Vol. IX, No. 8, August 2003

Ethics of a Fish Dinnerby Jonathan Wallace

I was amused and instructed by the importance of the choices we made in buying a piece of fish.

Year 2000 and the Agenda for Reform

by Peter Bearse

Our attention and the reform agenda need to be refocused on state and local initiatives and political parties if we want to take back our politics from the political class that has taken it over.

A Dream Field of Our Own by Sy Schechtman

Something there is in me that specifically loves the sight of a baseball diamond.

Our President is a Criminalby Danny Welch

The lies won't stop until we fire the liars.

Brain Terminal: The Great Media Melt-down

by Evan Maloney

How many times can the media cry wolf before people stop listening?

Civility Makes a Great Scamby Alasdair Denvil

All political controversies are reduced to "I'm right; you're a jerk."

Letters To The Ethical Spectacle

The only thing that i don't understand it's why did you jewish people never made anything, like a government or something to protect you all

If you like The Ethical Spectacle, please consider making a contribution in any amount you see fit.

All information about donations (checks, Paypal, Amazon) can be found on the website http://www.spectacle.org

"Noticing that no-one held the values I defended, I decided to make a spectacle of myself." --Richard Foreman

Text with Jonathan Wallace byline is copyright Jonathan Wallace 2003. All other text should be assumed to be the copyright of the bylined author. Artist: Laurie Caro; all art copyright Laurie Caro 2003 except as otherwise indicatedEmail: jw@bway.netFlames will be published with attribution. All other correspondence may be published unless specifically otherwise requested

Ethics of a Fish Dinner

by Jonathan Wallace jw@bway.net

Once a year, the Wallace family gets together on a summer weekend. This year, it fell to me to host the gathering in Amagansett. My brother Richard, the professor of environmental policy, accompanied me to the fish market to buy a slab of fish that would feed eleven people. Chalked on the blackboard at the market were choices: we could buy wild or farmed salmon. "Where is the wild salmon from?" Richard asked. "Alaska," was the answer. "And the farmed salmon?" "Canada." "East or West?" "I don't know." We left with a huge 5.5 pound filet of wild Alaska salmon the size of a paving stone, the biggest cut of fish I have ever cooked.

When we got it home, the only thing we agreed on was that we were going to cook it on the grill. Everyone had a different suggestion: rub it in olive oil; add spices; throw it on just as it was; wrap it in tin foil; place it on the hot grill skin side down and turn it after a few minutes. I chose to cook it Richard's way: directly on the grill, with nothing on it but salt and pepper. It was delicious that way, which finally settled all the disagreements.

Years ago I remember an old friend remarking over lunch, "I don't really care very much about the environment", and feeling very displeased with her, not just because I felt she should care about forests and the ocean, but because I felt she was wilfully ignorant of the fact that the environment was more personal still, comprising herself and her immediate surroundings. So that her statement was tantamount to saying, "I don't care if my clothes or my apartment are clean." Since the environment consists of the sum total of our surroundings, environmental issues are pervasive, including the ugly black splotches of gum on city sidewalks and the quality of the air on subway platforms.

Similarly, when I started the Ethical Spectacle, I understood that ethical issues are also pervasive, and that in fact we make dozens of ethical decisions each day. Deciding whether to return the extra quarter in change a store clerk accidentally handed you, or whether to give a quarter to a panhandler in the subway, are both ethical decisions you might make any day of your life in New York, and some of these minor decisions are of surprising complexity (for example, giving money to a panhandler may not be in his best interests). What kind of career you choose, what kinds of things you tolerate or take a stand against, what automobile you drive and whether you talk on your cell-phone while driving it are all ethical decisions.

All environmental decisions are ethical ones; choices related to the environment are a major subset of the ethical decisions we make each day. I was amused and instructed by the importance of the choices we made in buying a piece of fish.

If you are like most Westerners, every week you go to the supermarket and you buy chicken or beef without thinking about the implications of the fact that the animals were raised on a farm. Nobody hunted your cow or chased your chicken through the woods.

