Russia views the enemy of its enemy as a friend.  Either way, the elaborate pantomime will play out in the months ahead.

Confused by the layers of intrigue, the three-dimension games of diplomatic chess being played by the main players in the region?  Welcome to the bazaar.

That nations cannot be built doesn’t prevent many from trying.  The US is not immune to such hubristic flights of fancy.  It is now engaged in geopolitical alchemy in the Middle East by attempting to transform failing states into stable ones.  Preliminary results aren’t promising.  Over 4,300 US servicemen have died fighting in Iraq, a conflict whose cost is nearing a trillion dollars.  Whether America will ever reap dividends from its investment is remote, a fact made more galling by the war’s thin justification.  The unhappy experience underscores yet again the foibles of nation building, even in places with remnants of an educated middle-class and plentiful natural resources. 

Afghanistan was supposed to be Iraq’s virtuous analogue, a “war of necessity” according to Obama.  A fig leaf for US unilateralism euphemistically known as the “Coalition of the Willing” required the US to shoulder the burdens of the Iraqi misadventure.  Not so in Afghanistan, where NATO, albeit heavily dependent on the US, is leading the charge.  Yet success has proven equally elusive.

The Afghan enterprise, eight years on, faces donor fatigue.  Governments participating in the NATO-led mission are wary about contributing further resources, particularly following a flawed election in Afghanistan that lay bare the Karzai government’s venality.  The reticence reflects public sentiment.  A recent poll found that 63 percent of Germans, 55 percent of Canadians, and 51 percent of Brits disapprove of sending more troops to Afghanistan.  Even a majority of Americans now say the war is not worth fighting.

Public discontent runs counter to the stated needs of commanders on the ground in Afghanistan, who are requesting 40,000 more US soldiers in addition to the 17,000 more already committed by Obama last January.  The president must now decide whether to double-down.  Supporters of the campaign promise fire and brimstone if the US fails to deliver.  Condoleezza Rice recently darkly prophesized another 9/11 if the Taliban return to power.  But this assumes that Afghanistan’s mediaeval marauders can be prevented from doing so.  In other words, it assumes that nation building can work if given enough time. 

The circularity of the argument is highlighted by a recent paper issued by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, which stated “The imperfect elections in Afghanistan should not deter the Obama Administration from providing the resources necessary to achieve stability in Afghanistan.”  But it is not a question of the perfect being the enemy of the good.  The ineptitude and corruption of the Karzai government has weakened it, perhaps irrevocably.  It is widely (and justifiably) maligned by Afghanis, who see it for what it is.  Such sentiment is exploited by the Taliban.  Inserting additional forces, therefore, may actually exacerbate problems by giving the Karzai government little reason to mend its ways.  Conservatives in particular should be sensitive to policies that perpetuate dependency.

There are no easy answers.  Failure to provide additional forces may make it impossible to roll back a Taliban advance, as General Stanley McChrystal, the top coalition commander in Afghanistan, warns.  And once the Taliban are ensconced in Kabul, it is far from certain whether the US and its allies would be able to ensure that the country doesn’t become a safe haven for Al Qaeda and its affiliates.  Yet staying may well only delay the inevitable.  What, then, to do?

To paraphrase The Princess Bride, never get into a land war in Asia.  Avoiding nation building might be added to the list.  The US has made both mistakes, simultaneously.  But since involvement in Afghanistan was unavoidable, every effort should have been made to get it right.  Which is why the Iraq blunder is also the Afghanistan blunder—the former assured that the latter would also fail by diverting resources.  All is not lost, though.  While it may be too late to build those war-torn nations, the lessons learned can help build a consensus in this nation to use power more wisely.

The farrago of complaints from the right suggests that Armageddon is nigh.  The busload of administration czars points to the Politburo-ization of Washington, the bailouts to incipient socialism, and an overhaul of health care to gramp’s early demise.  Run for the hills!  Or bravely take a stand using the language of yore—and of your opponents.

The sixties is often cited as the cause for much that’s wrong in America, but the rhetoric used to great effect by that era’s social progressives is back in vogue with those who so malign the decade and by extension many of its accomplishments.  The civil rights movement spoke of liberation and emancipation.  There were “Freedom Rides,” “Freedom Summer,” and Martin Luther King’s famous call to “let freedom ring.”  Lesson learned.  Here’s House Majority Leader John Boehner on health care reform: “We’re going to have a real fight for how much freedom we’re going to have left in America.”  Republican Senator Jim DeMint makes a similar point in his recent book, Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America’s Slide Into Socialism. 

Sponsors of the raucous anti-Obama “March on Washington” earlier this month included Let Freedom Ring and The Center for Individual Freedom.  Adam Brandon, the press secretary for FreedomWorks, which also helped organize the event, admits to co-opting the left’s rhetoric but not without reason.  Conservatives, he explains, are the true inheritors of cherished values once championed by liberals.  Proof can be found in an unverifiable counter-factual.  “If we had been alive back in the 1960s,” he claims, “we would have been on the freedom bus rides.  It was an issue of individual liberty.  We’re trying to borrow some from the civil rights movement.”

Brandon’s relative youth gives him a pass, allowing his claims to go unchallenged.  But what about FreedomWorks chairman, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey?  He was alive in the sixties.  Was he at the barricades defending “invidual liberty?”  Turns out not.  “[Armey] wasn’t politically active at the time,” explains Brandon.  In fact, it’s hard to identify one prominent conservative who participated in the defining fight for freedom of their youth.  It is far easier to find ones with segregationist bones in their closet. 

The past is past but what about the present?  How does this sanctimonious clutch of freedom fighters measure up?  Quite poorly.  Arresting freedom, not promoting it, is the priority for these authoritarians in libertarians clothing.  Take gay marriage, a prospect that social conservatives welcome like a plague of locusts.  The matter received top billing in this past weekend’s Values Voter Summit featuring a who’s who of out-and-out bigots and mainstream Republicans, which are often one and the same. 

The lineup of right-wing luminaries at the colloquium of the aggrieved cautioned against illegal immigration, creeping socialism, and told off color jokes about monkeys running Washington.  But gays topped the list of bogeymen.  Carrie Prejean, the former Miss California, spoke of being chosen by God to defend “traditional marriage” while author and syndicated columnist Star Parker revealed her hope that all “sodomites” be forcefully quarantined.  Meanwhile, the summit’s breakout sessions included “True Tolerance: Countering the Homosexual Agenda in Public Schools” and “Marriage: Why it’s Worth Defending and how Redefining it Threatens Religious Liberty.”

The right knows that intolerance doesn’t sell well nowadays, so it must be sexed up by marketing gurus and focus group whizzes.  And why mess with success?  If the left got great mileage out of the language of emancipation why can’t the right?  Of course, they can.  The critical difference is that the civil rights movement actually sought to extend freedom to the disenfranchised while the right evangelizes about freedom in order to promote an often-intolerant agenda that does just the opposite.  Some might find such co-opting of liberals’ language shameless if shrewd.  Perhaps.  But few Tea Party demonstrators were blushing at the recent anti-Obama demonstration in Washington when singing in unison, “This Land is Your Land.”

