There are many accounts of those distinctive images and situations that are associated with the atomic bombing that ended the Pacific War in World War II. Very well told is Ian Toll’s “The Twilight of the Gods” in that he covers everything, including whether a diplomatic tweak on the part of the Americans might have ended the war without requiring the A-bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Toll does not provide anything new but he is well balanced. There is the Oppenheimer operation in Los Alamos, a city of young scientists doing with limited comforts. Then the first A blast in the New Mexico desert, the sun rising twice, as has often been said, and toll’s retelling of the green ferrous oxide that was all that was left at the original site of the blast.Then the shift to the politicians when the scientists turn their weapon to the decision makers. Then the hordes of B-29 fleets pulverizing the Japanese homeland and then delivering the bombs themselves, and then the stunned aftermath where the agonizing decision was made for the Japanese to surrender, and then the start of the occupation, Americans startled that the Japanese people who greeted them when they arrived as conquerors in their home territories were grateful and joyous rather than sullen or dejected.
Read MoreMorals and the Taliban
Other people are regarded as taking responsibility. Then they can be blamed for it. The existential fact of doing one thing rather than another is on their hands for reasons always inexplicable and after the fact. My mother and her sister decided to leave Poland for the United States in 1939 knowing things were going bad but also knowing that they would never see their families again and must find work and people in a new life. That was the bravest thing they ever did though it seemed to them to be doing the natural thing, how fearful they were of the Germans. It seemed to them obvious self interest and, anyway, being servants and shopgirls in Poland did not seem to be an appealing future and so making a decision was like following water down an inclined street. It was bound to happen; it was the thing to do, even if their friends and relatives stayed put and were eradicated by the Germans.. People from their own mind’s eye make decisions easily and in a flash, not agonizing, even if they agonize later, as if they were contemplating other people for whom decisions in those other minds always seem paradoxical and unrequired.
Read MorePolitics Akilter
There is a widespread perception afoot, so announced by a number of pundits, that American politics and American society are out of whack. The evidence that suggests that the regular institutions and the usual arrangements and interests of the various demographic populations are not doing what they are supposed to be doing include the fact, central to me, that half of the Republican congresspeople have not admitted that Biden was legitimately elected, that Congress does not want to investigate an insurrection at the Capital, and that poor people are supporting Republicans and that farmers are also supporting Republicans even if trade wars against China have not been to their economic advantage. What is going on? The usual explanations have come up empty.
Read MoreA Competent Admininistration
The Biden Administration is churning along on its various projects but things are in stasis, at the moment, because the fruits of their endeavors have not yet arrived with the exception of that easy one that occurred early on when the Recovery Act passed and, among other things, provided jobs for health care workers and cops, and gave everyone a fourteen hundred dollar check, and covered the costs of Covid relief. Not minor but the real test is whether Biden will get his infrastructure bill and his family plan, both of which should result whether from bipartisanship or reconciliation in late summer. As it is, there is no movement on the George Floyd Act to deal with police violence, where negotiators are still negotiating and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act seems to be getting nowhere however much Biden says he is strongly in favor of those two bills. So Biden will either be a great success and run in the midterms on his success at the infrastructure and family bills, a tribute that government can work in spite of the fifty fifty tie in the Senate and only a majority of a handful in the House, or he will be a failed President, in which case the Republicans who had blocked his efforts will run against him as a do nothing President. Either a hero or a failure rather than just middling with just some accomplishments along with his defeats. So we all wait and think that the very fabric of democracy is in the balance in that a Republican majority in Congress, most Republicans still not having pledged itself to the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and those Republicans might do any number of deplorable matters though. like as not, will do not very much other than allow states to undercut democratic elections because doing nothing and being obstructionist is what Republicans have done for a while, even before Trump, in that their creed is no longer balancing the budget or being aggressive at foreign powers or fighting the cultural wars like abortion, the last issue to be dealt with next year by the Supreme Court when its 6-3 majority will likely seriously curtail the right to an abortion just as this year it seriously curtailed the 1965 Voting Rights Bill, leaving only the possibility that the Biden Attorney General will cleverly find a way to sue states for voting rights incursions even though the Supreme Court limited that by saying these suits had to be significant and cognizant of the need to avoid voter fraud even though the Court never had to say the states had to show there had indeed to be voter fraud before restrictions to protect it from happening occurred. The Supreme Court is not simply wrong headed; it is fatuous. So we wait and so have foreboding about what will happen when events break.Meanwhile, I get some solace, despite my anxieties, for watching the Biden Administration perform itself so smoothly. It is a pleasure to watch given the chaos of the Trump Administration when that President made off the cuff and erratic and wrong and lying remarks and performances and his Executive Branch was understaffed or ever changing or riddled with ideologues and ignorant people and Trump, for the nation’s relief, was not able to control the reins of government because he didn’t know how to and so could do trivial things by clearing rioters so he could have a photo op at a church, to no effect, although reports have it that he did plan to undermine institutions, while only undercutting Bill Barr and his predecessor because of the only parochial concern over whether the two of them had supported him in the investigations by Congress of his misdeeds. No big policy agenda. Just a wall to nowhere and giving money to rich people, that last something Republicans always like to do so as to get reelected to office.