Ask yourself when you last ate any meat which was caught rather than raised. Unless you yourself hunt for sport, your answer might be "never" or "not sure". Before I stopped eating red meat entirely, I ordered venison sometimes in restaurants, but despite being presented as a "game" meat, it may have been farmed rather than hunted.

With the fish that you eat, the situation is the exact opposite. Until a few decades ago, every pound of fish you ate in a year was caught rather than farmed (except possibly catfish). Now this is beginning to turn--increasingly your dinner of salmon, tilapia or trout, may come from an acquaculture facility somewhere.

With meat, the change from a hunting to a farming economy took place centuries ago and is an extremely logical one. In much of the world, there isn't enough wild land left, let alone game on it, to feed billions of people. Hunting is also unreliable, especially as the game gets scarcer. By raising animals, we can coordinate supply and demand better, so that if you want a piece of a cow for your family's dinner on Friday, someone only has to say, "I will kill one for you," not "let me see if I can catch one for you." (The names of dishes like "hunter's chicken" are very entertaining, suggesting that this is what hunters eat for dinner when they couldn't find a deer.) We can also control the quality better, making sure the meat will be exactly the tenderness that you want, and not the tough gamy flesh of some angry, muscular survivor animal that has evaded the hunters until now.

Looked at this way, it is remarkable that we continued hunting the ocean for centuries after we switched to raising farm animals on land. The explanation of course is that the oceans were immense, covering much more of the earth's surface than the land, and we were able to continue believing that fish stocks were inexhaustible. In recent decades, this belief system has collapsed along with various fish stocks. There was a time when there was an East Coast U.S. salmon fishery. Now the fish are gone; when someone caught a salmon off Long Island a few years ago in a net full of striped bass, it was news, an event of extreme rarity. The Long Island striper fishery collapsed a few years ago, but the fish are now making a come-back after a few years of stringent federal regulation.

I have been scuba diving on and off for more than a quarter century. When I first dived the Florida Keys in the late seventies, you could sometimes still see a large grouper on the reef; within ten years you never saw any, as they had all been caught for someone's dinner. The average size of large species like tuna and swordfish has radically declined, as we catch every adult fish long before it has a chance to grow to full size. I heard years ago that we catch every adult lobster along the Florida coast before it has a chance to reproduce; the only reason there continue to be Florida lobsters is that the planktonic spawn of Caribbean lobsters floats in every year.

Some of the delicacies we buy at the fish market consist of endangered species which have not yet been protected by international treaty or federal law. For example, there is a persuasive case that you should never buy Chilean sea bass (known as Patagonian toothfish until renamed by the marketing people). Increasingly, we eat species that were thought of as trash fish just a few years ago (eg, tile fish, monkfish), but which come to our tables now as substitutes for more familiar species which have become harder to get.

And we haven't yet mentioned the environmental impact of the way in which we chase and catch the declining numbers of smaller fish. Tuna for some reason swim with dolphins, which are air-breathing mammals; hundreds of thousands of dolphins are drowned every year in tuna nets. Similarly, sea turtles drown in shrimp nets. Most types of nets catch species other than the ones they are set for. Here on the East End of Long Island, the bay-men (local families who made a living from the ocean for centuries) practiced a style of fishing where they would attach one end of a net to a truck on the beach and two other ends to dories (row boats) in the water. They were after stripers but the nets would indiscriminately catch many other species of no interest to them. I remember a trip to Montauk in 1972 in which we saw thousands of dead sea robins, puffers and other fish rotting on the beach, the "by-catch" of one such set by the bay-men. (This type of fishing has now been banned because of its destructiveness. Read Peter Matthiessen's Men's Lives for an account of the baymen and their style of fishing.) Similarly, today's huge ocean trawlers throw tons of unwanted dead fish back into the ocean.

Technology as usual is a neutral force, blindly playing good and evil roles simultaneously. "Turtle excluder devices" and nets which will allow dolphin and even unwanted fish species to escape have been designed, though there is a lack of international monitoring to make sure they are being used properly. On the other hand, nets have become larger and are now routinely dragged across the bottom, crushing coral or destoying seabed, to make sure nothing escapes. (The industry's phrase for removing every living thing from an area of the seabed is "biomass extraction"). Long-liners set individual hooks on miles of line that also catch unwanted species which die before they can be freed. "Ghost" nets and longlines

break free from boats and drift through the oceans catching fish which will never be harvested by anyone.