Eight years later I have a job but no job security.  I could be, in the euphemistic language of the times, made redundant at a moment’s notice.  A menacing job market looms.  While recession may well have ended, as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke believes, unemployment is nearly ten percent and most in the know say that it will be a long time before a growing economy prompts employers to fill their depleted ranks.  My trepidation is hardly unique.

Time’s cover story asks, “Is double-digit unemployment here to stay?”  The article contains an astounding statistic: the total number of nonfarm jobs currently in the US economy is roughly the same as it was in 1999.  In other words, there has been no net job growth in ten years.  Worse, the Fed forecasts negligible growth for the foreseeable future.  Think about that.  The implications are profound.

A long-term job market that is actually shrinking given the overall rate of growth of the population jeopardizes the implicit societal bargain whereby persistence and hard work are duly rewarded.  What happens if playing by the rules no longer pays off?  One answer has been on display in the last few months, manifested in a faux-populist backlash. 

The disenchantment ostensibly is driven by the expansion of government and government debt.  It’s hard to take the concerns at face value.  Obama’s immediate predecessor grew the size of government at a faster clip than at any time since LBJ’s Great Society without a hint of objection from Tea Party stalwarts.  Nor did these guardians of fiscal restraint object to Bush’s reckless policies that helped bequeath trillion-dollar deficits to the present administration.  The anger is real but its source must derive elsewhere.

We’ve been here before.  There are antecedents.  Prior periods of great change brought with it furious backlashes much like the one seen now.  The Great Depression witnessed the rise of fascism and bigotry in America, exemplified by the angry rants of popular radio personality Father Coughlin, the Rush Limbaugh of his day.  Desegregation in the fifties and sixties gave birth to another backlash used to such great electoral effect by Nixon and his right-wing successors.  Similarly, the present period of tumult and upheaval has generated misplaced anger.

There are seemingly many factors underlying the angst.  Demographics are one.  Four states already are minority-majority.  According to the Census Bureau, the country as a whole will become so in 2042.  Obama is emblematic of this shift and therefore the backlash’s logical object of derision.  But he’s not the only target.  So it is that the farfetched prospect of illegal immigrants, i.e., undocumented Hispanics, receiving health care coverage stoked congressman Joe Wilson’s ire last week.  Since tolerance is positively correlated with economic security it’s not a coincidence that the fears of a dark-skinned menace would be heightened during such difficult economic times.  As James Carville famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

It is unclear whether the current economic crisis represents a temporary blip or a more fundamental transformation as Time suggests.  New technologies, new industries, and new ways of doing business may create a more vibrant economy with greater opportunities for all.  Such is the process of “creative destruction,” and good times may be back again soon.  But they may not.  Wages for most workers have been stagnant for decades of supposedly robust economic growth and now unemployment is at levels not seen in 26 years.  The upshot for many is that the social contract has ruptured.  Hard work and thrift aren’t delivering.  Blame must be assigned.

My own future is reasonably secure.  I will do fine.  While I am no longer wide-eyed and confident, my social contract is tattered but intact.  The same cannot be said of others.  Much of their anger is being channeled toward useful chimeras, such as illegal immigrants and death panels, which divert from larger structural issues driving the crisis like a workforce that’s inadequately educated and trained to compete globally.  But tackling that challenge isn’t easy.  It is far easier to complain about socialism.

Jews’ liberalism is well established.  Since 1928, three-quarters of Jews typically vote Democratic in presidential elections.  They cast 78 percent of their ballots for Obama, or 35 percentage points higher than that from non-Jewish whites.  Views on abortion, gun control, school prayer, and other hot-button issues bear out that Jews are the most liberal group in the country.  “Jews earn like Episcopalians,“ scholar Milton Himmelfarb said in the 1950s, “and vote like Puerto Ricans.”  It holds true today. 

Might such peculiar behavior be attributed to intrinsically liberal “Jewish values?”  Not at all, says Podhoretz.  Those most familiar with such values, the Orthodox, are the one group of Jews who are reliably conservative.  The answer therefore must lie elsewhere.  But Podheretz, writing in the Wall Street Journal, provides no insight.  He only laments that liberalism has superseded Judaism for most American Jews to such a degree that a conservative conversion is seen as tantamount to a Christian one.

The circumstance is particularly objectionable given that liberals, in Podhoretz’s telling, are hopelessly consumed with the country’s shortcomings while more decorous conservatives celebrate its attributes and defend its virtues.  Why, then, should Jews, who have reaped a bountiful harvest from their adopted North American homeland, be such ungrateful whiners?  Perhaps he’s answered his question, as Jews, according to the stereotype, are nothing if not complainers!

The true answer is as obvious as it is lost on Podhoretz.  Understanding the present, as ever, requires looking to the past.  A collective memory of persecution animates Jews’ worldview.  In this light, Jewish steadfast commitment to social justice, i.e., what’s wrong with the country, in Podhoretz’s reductionist view, is not a pathological fixation, but rather the result of its cruel absence for much of Semitic history.  America has welcomed Jews but memories cast long shadows.  And it’s not just shadows.  Podhoretz’s ideological brethren keep the specter of a dark past alive. 

Arguably the most influential conservative constituency, the evangelical right, speaks a language that evokes atavistic fears.  Protestations of America’s true Christian identity and efforts to inject sectarianism in the body politic are deeply worrying to a people well acquainted with the perils of religious authoritarianism.  Developing a thicker skin is not easy when code decrying the “liberal media” or “Hollywood elite” echo millennia of accusations of Jewish conspiracy and perfidy.  Given the power and heft of the evangelical mullahs it is Jewish conservatives, not liberals, who have much to explain.

The politics of Jews living in the Diaspora cannot be addressed without mention of Israel.  And it is this matter that truly exercises Podhoretz.  That liberal Jews are insufficiently supportive of their ancestral homeland is unpardonable.  Podhoretz grouses about Obama pursuing policies “dangerous” to Israel’s security, yet American Jews back him anyway.  He doesn’t elaborate how the president threatens the Jewish state but his record is clear.  For decades Podhoretz has accused those less hawkish than he—which is most—of being “appeasers” who have not learned the lesson of Munich.

Podhoretz, like many neoconservatives, sees weak-kneed capitulation at every turn.  Most American Jews do not make the same mistake.  They understand that unconditional love is no love at all.  As a result, they appreciate that what Israel does is not always good for Israel (or for the US).   That lesson is sinking in.  As former American ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk observes, “In the Bush years, when Israel enjoyed a blank check, increasingly numbers of people in the Jewish and pro-Israel community began to wonder, if this was the best president Israel ever had, how come Israel’s circumstances seemed to be deteriorating so rapidly?”