Read MoreIs Civic Education the Answer?
George Packer is a seasoned and judicious political journalist and has offered in the Atlantic magazine this week a very pessimistic portrait of the American scene. He says that we are engaged in an extended civil war in that people have difficulty recognizing themselves as fellow Americans because of their ideologies, emotions and customs. The other side is the enemy. Hillary Clinton’s side thought she was right to think her opponents deplorable and irredeemable while those opponents thought that the coastal elites, as they considered them, condescending and remote from ordinary life, not willing to recognize that so many families of both stripes supported Little League and soccer practice. I observe the truth of this view when I see and hear people who are committed to law and order and think the looting that occurred last summer during the reaction to George Floyd was unconscionable while those who attacked the Capitol in January were people out on a lark and visa versa, the insurrectionists unpardonable and the looters understandable. Moreover, Packer thinks this situation is likely to remain of longstanding, each side more deeply sunk into its own silo of thought, fact and observation, whatever is the order of these three perceptions, and may lead to the disintegration of the American polity and something could set off a spark that not even the military should or could suppress.
Read MoreCriticizing Critical Race Theory
When critical race theory was a manifesto proposed by Black lawyers and other Black intellectuals in 1980 to set straight American history, claiming that Black people were the backbone for creating American society and yet its endemic racism had turned the tables and victimized Black people and it was time to restore to Black people the rightful historical and present order of things, I thought the theory, though it was not worked out well enough to award that term of praise, was both jejune and meretricious, and I thought the so-called theory destined to fall on its own weight and to be overtaken by more enlightened Black intellectuals because its success would turn back race relations for generations. The movement it has inspired, however, has become hallowed in its brief history and has inspired a counter movement to abolish it, in school boards and state houses, both the advocates and their opponents neither of them appreciating history as the way to see history is complicated but instead think of history as a way to take sides on peoples and races and so the controversy has indeed set back a more enlightened view of race relations and so there is indeed a need to point out the shortcomings and malice of the movement and the same of its opponents. It is just another case of bad ideas continuing to fester and we would all be best rid of it, which is also the case of Naziismand Qanon. Bad ideas, after all, do matter. I will grant, however, that the two sides are ignorant rather than as meanspirited or vicious as those other benighted movements.