One blessing is that there is a very important margin between the commercial collapse of a species and its actual extinction. Fish that are no longer commercially viable to catch may still exist in sufficient numbers to make a come-back.

Given that the economics of hunting the sea are now, due to the pressures of population and technology, aligning themselves with the economics of hunting the land, wouldn't it make sense to promote fish farming? Why did my environmentally sensitive brother choose to buy a wild salmon rather than a farmed one?

The answer is that large acquaculture is causing some of the same problems as large, factory-style agriculture. Salmon farms are not beloved of their neighbors because the fish's wastes foul surrounding waters. Farmed species sometimes escape and may drive out or interbreed with native species (it is a dangerous thing to farm salmon in proximity to a wild fishery). An article in the July 29, 2003 New York Times (the paper has run an interesting series this past week on fishing and acquaculture) reveals the results of a new report that indicates that farmed fish show much higher concentrations of the pollutant PCB than wild ones. The article also points up a discrepancy between the vanishingly small amount of PCB's the EPA will tolerate in wild fish (it publishes advisories that the public should refrain from eating Hudson river striped bass more than once a month) with the concentrations the FDA allows in commercially-sold fish, which are hundreds of times higher. Apparently, the fat content of farmed fish are also much greater.

A month or so ago, there was a truth-in-labelling scandal pertaining to farmed salmon. Wild fish are natrurally pink because they pick up the color from the shrimp which are a major part of their diet. Farmed salmon, fed on other types of feed, have grey flesh. Some distributors were dying the fish pink, afraid that consumers wouldn't want grey salmon.

Despite these problems, I believe that acquaculture is the way of the future, because recent events have definitively shown the almost insurmountable problems involved in maintaining wild fish stocks under insatiable fishing pressure. Even without regulation I think the market will continue to swing in the direction of farmed fish. A little attention (preferably commercial, government if needed) to moderating the environmental impact of fish farms, and ensuring the health and purity of the product, will ease the transition.

YEAR 2000 and the AGENDA for REFORM

by Peter Bearse DSC2000@aol.com

■ 2000: What a Year! Threshold of Change? Reform as a Subtext

of the Year 2000 (Y2K) Presidential Campaign

■ Populism and Participation in the Politics of a Presidential Election Year

Ø The 2000 Primary Season & ReformØ Presidential campaignsØ Campaign Finance Reform: DebatesØ Campaign Finance Reform: Legislation

§ Other Reform Initiatives Stemming from Y2K

Ø Florida, the Count and Election ReformØ Other Propositions for Election Reforms

■ Postscript to the Y2K Election§ Goodbye to Bill Clinton§ Prognosis, Postlude, New Beginnings and Reform Redux

Foreword

Several months ago, Ben Price and I had discussed the possibility of doing this article together but we had several disagreements over what to write on certain issues like the Supreme Court’s “election” of George Bush, and Ben accepted the challenge of running for Congress as the Green Party nominee. Hat’s off to Ben for a fine campaign to become a citizen legislator. This article is dedicated to him. It has benefited from our interactions, as has the book from which the article is drawn. Hopefully, this will generate some controversy among other readers, too, so that our shared purpose of generating a debate on political reform will be served.

Executive Summary

From the standpoint of real political reform – that which would help to bring people back into the picture -- election year 2000 (Y2K) started with a bang and ended with a whimper. Ironically, campaign finance reform (CFR), though supposed to reduce the role of money in politics, focused only on money. No value was assigned to the people’s time as political volunteers. Both CFR and election reform initiatives took steps to federalize campaign finance and elections that bordered on being unconstitutional. Bill Clinton’s exit served to remind us how he depreciated the coin of political life even while focusing attention on an imperial Presidency and national politics. Both our attention and the reform agenda need to be refocused on state and local initiatives and political parties if we want to take back our politics from the political class that has taken it over.