Ironically, it is precisely carte blanche policies towards Israel advocated by Podhoretz and his like who help alienate American Jews from the Jewish state.  Syndicated columnist Harold Meyerson makes this very point.  “American Jews,” he writes, “remain intensely committed to liberalism and to universal values and minority rights.  As a democratic state rising on the ashes of the Holocaust, Israel once embodied those values to its supporters, but 42 years of occupation have rendered Israel a state that test those values more than affirms them.” 

That’s appeaser claptrap to Podhoretz, the sort that led to Jews being marched into ovens.  Instead, Jews should check their bleeding hearts at the door, stand firm, and start voting, not just earning, like Episcopalians.  For the sake of the US and for the sake of Israel, let’s hope that American Jews remain Puerto Ricans at heart.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Joffe, Co-Editor of Die Zeit and fellow at several US think tanks, pushes back against the hectoring Cassandras.  His case against US decline is built on several pillars.  The first is economic.  The US’ $14.3 trillion economy is unrivaled.  Japan, the world’s second largest economic power, is only as third as big.  The EU’s economy actually eclipses that of the US but it’s an “unwieldy conglomeration” incapable of pushing its weight around.  And what about China?  The Asian juggernaut is growing at breakneck speed, but its per capita income is still $2,900 compared with $47,000 in the US.  It will take decades to catch up.  Besides, China faces political challenges at home and an ageing population.  Both imperil the country’s prosperity. 

Economic might often translates into military might.  Here too the US stands alone.  The Pentagon’s $607 billion budget accounts for half the world’s military spending.  Add the military budgets of all of the US’ potential enemies as well as that of the EU and there’s still a $100 billion gap.  A “warrior culture” that honors military service and does not shy away from mixing it up when need be cements the US’ dominance.  Carping Europeans take note. 

Joffe cites other American advantages: its excellent universities, its spending on research and development, and its ability to attract the world’s best and brightest in various disciplines.  So-called “soft power,” or the ability to wield influence and achieve ends in non-coercive ways, is another arrow in the US’ quiver.  The list goes on.  The global public goods stemming from America’s policies of enlightened self-interest—global institutions like the UN, World Bank, and IMF put in place by the US—has also amplified the country’s power and engendered goodwill.  The same can be said of universal values that the US champions though not always upholds.  Recall that protestors in Tiananmen Square chose a replica of the Statue of Liberty to embody the liberal values they espoused. 

Case closed, right?  Not quite.  If the US is as powerful as advertised, why does Joffe characterize the country as the “default” power?  By this he means, “the country that occupies center stage because there is nobody else with the requisite power and purpose.”  The assertion muddies the water, begging a second question as to why, if the US is so dominant in so many ways, does its hegemony rest on the apparent weakness of all pretenders to the throne?

Joffe doesn’t say.  He merely restates his case by juxtaposing the inadequacies of the EU, Russia, China, and India with the many examples of US heft.  “The moral is that either the United States takes care of the heavy lifting or nobody does,” he says once again.  “And this is the concise definition of a default power.”  Fair enough.  But such an assertion hardly drives a stake into the hearts of those propagating what Joffe calls US “declinism.”  Indeed, it does the opposite by suggesting that, despite its many virtues, the US ultimately reigns supreme by the absence of legitimate rivals. 

Can hegemony rest on relative might?  Weak competition certainly helps but history suggests that it alone does not win the day.  Empires can and do crumble from within, not just from without, leaving a messy tangle, which other lesser powers must grapple with—geopolitics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.  Whether we are on the brink of a multi-polar world whereby the US’ power is partially cannibalized by a host of less strong, uppity competitors is unclear.  Some think so.  But then even unquestioned US power would not preclude its questioning by its critics.  On that point Joffe is clear and convincing.  However, by suggesting that America’s is the default power—his essays’ very title—Joffe inadvertently strengthens the case of those he seeks to rebut.

The answer might be impossibly elusive if health care were an outlier, an exception to the rule.  But it’s not.  America in many ways is a cruel place.  Take the criminal justice system.  The US incarceration rate is off the charts.  There are over two million inmates in US prisons, a number that far exceeds any other country.  China, whose population is four times that of the US, is a distant second.  Are Americans really so lawless?

The US also executes its most incorrigible prisoners, a rarity for industrialized countries.  We relish the fact.  Bill Clinton dared not stay the execution in 1992 of a convict so brain damaged that he asked that his dessert be put aside for him to eat as a snack after his execution lest it hurt his electoral chances.  Supreme Court justices argue that executing an innocent person is not unconstitutional provided that the accused received a fair trial.  There is a description for such attitudes: cruel and unusual.

Insofar as it exists, tolerance features prominently as an inclination to accept the unacceptable.  Pockets of poverty go largely ignored in a land of great wealth and abundance.  Public education withers silently, particularly in lower income neighborhoods.  The country’s physical infrastructure is permitted to fall into disrepair.  And yes, there is an unconscionable acceptance of a failing health care system that fails to provide coverage for 47 million Americans.  How can such cruel neglect be permitted?

One oft-cited reason for such apparent callousness is America’s so-called rugged individualism.  It is said that a country of pioneers never developed a strong ethos of collective responsibility; heading for the frontier and starting anew could always alleviate discontent with local circumstances.  This is undoubtedly true but another factor may be more salient, race.  The nation’s original sin is still with us.

The virtues of a multiracial society are many but engendering a communitarian spirit isn’t one of them.  Loving thy neighbor is a tall order when he looks very different.  That high incarceration rate, for example, can be seen through the prism of race.  Whites use illegal drugs at higher rates than blacks, but black men are sent to prison on drug charges 13 times more often.  Were whites incarcerated as often as blacks, drug-sentencing laws would be overhauled.  Drugs might even be legalized.  A similar bias exists in health care.  Because many of the uninsured and underinsured are poor, and because many of the poor are of color, the impetus for ensuring universal insurance is not all that strong.  Harry Truman learned that when trying to enact universal coverage over half a century ago.  The American Medical Association, amongst others, launched a virulently racist campaign against Truman’s plans, leveraging fears that it would force the desegregation of hospitals in the Jim Crow South.

Relatively homogenous societies are not crippled with the same challenges.  Scandinavian countries are renowned for their generous welfare states, which provide an enormous number of services, including government-provided health care and education.  Do Swedes believe in “big government” more than Americans?  Are they less cruel?  Perhaps so on both counts.  But it’s not a good comparison.  Until recently, Scandinavian countries were effectively monochromatic.  An affluent Swede seeing a poor Swede, otherwise indistinguishable from himself, might say but for the grace of God go I.  That may be changing as Sweden becomes more diverse.  Anders might feel less magnanimous when Ahmed needs assistance.