Read MoreCommunism and Qanon
Frank Lovejoy was a mid-level supporting movie actor whose base voice, prominent chin and dour personality should have given him more recognition, much more so than Robert Stack, who also developed a persona as a stone face and became a Hollywood fixture for twenty years. But Lovejoy did manage to act as the star of a minor movie, “I Was a Communist for the FBI”, made in 1950, close to the top of the Second Red Scare, and he portrayed a Communist undercover agent for the FBI so as to let the audience see both the workings of Communism in the American midst as well as how the hero persevered to finally reveal himself as a true patriot, something all right thinking people would endorse because all the Reds were bad and devious and violent while the FBI and civilians understood that all Reds were bad, no ambiguities allowed. As Whittiker Chambers put it, the real war was between Reds and ex-Reds. They would decide the fate of the world. Other movies such as “I Led Three Lives'' and “Dear John'', which starred Helen Hayes and the last year of the overweight Robert Walker, made the same point: monolithic heroes and monolithic villains in our midst. The point of these movies was to see the Communist side as impenetrable, beyond the ability to understand what ordinary people thought of them, and nothing redeeming about them, and so it was that there was a gnostic divided between the two that was not mediated by ideological interchange or mixed feelings, the female Communist in the movie realizing it was a lost cause as soon as she realized what the Party was doing, never wondering whether allowances might be made for its imperfections after she had joined its initial idealistic enthusiasm. Even German generals within a few years of the war were recognized as having human touches and mixed feelings and a kind of honor, but not so for Communists.
Read MoreBiden's New Deal
Before assessing Biden’s initiative to change America’s social structure through government, let’s stand back and consider these other initiatives to do this in the course of, say, the last hundred and twenty years, when government emerged out of a Wild West culture where businesses jousted with one another to industrialize America without much government intervention. Remember that wars, or the Space Program, or establishing national parks, or conventional infrastructure, such as building the Continental Railroad or the Interstate Highway System, however admirable they may be and of considerable consequence, are not part of these social initiatives, all of which, whether Republican or Democratic, failed or successful, have tried to expand entitlements and regulations, where an entitlement means awarding money or some other favor, such as ten points oxtra on a civil service exam for veterans, and a regulation is the stipulated procedures for an organization, such as regulating the way to calculate utility charges for the consumer, and these entitlements and regulations have been opposed by those who had preferred whatever had already been there, or thought government was too intrusive and so a danger to individual liberty, or were simply oppositional, in that the other party was always to be opposed against the incumbents for that reason alone, and that is the present case, where Mitch McConnell is against Biden’s programs just because Biden is proposing them, and think that Republicans can win the Congress and the White House just by being contrary.
Read MoreThe Anger of Rashida Tlaib
An event in current events prompted for me a consideration of the nature of anger. Rashide Tlaib, the only Palestinean American person in Congress, was at the tarmac in Dearborn, Michigan meeting with President Biden a week or two ago when he was touting the recovery and promise of the Ford River Rouge auto plant and she was reported to have had a heated exchange with him about what was the then continuing war between Israel and Gaza, she reported to have claimed that Netenyahu was a “aparteid prime minister”. Afterwards, at the auto plant, Biden had publicly praised Tlaib as an eloquent and passionate spokesperson for her own point of view and that he hoped her family on the West Bank was doing well. The question is how she would have taken to his response, putting aside that the meeting itself, as that had been engineered by the President, allowed the congresswoman to be known as someone expressing the concerns of her constituents in a particularly pointed manner. Quite aside from these politics where one hand washes the other and that Biden might need a favor from her later on for his having given her the opportunity to speak out, a deeper question is whether she would have felt the President was to be noticed as having been gracious rather than angry for what she said, certainly not how Biden’s predecessor would have done, which was to angrily chastise Tlaib for her point of view. Rather, Biden and Tlaib had acted in a civilized manner to one another. Biden had in effect said that being cordial whatever are the political differences, however emotional they can become, and that recognizing familial loyalty is something everyone can embrace. Biden. In his brief remarks, refused to villainize an opposition just as George Bush ‘43 had done when he did not villainize Arab Americans after the World Trade Center disaster. Biden, I might take it, was binding wounds and making all of us feel better, rejecting animosity in favor of mutual respect. That is the way I first took it. Biden’s remark was to remind us that American politics can put aside personal rancor while pursuing the political process, each of those who hold positions in the government to be treated as worthy of dignity. We all become warm, or many of us do, for having risen to this occasion.