Introduction:2000: What a Year! Threshold of Change? Reform as a Subtext of the

Year 2000 (and 2004?) Presidential Campaigns The first draft of this article was being written during one of the most remarkable political years in our country’s history. The Presidential campaign playbook came to a final episode far more remarkable than the political game preceding. As a result, all of a sudden, there was talk of “reform” once again at the end of a year that opened with talk of reform by challengers during the Presidential primary season. The scope of the year-end talk, however, was limited largely to “electoral reform” – changes in voting arrangements to ensure that every vote would count. This was followed by another round of talk and, finally, of action on campaign finance reform that seemed like déjà vu, harkening back to the year’s beginning. Those who talked the talk, however, were not able to act in ways that would help the great American majority to walk the walk, politically. In other words, another great Presidential election year opportunity to grapple with the true challenge of political reform was lost. Perhaps the most hopeful sign was seen at the White House exit. The

rhetorical entry of another occupant seemed sanguine as well as consanguine. We are still hanging on some nice-sounding words. Harbingers? Preludes? Real hope? Who will turn out to be the “Reformer with Results” after all is said and done on the issue of reform? A common slice of political advice tendered to those running for office is that the candidate should always try to set the agenda so that the campaign debate is carried out on his terms, not those of the opponent. Bush’s political advertising slogan was a backhanded compliment to his opponent at the time, testimony to the fact that McCain had succeeded in setting the Presidential Campaign agenda for awhile, even taking it away from Bill Bradley so that reform became the subtext of the Y2K Presidential campaign. This is how things looked in naked (calculating, short-term) political terms during the Spring of the year 2000. Given the passage of time since, we can now get a better, broader slant on the political workout on reform during the year and its immediate aftermath. Who actually set the agenda? How was the reform issue defined? What kind of “reform” did the issue definition represent? And what are actual or likely repercussions to deal with now and into the future?

Populism and Participation in the Politics of a Presidential Election Year

The 2000 Primary Season & Reform Hopes rise at the New Year and sap rises with the onset of Spring. So, too, with the primary season of the Y2K Presidential race. For awhile, it seemed as if “reform” might be the prime driver of the year’s political season. Words resonant of the Progressive Era of 100 years ago brought out thousands of new, young and independent voters, putting new energy and life into a race in ways and to an extent that had not been seen during the previous Presidential election campaign of 1996. The challengers attracting media and primary voters’ attention, John McCain and Bill Bradley, were on message re: reform like Frik and Frak. Thus, primary questions at two

levels came to the fore:

1. Would a reform message move to the top of the public agenda, notwithstanding polls that repeatedly said “no;”2. Who would win out as the message bearer?

Remember the joint press conference in New Hampshire at which Bill and John shook hands and pledged mutual devotion to a reform agenda? That reminded me of the handshake between another Bill and his buddy Newt that accompanied a similar declaration – like that emerging from a NATO meeting: No Action; Talk Only. Nothing happened as a result.[1] The encounter between “Dollar Bill” and “Straight Talk McCain,” however, was like a coin toss that Bill lost. Afterwards, it was downhill for the Bradley campaign. This Bill had some good things to say, but he never did overcome his (public) speech handicap and John had it all over him for charisma. It’s tough running against a real war hero who preempts your main message. We’ve already had our fling at that in the form of its legislative embodiment, McCain-Feingold (see the section to follow on campaign finance reform). Though Bill’s lackluster campaign may be blessedly forgotten, what should we recall from the reform part of his platform? Looking back, who among the political pundits noticed a disconnect between early and late Y2K in terms other than number of months passed? The early Presidential primary season was marked by political participation in New Hampshire that could nearly darn well be called populist. People from all over and many walks of life converged on the Granite state to walk, talk, mail, call and otherwise work for various Presidential candidates, not only McCain but Bradley, Bauer, Forbes, Keyes and others. Old fashioned people politics seemed to be back with new faces and flavors. Now recall the late Y2K political channel. What did we see? – The people appeared to have left the scene. The reform issue was reduced to S.27, “McCain-Feingold,” a Senate Bill that mentioned only money. What happened to all the political volunteers that we saw in New Hampshire, those who thought the political process might still have some life left in it after all? Were some of them the same people we saw standing outside courthouses in Florida? Were they the ones attracted by