The problem with bad policies is that they tend to harm everyone.  So it is with benign neglect.  The US not treating health care as a right turns out to be both cruel and cost-ineffective.  Our predominantly private system for delivering health care is colossally expensive—far more costly on a per capita basis than countries with socialized medicine—and it fails to cover millions.  The winners are few, the losers many.  Such paradoxes are common in societies rich in diversity but poor in compassion.

Bill was unusual.  He had no art training.  In fact, before moving to New York he had been a dog food salesman.  With an innate sense of design, he had discovered a method of producing “art” that could only be described as spinning straw into gold.  The magic lay in finding an abundant and cheap source of everyday mass produced items, such as nails, chain links, industrial scraps, and cast-offs, the “straw or chaff” of an industrial society.  On to this raw metal, gold and silver foils were glued and then the individual pieces were welded together to produce tasteful designs.  Bill hired me because I knew how to weld. 

Since each of Bill’s pieces was impossible to assemble the exact same way twice, each could be called an original sculpture.  I arrived at the right moment.  The work looked like what was being shown in the fine art galleries, was loved by interior decorators, and was modestly priced.  His business soon grew from a small studio gallery with one welder to a large building in a prime section of mid-Manhattan with a production line featuring nine welders.

Just seven months earlier I thought the world was coming to an end during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  I had been determined to risk all for art but now was working in a job that was effectively factory work.  My parents, in spite of their great unhappiness that I was not finishing my architecture training, had generously provided me with room and board.  By saving my salary I now had a modest nest egg.  I gave Bill notice; the time had come to go out into the world and live the artist’s life.  I found a living space that doubled as a studio in an old store.   In the corner of its plate glass window could be seen the faded remains of one of the former tenants.  It read, “Kosher Pickles.” 

Fixing up the rundown place took a large bite out of my savings.  Yet, I was filled with optimism.  In a whirlwind of activity, I produced what I saw as my first fine artwork: glorious welded figures in steel and carvings in stone and wood.  I presented them to New York galleries and even had a few of my smaller efforts accepted for exhibit.  Two were sold.  I was particularly excited by these sales, feeling that I had stepped from the world of the amateur into the ranks of the professionals. 

That someone would actually pay money for a creation of mine gave me hope.  Unfortunately, at the prices I was getting after the gallery took its large commission, the prospect of being able to support myself was fading.  Was it true that one cannot live only as an artist?  My savings would soon be gone.  In desperation, I contemplated trying to earn some money to just tide me over by doing Bill-like decorative sculpture.  But I couldn’t do that to him. Yet, as my financial situation went from bad to critical I rationalized that Bill’s style of work was abstract and I was interested in figurative sculpture.  I had learned that magical secret of “spinning straw into gold,” but was it possible to take the mass production method that clearly worked for abstract sculpture and convert it to figurative sculpture?

I set about welding together six or seven designs.  I was not optimistic about the results or even, if successful, how I would go about selling the creations. To my surprise it did not take long to develop, for want of a better word, a “line” of figurative commercial sculptures.  They looked complicated, were easy to fabricate, and had a whimsical quality.  Within a month, I had a body of work with titles like “Harlequin Catching Birds,” a running figure holding a long butterfly net over his head as a flock of folded steel birds attempted to elude him.  Another, “Marionette on a Bicycle,” featured a marionette-like figure with fine steel rods extending upward from its joints to represent the controlling cords. 

It struck me that the most obvious place to give the new pieces a try was at an outdoor exhibit in Washington Square.  That spring and fall Manhattan’s outdoor art fair was enormous, open to all, from those who called themselves artists and had true talent to others who produced blatant commercial pap, such as my own lineup.  I signed up but considering myself a serious artist, I would show this work under a nom de art, Dale Broza.  It was a name that expressed my opinion of what I was being forced to do.  Dale Broza could be read in Spanish as “give them garbage.”

“Give them garbage” was to be a man of destiny.

August 2001 was a time of relative global tranquility.  There were conflicts, of course.  The interminable war in Congo continued—an estimated 2,300,000 people died in eastern Congo between August 1998 and May 2000—as did fighting in Chechnya and Sri Lanka.  Tensions on the Korean peninsula percolated, as they did in Kashmir.  But compared with bygone eras the world was a peaceful place.

This past weekend, the Obamas arrived in Martha’s Vineyard for an eight-day vacation.  The president will undoubtedly receive hair-raising intelligence briefs, perhaps warning of apocalyptic acts of nuclear terror, an incipient swine flu pandemic, or plots by right-wing militias.  The brief is sure to contain an assessment of the ongoing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Americans are dying in both hotspots.  The world’s problems appear more immediate, more threatening, more dire.  The innocence of yesterday is no more. 

That’s the prevailing narrative.  Nine-eleven changed everything, we’re told.  But did it?  For Americans, the attacks shattered the fiction that what happens outside the country’s borders is of little consequence, spurring an interest in global events.  Once-exotic places with fanciful names like Mazar-i-Sharif and Fallujah became prosaic.  Foreign bureaus at news organizations grew to meet the demand of a newly inquisitive audience.  Shark attacks disappeared from the front pages, replaced by in-depth reporting from faraway places.  Substance replaced pap.  Only it didn’t.  

The world didn’t change on 9-11.  The US is embroiled in two wars stemming from the attacks—one directly, one not—but foreign campaigns are not aberrant.  On the contrary.  They’re the norm.  The war in Iraq was preceded by a war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan was preceded by a war in Afghanistan fought by proxies.  Before that there was Vietnam.  And before that Korea and World War II.  The list of lesser conflicts with US fingerprints is far more extensive.   Conflict, not quiescence, is the norm.  American perception that it is somehow inoculated from global events, much less an active participant in them, is a deep-seated and convenient myth subscribed to by a blinkered citizenry that easily forgets its history.

The notion that Americans, woken from their narcissistic slumber, are now engaged in the world is also bogus.  Those foreign bureaus at news organizations are closing.  Headlines are once-again dominated by escapist pap, this time death by government health care panels, not sharks.  That the world even changed because of the attacks of 9-11 is debatable.  Whether large-scale terrorism proves enduring is unknown.  It might.  Or it might be like the scourge of anarchism in the late-nineteenth century, which at its apex claimed the lives of heads of state but subsequently receded quietly.  Iraq and Afghanistan are embroiled in conflict, though both were hardly tranquil before 9-11.  Meanwhile, Congo and Chechnya remain a mess.  The Tamil Tigers were defeated but Sri Lanka’s civil war may well flair up again.  The Korean peninsula and Kashmir are typically tense. 

The world of today is instantly recognizable.  The basic dynamic of industrialized countries jockeying for economic preeminence while most other less-wealthy nations struggle, sometimes violently, holds true.  China remains a juggernaut; Russia a nuisance; the Middle East a backwater, and Africa more so.  And let’s not even consider France!  Conventional wisdom’s got it wrong: the world ahead of the upcoming 9-11 looks a lot like the world on the eve of 9-11.