Read MoreThis Week in History
Here is a record of what happen this week that might be worth remembering fifty years from now, just as I wish I remembered vividly some week’s events in 1962 when people like me were wondering whether Kennedy would push for some civil rights bill, that mounting sense of disappointment occurring at the same time of heightening tensions while there were rumors and reports that the Soviet Union was placing missiles in Cuba. I have also repeatedly seen the record captured in the footage of George Stevens of the ravages of Berlin and Munich in mid 1945. Women send bushels of rubble from one hand to another in a chain of workers so as to clear some of the debris (I understand they were paid a day wage by the American government so that some people could get some work). Stevens also, at the time, filmed German POWs, smiling perhaps because they had survived the war or, perhaps, only angry that they had lost, not yet rehabilitated from Naziism. Like every moment, there was a knife edge on whether Germany would change what was not at all inevitable, which is to return to a democratic society. The Stevens films conveyed the tenor of the times, more accurate than a reconstruction through history. I also remember having read the next day of the New York Times reporting on the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, in 1911, when 146 girls died and 78 were injured in a sweatshop factory where the doors were locked so that the girls could not take bathroom breaks. Journalism didn’t only provide “the first draft of history”, a phrase invoked to praise journalism. Rather, such journalism or newsreel footage or memory provide but facts that might otherwise ever escape notice and retain the character or flavor of the concatenation of events that make the period of a time as being such.There were reports of girls jumping off the building, where the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was housed, to their deaths so as to avoid the fire, just as people did when they also jumped from the World Trade Center on September 11th, teachers not telling the children who saw it that these were not birds. That immediacy of experience is not as well captured as happens in, let us say, the 9/11 Commission, and so should be treasured for what is established as a record just last week too.
Read MoreRace Relations Today
There have been much congratulations offered by Black activists and observers as well as the President and Vice-President about the fact that Derek Chauvin was convicted on all charges for the murder of George Floyd. Those surrounding Floyd’s family think that this decision was pivotal. Police officers whose actions that illegally kill Black citizens are usually covered up and police officers charged with such a crime are usually vindicated. This time was different and the conviction will increase the pressure for Congress to pass the well crafted and long overdue George Floyd Act which would restrict police violence. But remember that we just barely missed the bullet shot against both social order and equal rights for Blacks and whites under the law. The building where the trial was held and the decision delivered was crowded with National Guard members and other kinds of police officers because there might have been significant rioting if the verdict had been otherwise, whether to acquit Chavin or just to convict him only of manslaughter. That shows there is an imbalance of forces in that the Black community has a sense of justice on its side and also a threat of rioting while the white population has an ingrained sense that the Black community is not on the side of social order and that its grievances are exaggerated even if the outrage against police violence is eloquent. The combination of justice upheld and violence deterred suggests that race relations are very bad. Blacks have a justified grievance against persistent police violence and whites think that Black neighborhoods are suspect because there are hoodlums and gangsters among them that the rest of the community cannot control. And Black advocates do not help the matter because they come up with preposterous slogans that offer justice or nothing instead of a balanced and nuanced presentation of the issues as they were once proclaimed by the Black leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, and especially by Dr. MLK, Jr.
Read MoreBiden's Gun Control
Biden is going big in his Liberalism in that he believes that big government is the solution rather than big government being the problem, which is what most Conservatives think. Big Liberalism thinks that government can provide money and programs that will alleviate inequities and discrimination between class and ethnic groups, as happened when Social Security and Medicare led to abolishing the fact that the elderly were poorer than the other age groups in the population. Laws to insure equal accommodation transformed the southern states. Conservatives may think that government might tweak the market system, such as by creating incentives whereby private companies could expand broadband to rural areas, but Liberals think that only a government effort can make broadband universal so that it can become the basis for educating young people through distance learning and so broadband has to be the equivalent of a public utility, part of the national infrastructure, rather than a luxury item for those able to buy the product. You can’t have elementary and middle school and high school students attend distance learning if broadband isn’t universal. The prior model was rural electrification, where the government had to step in because customers were far enough apart that it made no sense for private power companies to expand their reach to rural areas and the cost of some areas, should the private companies enter the field, were prohibitively expensive. The government, such as in the TVA, had to do it, and so does broadband today, where a third of rural areas do not have broadband.