Al Gore’s pretend populism? How many even bothered to vote once the McCain flame had died out? How many moved over to Nader or voted Green, Libertarian or other 3rd party? Presidential campaigns While he was running, President G.W. Bush never had a Republican reform proposition that had much more to offer than that of Sen. Mitch McConnell, the prime opponent of McCain-Feingold and other campaign finance reform (CFR) legislation. To his credit, however, Bush’s actions demonstrated the value of McConnell’s main proposition in ways that words could not. His campaign provided quick and “full disclosure” of campaign contributions via the Internet. Meanwhile, his opponent was playing the populist card. Not only did Mr. Gore repeatedly say that he would “sign” McCain-Feingold once it reached his desk as President, he railed against “big money” and “special interests,” as if he were running his campaign according to a Progressive Era reformers’ playbook. Then, in its desperate last days, the Gore campaign appealed to "the will of the people" and "the voters' intent" to justify repeated efforts to find enough voters in Florida to validate Mr. Gore’s presumption of the Presidency based on a national popular majority, as if the U.S. was a foreign, unitary state with a different constitution. His appeals were those of a demagogue, not those of a man who would be President of an American federal republic. For the tradition that Al upheld was otherwise. He was the latest in a long line of American demagogues -- pretend populists who play on people's passions without informing them as to what they can or should do other than vote for the “man of the people” if they really want to "count." The appeals of such pretenders also rest upon what they do not say. They rely too much on people's ignorance of what it takes to make a democratic system work. One was hard put to hear, even if one had a political hearing aid to turn up, how Mr. Gore’s election would bring people back into the political picture and enable a government of and by as well as for, the people.

The Supreme Court properly focused on HOW votes need to be counted to ensure equal protection under the law. No totalitarian allusions to "will of the people" here. Voter is as voter does. Whether or not the vote can be counted is unambiguous according to a uniform standard, or the vote is rejected or not recounted. No impressionistic reliance upon various interpretations of “voter’s intent” here. We do not live in the Republic of Chad. Our ox was not Gored, Babe. Yet the Supreme Court was wrong to put itself in the position of effectively deciding the outcome of the Y2K presidential election. Yes, there was a Constitutional “equal protection” issue, so the Supremes were right to take the case on even though (or because?) it sang to the country with dissonant chords. There were also voting inequities, although reliable, convincing evidence of these did not arise until later. Yes, an election result needed to be certified within no more than a few weeks. The Court’s decision would have been wiser, however, if it had enabled the federal nature of our election to work itself out, with clearer standards, to be sure, but at the state level first and foremost, then passing to the Congress as specified by our Constitution, if necessary. The process would have been a bit further prolonged and even more contentious, partisan and noisy. The outcome would have been no different but it would have been more satisfactorily consistent with the decentralized, federal nature of our Republic. We can now look back at the 36-day episode as a much needed civics lesson on what we as citizens need to do if we really want to count in the future. We don't have to buy into continued, misleading, negative interpretations generated by the media "commentariat." The brunt of the lesson is positive, promising and constructive if the majority of the American people see that they need to be active participants in the political process if they want the political system to be authentically as well as legitimately theirs. The importance of voting is now obvious to all. But democratic political participation means more than just voting. People need to participate actively in the political process through which candidates are selected and elected. At the local level, this process includes ballot design, designation of poll workers, and selection of people to serve on election boards.