No indictment is being made here.  Quite the opposite.  The world is as it always was, despotic and dysfunctional in the main, with pockets of peace and prosperity.  America too is as it has always been.  By this critical measure, those hoping to land a lasting blow to the US eight years ago failed.  They bloodied noses, nothing more.  Just look around.  The Discovery Channel just wrapped up Shark Week.

But if Democrats are in the driver’s seat, how is it that they’re having so much trouble passing their legislative priorities?  Why should health care overhaul and climate change legislation be hanging in the balance when Democrats enjoy a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a whopping 257-178-seat advantage in the House?

One answer is that numbers are deceiving.  Will Rogers’ line about not belonging to organized political party, but rather being a Democrat holds true today.  Democrats, as ever, are not monolithic.  Their ranks include unapologetic liberals from urban areas as well as fiscally conservative “Blue Dogs” from right-leaning districts, mostly in the south.  Democratic senators represent traditionally conservative Montana and North Dakota.  In the House there are 49 red-district Democrats.  The same dynamic does not feature prominently across the aisle.  Just a handful of moderate GOP senators and congressmen represent blue states or districts.

Progressive legislation, therefore, must be passed with virtually no Republican support and relatively minimal Democratic defection.  Take Waxman-Markey, a bill to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases linked to global warming that squeaked though the House last June by the narrowest of margins (219-212).  An analysis of that vote by Ronald Brownstein of the National Review found that 59 percent of the Democrats from districts that McCain carried voted against the bill, while just seven percent of Democrats in Obama-majority districts did likewise.  Just eight (eight!) Republicans supported the measure, but of that group seven represent districts that backed Obama last November.

Brownstein’s analysis tells an important story but not the whole story.  It demonstrates that Democrats huge numerical advantage in Congress is largely illusory, at least with respect to sweeping legislative initiatives that are highly partisan in nature.  But even if red-state Democrats peel off, liberals should still prevail, as Waxman-Markey demonstrated.  Does the same hold true in the Senate?  No.  Unlike the House, where a majority of one is sufficient to win the day, the Senate typically requires a much higher threshold of 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.  Thus, Senate Democrats must maintain absolute discipline to pass contentious legislation (or minimal defection offset by Republican defections).  End of story?  Not quite.

An energized White House with a strong mandate coupled with the large majorities the Democrats enjoy in Congress should be sufficient to overcome the inherent inertia of the lawmaking process, particularly on health care and climate change where a majority of the public supports in broad terms the sort of changes sought by the administration.  The iconoclasm of a minority of moderate Democratic lawmakers alone cannot explain the difficulties encountered by the White House on its main legislative priorities.  Another factor is far more decisive.

Industry is naturally keenly interested in the legislative process.  With billions of dollars at stake it couldn’t be otherwise.  Policies that are good for industry, however, are not necessarily good policies.   As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich observed, “Very few things happen in Washington that are in the public’s interest when corporations have huge financial stakes in the game.”  The clash over reforming health care vindicates Reich’s sober assessment.  So it is that there are six lobbyists representing health care interests for every member of Congress and that collectively they’ve spent quarter of a billion dollars influence peddling.  So it is that political committees associated with Senator Max Baucus, a critical player in the health care debate, received nearly $1.5 million in 2007 and 2008 from health-related companies and their employees, and that the sector gave almost $170 million to federal lawmakers over those two years, with 54 percent going to Democrats.  So it is that reform is stifled.

It’s a similar story with climate change.  Oil and gas companies have spent loads to defeat legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions.  They have even bankrolled efforts to discredit the science behind global warming.  Most recently, a PR firm hired by a pro-coal industry group sent forged letters to lawmakers from prominent organizations arguing against climate legislation.  What is true for health care and climate change is also true for other areas of policy.  Frustrated by the power of the finance industry to turn back consumer-friendly bankruptcy reform to address the foreclosure crisis, Senator Dick Durbin lashed out.  Banks, he said in reference to Congress, “own the place.”  If only it were just the banks.  And if only they owned just Republicans.

First were strikingly candid comments by General Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan.  The Taliban, he said, were winning, having broken out of their traditional stronghold in the south around Kandahar.  The north and west of Afghanistan, once relatively peaceful, are now threatened.  Casualty figures bear out McChrystal’s sober assessment.  July was the bloodiest month in the eight-year conflict for American and British soldiers.

By year’s end, 68,000 American troops will be in Afghanistan, complementing 30,000 mostly-NATO forces, and McChrystal is expected to request 10,000 more.  Congress is justifiably restive.  The interminable campaign approaching its eighth anniversary is costing the taxpayer $4 billion a month.  House Appropriations Chairman David Obey floated the prospect of cutting off war funding if the situation does not improve quickly.  But the situation is sure to get worse before it improves—if it improves.  The drug trade, which finances the Taliban, is thriving; the Afghan army and police are inept; and the Karzai government is hopelessly corrupt.

Next up is that old chestnut Iraq.  Afghanistan has pushed it off the front pages, creating the illusion that the country’s reasonably pacified.  Not so.  Suicide bombings are commonplace.  A particularly vicious pre-dawn attack earlier in the week in Khaznan near the northern city of Mosul flattened the entire village.  Bombs in two booby-trapped trucks killed 25 people and wounded 70 more.  The sectarian nature of the conflict is worrying.  A forthcoming report by the National Defense University warns that the Iraqi army and police, key to holding the country together, are pawns of sectarian political parties.  The report’s author, a former Iraqi mayor who helped run a major counterinsurgency campaign after the US invasion, points out that much of Iraq’s army is more loyal to political parties than the central government.  It’s a “recipe for civil war.”

Finally Pakistan.  For years, the country’s leadership has supported radical militants in Afghanistan to keep strategic foes from gaining a foothold on their doorstep.  The enemy of one’s enemy isn’t necessarily a friend, the Pakistanis are learning, as their own wicked creation has turned on its onetime patron.  Pakistani forces have had some success since the Pakistani Taliban took towns just 70 miles from Islamabad.  But the war is not won.  The Pakistani Taliban does not want for resources: they are said to generate $200 million annually from the sale of opium-based drugs from neighboring Afghanistan. 

The challenges are compounded by popular sentiments.  A recent poll conduced by Gallup Pakistan for Al-Jazeera found that just 41 percent of Pakistanis support the government’s military operation against the Taliban.  Twenty-two percent claimed neutrality and 24 percent oppose it.  The same poll found that an astounding 59 percent of Pakistanis, distributed evenly across regions and classes, cited the US as the country’s greatest threat.  Eighteen percent named Indian and just 11 said the Taliban. 

While doubts about-American intentions are well founded given the US’ historically unsteady alliance with the country, and while such sentiments are reinforced by drone attacks that, though effective against the Taliban, kill many innocents, it is nevertheless hard to understand the poll results.  Which is precisely the point.