Read MoreBiden's Long March
Biden’s press conference on last Thursday made clear that the achievement of his legislative agenda will be a long slough, inched forward, rather than a blitzkrieg whereby Biden will rush law after law following his spectacular success at the American Recovery Plan. The reasons for this are that the American Recovery Plan was a fluke in that it was subject to reconciliation, whereby only a majority was required, and also because McConnell has made clear that he will hold his caucus together to be against any legislative measure Biden may propose just so that McConnell can in 2022 claim that Biden hadn’t done anything and so the Republicans should take the House and the Senate, even though McConnell has no legislative agenda himself, the same pattern whereby Republicans had said they would replace Obamacare with a better plan and never bothered to offer one for twelve years.
Read MoreJoe Biden's Radical Liberalism
Rahm Emanuel, when he was Chief of Staff to Barack Obama, said “No crisis should be wasted”. What he meant was that when there is a legislative moment where there is an urgency and general willingness to act, measures should be added to the package of other measures that are a long time part of the leadership’s agenda. That is what happened with the passage yesterday of the American Recovery Act. No Republicans joined to aid the Democrats, truthfully saying that many of the measures had nothing to do with coronavirus relief but were part of long time Democratic wish lists, but some of the Democrats did not waver too much from the bill, except for eliminating the fifteen dollar minimum wage and forgiving student loans, and did approve of provisions that could be considered radical in a liberal way in that they moved forward major programs to expand entitlements so as to provide a more substantial way of life for all citizens and particularly those who were all but the rich, the rich not needing the assistance. Biden’s law is incremental but substantial, a firm way whereby economic situations do not interfere in people achieving their life, liberty and quest for happiness. From a Liberal point of view, this is the greatest advance since the New Deal, and Democrats from Bernie Sanders to John Manchin are impressed by the audacity, even if Larry Summers says that the package of money is so large that it will lead to inflation. The U. S. has had no inflation since the late Seventies, which is two generations ago, and the Federal Reserve has the ability and the power to squeeze out any inflation should it arise. Look at the solid policy accomplishments rather than speculation.
Read MoreThe Department of Justice
Merrick Garland will need all the intelligence and judicial discernment his supporters say he has, as well as a theoretical perspective his prior roles have not required, so that Garland will be successful as Attorney General because the policies to be implemented by him will be the most important of the issues of the Biden Administration after that of the coronavirus Recovery Act and what comes right after that, which will probably be some deal on immigration. Biden is correct in picking Garland to deal with some of the most controversial issues Biden will have to deal with. Here are three of them: what to do with prosecutions of Trump and his henchmen; the legislation concerning police violence and voter disenfranchisement; and the legislation concerning social media. All three of them fall into the hands of the Justice Department because criminal justice, voting rights and anti-trust are part of their responsibilities.
Read MoreMy First Vaccine Shot
I got my first vaccine shot yesterday, as you oldsters probably already had before me. It was done in what is called "The Salt Palace'', which is in downtown Salt Lake City. It is a convention center of gigantic proportions that was built in 1995 and seems to have taken its inspiration from an airport terminal. It had very long hallways with properly spaced chairs between so that all the people waiting for their appointments to start at ten a.m. business could sit while they were waiting, quite considerate of the fact that many elderly people can’t wait standing for a long time. Everything was well organized. I was ushered into the Grand Ballroom where one person promptly went over the paperwork and then shifted to a table where I got my shot and then went to another place to wait for fifteen minutes to see if I had a reaction. All of the people at work, from those at the start to guide you where to go, or at the end to tell you to go home, were all perky and friendly, something I much appreciated, anxious that something in the process might go wrong because of the paperwork or the injection. Nothing did.
Read MoreThe Crisis in Education
All institutions are always in a state of crisis. The economy has to adjust every generation or so to new products, a changing work force, and new ways of raising capital. The airline industry has to find today ways to work out of the problems created by high union contracts, unregulated competition, terrorism, and high oil prices just as it had to find a way out of the cluster of problems that arose after World War II: how to increase the passenger base; how to absorb Army Air Corps bases as civilian airports; how to stake out routes. Medicine switches from being office based to hospital based, from treating infections to treating organ diseases and cancers. Institutions are never just on the cusp between one era and another. The ground shifts so quickly that an era of medicine or industry is only a metaphor for the fact that some features of an institution may coexist for a while together even if one or another of those features will change for any number of reasons.