The US doesn’t understand Pakistan.  Nor does it understand Iraq or Afghanistan or for that matter the entire region.  Few do.  Best, then, to keep a respectful distance from that which is so enigmatic.  The US forgot this lesson in Iraq, where a facile philosophy that assumed that liberal democracy could be imposed with bayonets was put to the test.  It failed.  Different but equally erroneous assumptions about the efforts required to transform an almost pre-modern society have yielded much disappointment in Afghanistan.

The die is cast now, leaving little choice but to make the best of a host of bad situations that might not be salvageable.  But going forward it would be prudent to keep in mind the limits of our knowledge when fashioning foreign policy.  After all, the US has over its history intervened in many countries, often with bad results.  And as Albert Einstein pointed out, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different outcomes.

As befitting artistic births, whether they are high art as Botticelli’s “Venus” blown to shore on a seashell, or the folk tales of babies brought to their mothers by the stork, I too was delivered to what I would call my artistic birth by air, aboard an airplane flying from Louisville, Kentucky to Newark, New Jersey.  I was 24 years old, born, in the traditional sense, in New York and was now returning to my native city after six months of basic training in the US Army Reserves.

Before the Army I had been a student of architecture.  One more year of architecture school and I would earn my degree, something much desired by my parents. They were the product of the Depression and saw in architecture a secure profession.  Since childhood, I wanted to be an artist but the idea of supporting oneself by art seemed remote.  The romantic movie image of the cold and damp studio, the crust of bread and moldy cheese, made unimportant in the comradeship of other struggling artists and the love of your beautiful model didn’t seem to fit with the well-known stories of artists dying too young from drink, drugs, and suicide.  I was returning home aware that the time was at hand for me to make an important decision in my life.  My parents would be pressuring me to return to architecture school with the concession that fine art would be a very nice hobby.  I secretly hoped that on returning to New York some extraordinary revelation would show me a path to a career in the fine arts.

On that last day in the Army, while picking up my discharge papers, the company sergeant looked at the group of us about to leave and said, “Now, don’t you boys rush home and unpack those duffel bags of yours.  I don’t know what’s coming, but boys, I think this is the big one.  And if it is, all hell’s gonna break loose.”   I didn’t know if this was a bit of Army-style departing sadism or if something was really about to happen.  I had been away from the real world for what seemed such a long time.

So it was that on October 22, 1962 my plane landed at Newark Airport and I, with my duffel bag, returned to New York City and my parent’s apartment in the Bronx.  That evening, President Kennedy addressed the nation on what would be remembered as “The Cuban Missile Crisis.”  There are some that lived through those days who felt it was all just bluff and that nothing was really going to happen.  I believed that while it might be bluff, it was very possible that that bluff would be called and by accident or pride a nuclear war would ensue.  My big decision of a career in art or architecture, or anything else, no longer seemed important.  Would we survive until tomorrow became the question.  That the Cuban Missile Crisis started on the very day that I left the Army and returned home to plan my future profoundly affected me.  My adult life, though barely begun, looked as if it were coming to an end.  Not just my life but human life, civilization, music, art, love, and hope.

I spent the following days at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I had the strange feeling that it was the safest place.  When I walked through its halls, it seemed inconceivable that such an artistic heritage, some of the finest examples of human expression over the past thousands of years would really cease to exist in a flash.  The Museum seemed to prove that nuclear war couldn’t happen.  Yet, for that week I didn’t unpack my duffel bag.

If one wants to belabor this analogy of artistic birth, I could say that my last months in the Army were like the imagined boredom of the womb, my flight home symbolic of the stork, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the pain of the actual delivery.  After it was over, I was not the same person: I had been “reborn” in religious jargon.  Financial security, to the extent that it was important to me, could have no meaning in a world that was itself so insecure.  President Kennedy was being praised for going to the brink, which seemed to suggest that such brinkmanship would be the norm.  To me the world had almost ended; perhaps in another crisis it would end tomorrow.  I was alive.  We had survived.  I would try to live as an artist.  The future may turn out to be shorter than it takes to starve to death in the traditional artist’s garret—but how to get started?

I won’t mince words or compromise
No-holds barred, I write what I think
Disguised as a * from X’s eyes
To you who know I give a wink.

Such * is not for awards nor is it fame
Little chance it’s seen upon a printed page
To X it’s anything they give that name
Provided it does not afford a living wage.

* is no longer the thing of bards
Their craft’s not just dying, it’s dead.
What X calls * is in greeting cards
And what we do, X reads with dread.

 
* = wink
X = snap fingers

Take Guatemala, where the CIA in 1954 helped depose Jacobo Arbenz, who had come to power in that country’s first ever universal-suffrage election.  The coup laid the groundwork for a devastating civil war that claimed 200,000 lives.  Places like Guatemala, home to puppet governments beholden to the US and powerful agricultural patrons, became so common as to earn their own name: Banana Republics. 

US policy toward Latin America is not what it was.  The end of the Cold War put at ease concern of communist infiltration in the nation’s sphere of influence, and attention has turned elsewhere, particularly post-9/11.  Some friendly Latin American countries have even groused at America’s inattention.  A chastened United States, however, has not chastened some South American despots who define themselves in opposition to the ghastly Yankees.  Hugo Chavez, a buffoonish caricature of a Caudillo were he not an actual buffoonish Caudillo, leads of rabble of tin pot tyrants masquerading as heroic anti-imperialists.

The latest installment in a long-running saga featuring Chavez and his fellow strongmen came last month when a video captured from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the Marxist-guerrilla movement considered by the US and EU, amongst others, a terrorist organization, aired in Bogotá.  The video showed a FARC commander reading from a letter written by FARC’s founder outlining the guerilla movement’s contacts with and financial contribution to Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa’s campaign.

The video’s airing came at a bad time for Correa, whose brother faces corruption charges, and he responded sharply, accusing Colombia of all manner of skullduggery.  Chavez came to his ally’s defense in customary fashion, lashing out at his faithful bête noire.  The US, he said, wants to turn Colombia into a “new Israel” of Latin America, “a platform from which to attack our brother countries.”  The bizarre allegation referenced a new security agreement between the US and Colombia that resulted from Correa’s decision to terminate America’s drug interdiction operations launched from Ecuador.  It also inserted the useful specter of Jewish plotting.

The FARC video bears out its close relations with governments in the region.  A raid last year by Colombian forces of a FARC encampment in Ecuador uncovered ties between the guerilla movement and Venezuela’s government.  More recent evidence indicates that the relationship remains intact.  Venezuela, it seems, continues to procure weapons to and provide logistical support for the FARC.  The Swedish government, for one, wants to know how rocket-launchers it sold to Venezuela ended up in the hands of the guerilla movement.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, no stranger to corruption himself, and Bolivian President Evo Morales have defended their apparently narco-allied allies.  The two, united with Chavez and Cuba’s Raul Castro under the so-called Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) banner, have pushed back.  Ortega condemned the Columbia-US military accord, characterizing it as a “betrayal of the fatherland.” 

Percolating in this witches brew is the crisis in Honduras.  There, President José Manuel “Mel” Zelaya Rosales, a late-joining member of ALBA, is trying to regain power after being exiled last month.  Zelaya portrays himself as the victim of a classic Latin American putsch.  The Obama administration has bought it and is negotiating his return.  But Zelaya’s democratic bona fides are no better than those of Chavez.  Indeed, his exile resulted from his Chavez-like efforts to ram through a plebiscite that would allow him to extend his mandate.  When Honduras’ supreme court ruled the referendum illegal, Zelaya proceeded anyway.  He even had the ballots printed abroad.  Where exactly?  Venezuela, of course.

With the US’ attention elsewhere, Latin America has edged away slightly from the reach of its northern neighbor.  But being farther from the US has not brought Latin American any closer to God.  On the contrary.  And who is to blame?  That’s simple.  According to Latin America’s homegrown oppressors, the region’s salvation from its many ills is far off because the specter of Yankee oppression is so close at hand.  Such is Caudillo logic.

Maloney, who is challenging Kirsten Gillibrand in the upcoming Senate primary in New York for Hillary Clinton’s former seat, possibly undid her candidacy when recounting a phone conversation.  “In fact,” Maloney told a newspaper, “I got a call from someone from Puerto Rico, said [Gillibrand] went to Puerto Rico and came out for English-only [education].  And he said, ‘It was like saying nigger to a Puerto Rican.’  I don’t know - I don’t know if that’s true or not…I’m just throwing that out.”  Repeating such inflammatory hearsay raises questions about Maloney’s judgement, suggesting that she’ll go to lengths remarkable even for a politician to achieve her electoral ambitions.  Enter Sharpton.

The reverend took umbrage at Maloney’s utterance.  “No public official, even in quoting someone else, should loosely use such an offensive term and should certainly challenge someone using the term to him or her.”  Read carefully - no public official.  If the term is so offensive, why should anyone use it “loosely?”  Turn on MTV or BET, though, and one is barraged with nigger this and nigger that.  It’s almost a term of endearment used freely, it is said, to de-stigmatize it in the same way that gays have co-opted “queer.”  But why, then, is it off limits to whites or public officials of all stripes? 

The answer, undoubtedly, is that nigger, when used by whites, hearkens to Jim Crow.  Yet it begs credulity to imagine, say, Attorney General Eric Holder throwing the term around.  Its apparent absence from the vernacular of highly-educated and accomplished blacks suggests that the term has been co-opted only insofar that self-hating blacks have appropriated it from racist whites.  But taking on some shibboleths is not in Sharpton’s repotroire.  Demagoguery is his stock in trade. 

Maloney’s statement at least had a racial subtext.  Michael Jackon’s death did not.  “I am here because of the disgraceful and the despicable way some elements of the media have tried to destroy the legacy and image of Michael Jackson,” he told a congregation, alleging different standards for black and white performers.  “You have had other entertainers that have had issues in their life,” he said.  “But you [the media] did not degrade and denigrate them…Show the same respect for Michael and Michael’s family that you showed Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley.”  Judging by his many sightings cited in grocery store tabloids, posthumous respect has eluded Elvis.  And what instances of media malice was Sharpton referring?  References to the entertainer’s well-documented peculiarities?      

Sharpton’s race-based hat trick came later with the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.  Though the facts are in dispute—Gates alleges racial profiling while the arresting officer says that the professor failed to produce the proper identification and then became verbally abusive—Sharpton reached a predicable conclusion.  The arrest, he said, was “indicative of at best police abuse of power or at worst the highest example of racial profiling I have seen.”

Racial profiling probably played some role in the episode.  Whether two whites trying to force their way into a house in an upscale neighborhood—Gates and his driver, both black, were doing just that—would generate the same suspicion as two blacks is unlikely.  Still, it’s unclear whether police misconduct is involved.  Sharpton’s sure of it.  And why not?  His whole career, so brilliantly satirized by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities, is about profiling – media profiling.  Like Reverend Bacon in Wolfe’s book, Sharpton presumes race in matters regardless of the merits so as to generate media attention.  It’s given him his fifteen minutes and then some.

While the election of a black president would suggest that this game has run its course, there remains much injustice to fight, and as Al Sharpton knows, it need not all be real.

Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings demonstrated how cowed the left remains.  The Supreme Court nominee clumsily dodged questions about her own views of the law, instead parroting the hackneyed right-wing canard that portrays judges as non-ideological technocrats, or baseball umpires, using the metaphor de jour, rather than as sentient humans whose jurisprudence is shaped by ideological dispositions borne from life experience.   Sotomayor’s disingenuous testimony even riled some allies.  Louis Seidman, a left-leaning law professor at Georgetown, couldn’t swallow it.  “First year law students understand within a month,” he wrote in response to Sotomayor’s promise to simply apply the facts, “that many areas of the law are open textured and indeterminate-that the legal material frequently (actually, I would say always) must be supplemented by contestable presuppositions, empirical assumptions, and moral judgments.” 

To suggest that judges are more than umpires would run the dreaded risk of being branded a judicial “activist”—code, of course, for “liberal.”  The same label is nary applied to conservative judges who, in similarly sweeping fashion, discard longstanding precedents that they deem undeserving of legal sanction.  Accusations of legislating from the bench, however, only run in one direction.  Such is the ideological authoritarianism that underpins doctrinaire conservatism.

Sotomayor’s fudge will certainly pay off handsomely with a seat on the highest court.  But it’s a rebuke for liberals, as her grotesque kowtowing perpetuates the fallacious terms of the debate.  Instead of revealing charges of judicial activism for the lie that it is, or more precisely, for the cynical political tactic that it is, liberals legitimize it by sheepishly denying the accusation.  The episode demonstrates that, despite their electoral predominance, liberals lack the courage of their convictions. 

What is true of the legal debate is also true of other hot-button issues.  The Obama administration’s plans to cover the 47 million uninsured Americans by creating a public health insurance option that would exist alongside private ones is derided by the right as “socialism.”  And we wouldn’t want that.  Or would we?  Many of the conservative lawmakers in Congress bravely defending private enterprise from the encroachment of the ghastly government enjoy some of the best health coverage available in the world, and it’s publicly provided!  But never mind.

The right’s tactics aren’t new.  In the early 1960s, the American Medical Association (AMA) distributed an LP featuring a popular actor named Ronald Reagan speaking darkly about President Kennedy’s plans to impose “socialized medicine.”  According to Reagan, passage of Kennedy’s plan, if unchecked, would ensure that “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in American when men were free.”  Kennedy prevailed and that statist monstrosity known as Medicare became reality.