Education is an institution that is also always changing. Education, however, is described as in a state of crisis rather than merely in the process of responding to the next challenge. That is because education always falls short of the goals it and other institutions of social life set for it. Doctors may be required to treat but they are not required to cure diseases regarded as incurable; generals are expected to win wars, not to put an end to war. Teachers, on the other hand, are expected to provide, as the New York State Court of Appeals has held, “a sound basic education” for every young person, without defining what that would mean, though the phrase would seem to mean, if it has any meaning at all, that every young person will have learned enough to hold down a middle class occupation, regardless of the abilities of the child. Education is, in general, so grand a thing in conception that its goals always outstrip the ability of the institution to meet those goals. The goals of education are no less than to make every member of society economically productive, intellectually inquisitive, morally responsible, socially conscious, and psychologically mature.
Read MoreThe Insurrection as a Great Event
How do we know when great events have occurred, when something happens which is of great consequence, the road of history having taken one fork rather than another? Sometimes there are announcements and celebrations and ceremonies. Neville Chamberlain announced that Great Britain was at a state of war with Germany on Sept. 1, 1939. FDR announced there was a state of war with Japan at a joint session of Congress on Dec. 8, 1941. There were crowds of people in Times Square on V-E Day. Bells rang when the Declaration of Independence was announced and read at numerous crowds. Great events are also proclaimed at technological events. There were fireworks when the Brooklyn Bridge opened, and crowds of people crossed it in celebration at the new marvel. People cheered and were itself a celebration when Edison opened up the Pearl St. station in lower Manhattan and so began the Electric Age. There was a ceremonial golden spike hammered in by the last link between the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific to commemorate the opening of the railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans.
Read MoreMarjorie Taylor Greene
I know those whom I respect and with whom I can discuss political matters who nonetheless disagree with my Biden Liberal-centrist perspective. It takes a little more to understand or try to discuss matters with Marjorie Taylor Greene, who most of us dismiss as a kook or a laughing stock, what with her Jewish lasers from space attacking California so as to start forest fires and so make available lands for high speed train travel. Let us compare the differences in the kinds of people who are anti-Biden and we will find that even Greene can be placed within an ideology, which can be defined as a highly articulated set of propositions about politics and society, or else placed, like Greene, as just a not very articulate view even if some intellectuals can fashion thoughts and feelings into an ideology or turn an ideology into sentiments that do not have much thought about them, Biden as well as anyone else subject to the back and forth of feelings and ideas. None of us can escape some broad view of what constitutes the political and social landscape. Even my uneducated father believed that the gentiles were, in general, out to get the Jews, but that the United States was pretty safe for the Jews, and my students, who thought themselves too uninformed to go out and vote, had a sense, living in the Northeast, that there should be racial justice and protections for gays and lesbians as just a matter of common decency.
Read MoreThe Insurrection Moment
The insurrection can readily be appreciated as a historical moment because it was an unprecedented one. The U. S. Capitol had never been invaded by Americans, even if Washington and New York were assaulted by Bin Laden and, much previously, by the British. Not even our current pandemic is unprecedented, though not in anyone’s memory. Other such events are historical because they are momentous. These include Pearl Harbor and D Day and Antietam, all wartime occasions which altered American history, just as had economic events such as the industrialism of the Andrew Carnegie generation and the Great Depression and suburbanization in the Fifties and Sixties. Certain other events which seem momentous when they happened did not alter the American landscape. That includes the destruction of the World Trade Center, which, however, did not seem to have significantly altered the New York landscape, it instead becoming just office buildings, now filled with family based coops and the rest of the paraphernalia that go along with urban life rather than a permanent mark of devastation, something even Germany could overcome even if what abides in it is its scar of history.