Any overhaul of an industry that represents over 15 percent of the nation’s GDP deserves close scrutiny, and Obama’s plans are no exception.  But we are not getting an honest debate.  True to form, the right is attacking the administration’s proposals by echoing Reagan’s hyperbolic rhetoric conjuring images of an Orwellian future if the government takes a more active role in the delivery of health care.  It is a predicable response by the party that most represents the capitalist class.

The best way to counter the scaremongering is by addressing it directly, principally by emphasizing the importance of effective government.  Its role in delivering public goods, such as education and national defense, is indispensable, and so too should its role be in ensuring universal access to decent health care.  But instead liberals meekly adopt a version of the Sotomayor defense, claiming, in essence, that they too dislike government but that it is a necessary evil.  It’s a self-defeating tactic, as judiciously expanding the role of government cannot be achieved by maligning government.  So it is that liberals, in control of two of the three branches of government, do not control their own destiny and, more importantly, the destiny of the country.

I remember seeing a documentary on Nazi Germany in which Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, proudly announced that German culture was free of the detrimental influences of Jews and homosexuals.  What followed on the screen was a list of all such individuals expelled by the Nazis.  Scrolling by on the screen was name after name of some of the most outstanding figures in German science, music, cinema, theater, painting, sculpture, medicine, and academia.  It went on for so long that it produced growing roars of laughter in the audience.  What a loss these “detrimental influences” would prove for German culture.

Homophobia, like anti-Semitism, has its roots in religious dogma.  The anti-Semite ignores that Jesus and all his disciples were themselves Jews and focuses only on the Biblical account of a mob crying for his death as proof of Jewish culpability in that unpardonable crime of deicide.  That homosexuality is sinful goes unmentioned in the Christian Bible.  Jesus, or for that matter, all the Hebrew prophets, say nothing on the subject.  Homosexuality finds its clearest condemnation in Leviticus of the Hebrew Bible: “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman both of them must be put to death.”  In the Hebrew Bible, homosexuality shares the same draconian punishment with many other sins enumerated in Deuteronomy: “Death to a bride who is not a virgin;” “Adulterers shall be put to death;” and, “Disobedient sons who do not repent shall be stoned to death.”  In Genesis, it’s masturbation that deserves death.  In Leviticus, once again, “Death for having sexual intercourse during a woman’s period.”  Such Biblical capital offenses are recognized as clearly ridiculous in the modern world and are now considered to be matters of private concern and personal morality.  Why, then, for some is homosexuality considered beyond the pale and gay marriage such a national controversy?

A major question in the early Twentieth Century that clearly exercised the Nazi mind was whether Jews should be allowed to marry non-Jews.  The Nazi answer was an unequivocal: no.  It was just forbidden but a crime punishable by death.  Today, we marry who we want, Jew and gentile, black and white, (also once banned) or in a growing number of states, gays marrying gays.  The comedian Chris Rock’s favorable opinion on gay marriage is, “They have the right to be as miserable as everybody else.”

In the past sixty or so years, we have become more tolerant, even perhaps appreciative, of the diversity found in the human race.  Nazi-like bigots have been reduced to playing the bad-guys in films and on television.  Rules like “Don’t ask don’t tell” will eventually become “Tell, for nobody gives a damn.” Evangelicals and social conservatives will have to rethink homosexuality, for it appears that God must have a fondness for them since he seems to have placed so many in the church and the right wing leadership.  Recently, after two thousand years, the infallible Vatican has forgiven Jews.  Surely homosexuals cannot be far behind.

The assault took place during a hearing for an appeal Axel W. had filed for a €750 fine for insulting el-Sherbini when she asked him to make room for her son on a playground swing.  He allegedly called her a “terrorist” and “islamicist whore” and mocked her headscarf.  Unsubstantiated claims allege that Axel W., a stock clerk from Russia, fought against Muslim rebels during the Russia-Chechnya wars of the 1990s.  His sympathies with the National Democratic Party (NDP), the ultra-right, crypto-Nazi outfit, are not in dispute, however.  “You got any right to be in Germany?  You got no business being here.  That’ll all be over soon as the NPD comes to power.  I voted for them,” declared Axel W., an immigrant himself, before stabbing el-Sherbini 18 times.

The German government was slow to react publicly to the murder, only condemning it nearly a week later.  The tardy response raised suspicions.  In Alexandria, Egypt, el-Sherbini’s hometown, thousands of mourners gathered, some chanting “Down with Germany” and “Germans are the enemies of God.”  Others clashed with police.  Egyptian newspapers fanned the flames, calling el-Sherbini a “martyr in a headscarf,” a reference to Germany’s ban on the attire in its civil service and possibly French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent speech denouncing the burqa.  A promise by el-Sherbini’s brother to “revenge” her death also stoked tensions.  “Anger is high,” one Egyptian journalist wrote.  “Not since Egypt won the African [soccer] Cup have Egyptians come together under a common banner.”   

The tragic incident revealed security gaps, both for allowing Axel W. access to the courtroom without being searched, and for permitting him to stab el-Sherbini multiple times before police intervened, if ineptly.  It also highlighted the German government’s tin ear given that el-Sherbini’s murder was sure to garner international attention.  Chancellor Angela Merkel’s condolences, expressed publicly and to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek on the margins of the recent G-8 meetings in Italy, came too late. 

But the febrile atmosphere in Egypt says more about that country than Germany.  It demonstrates, once again, the counterproductive victim mentality afflicting the Arab world.  Though racism exists in Germany, there’s no reason to believe it’s rife.  A spokesman for the Egyptian embassy in Berlin said as much: “It was a criminal incident, and doesn’t mean that a popular persecution of Muslims is taking place.”  But too many on the so-called Arab Street see plots and conspiracies where none exist.  Autocratic governments in the region, happy to let their own people vent grievances that might otherwise be channeled their way, all too often play along.  Such demagoguery seems largely absent in this case, though some Egyptian politicians, eager to defray attention from their own many failures, have engaged in this type of shameless pandering.

The reaction in Egypt to el-Sherbini’s murder faintly echoes the firestorm created by the publication in 2005 in Denmark of an insulting cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist.  In both instances, slights by a marginal minority were seen as evidence supporting sweeping indictments of the non-Muslim world.  Such tilting at windmills serves no one.  Energies should be invested into countering real injustices closer to home rather than illusory ones abroad.  Indeed, since el-Sherbini’s murder, waves of bombings have killed scores in Iraq, a vicious crackdown by Iran’s clerical regime has continued, and a resurgent Taliban has murdered dozens in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  In every case, Muslims deaths have come at the hands of Muslims, yet a conspicuous silence pervades the Arab Street.  No demonstrators to be found there. 

Back in Germany, a country with a tortured history with racism, el-Sherbini’s murder has precipitated a national catharsis.  Uncomfortable questions are being asked about how widespread hate is there.  Such is the case in healthy societies that can look critically in the mirror.