The example of Florida is hardly negative. We saw dozens of volunteers helping to count thousands of ballots over hundreds of hours. We observed the critical importance of many more people than the "usual suspects" -- the political "junkies," "hired guns" or "pro's" -- paying attention to basic features of how "our" political system works (or sometimes falls short) -- as in ballot design, voting machines and procedures, whether voters pay attention, protest demonstrations, influence of the media, poll closing times, and so on. If these lessons are taken to heart and acted upon, then the experience we have been through as a nation will turn out to be a big plus. Our federal democratic republic will be the better for it. We will continue to light the way for other nations whose people were as fascinated with the counting controversy as ourselves. If the episode rings like a wake up call for American democracy, then our children will benefit most of all, in more ways than Sesame Street can "Count." They will benefit by example -- seeing more parent-citizen role models as actors, not just spectators, of the drama of American democracy. They may even get involved enough to "Take Back” their government, as the non-science fiction book by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein would help them to do if they were to read it and take it to heart along with one by this author from which this article is derived.[2] As for “Presidential campaigns,” it remains to be seen whether a genuine populist will emerge during 2004, whether real reform will be more than a “subtext,” or whether “digital democracy” will emerge as a real force. The folks at website moveon.org – “Carrie, Eli, Joan, Peter, Wes, and Zack” -- seemed determined to realize all three. They called for a much earlier than even New Hampshire primary via Internet voting on June 24, 2003, while featuring e-mail statements from Howard Dean and two other Democrats -- would-be populists that hoped to be anointed via e-voting. Moveon.org’s Internet newsletter of 6/18/03 reminded me of dot.com political site ads suggesting that democratic political participation is “just a click away.” Former Vermont Gov. Dean’s e-mail in that newsletter, if it had been designed for audio streaming, would have rung aloud with populist noises,

such as: “Defeating George Bush will take nothing short of a grassroots movement. That’s why we’ve… provided tools on our website to help you build the movement in your community. Click below…I want everyone to know that there is a way to get involved…no matter how much time they have…” Dean’s campaign manager claimed (presumably without blushing) that: “This is the first great grassroots campaign of the modern era.”[3] Dean appeared to be already anointed by Moveon, as his letter appeared as the first of “three candidates who polled highest with our members.” Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Sen. John Kerry were the other two. One had to click on “Read letters from all the candidates here” to find the other six of nine Democratic candidates for Moveon’s presidential primary.[4] Thus, it was no surprise to see the results of “the first Internet primary in recorded history” – Dean, Kucinich and Kerry placed 1,2,3, with Dean far ahead at over 43%. Democracy in action? What was surprising was the demonstration of how quickly a national primary could be organized and executed via the ‘net, and the size of the “turnout.” Certified at 317,647 Moveone members, it was larger than the combined turnouts of voters in the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries and Iowa caucuses during the 2000 presidential election season. Thus, the power of the Internet as a political organizing tool to which my article in the previous issue of this journal pointed was demonstrated nationwide. It now remains to be seen whether this power will be translated into a revival of people’s direct political involvement – “We, the People” empowerment -- or into another demonstration of the power of Internet political fundraising to finance political business-as-usual. Ironically for many Moveon members who see the need to revive the Democratic Party as a progressive force vs. a resurgent GOP, reliance upon such an Internet procedure would serve to weaken the Party. I was allowed to participate in the primary, and my vote was counted even though I am a registered Republican. Many who voted may not have been registered to vote in a regular election. The only requirement was that one be a Moveon “member.” Moveon did not use the occasion to urge members to go down to their city or town halls to register to vote. Neither was “instant voter registration” of the type urged by many liberal activists

allowed for participation in their Internet primary. One had to be “registered” as a Moveon member by the evening of the day before voting began. According to the avowedly liberal magazine, THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, the main winner of the primary was Moveon: “the group has managed to induce some of the highest profile Democrats in the country…many of whom are part of the party establishment and had not felt a need to join up with Moveon…into conducting a massive, no cost membership drive for them...”[5] Campaign Finance Reform: Congressional Debates Unfortunately, as Y2K wore on and slopped over into 2001, the reform issue became only a matter of money with respect to either side of the Y2K reform coin – election reform or campaign finance reform (CFR). “Thank God for C-SPAN.” C-SPAN2 carried the U.S. Senate debates on CFR in their entirety. Political commentators fell all over themselves to compliment the Senate and many of its members for the quality of their deliberations – as if political speechmaking had been sadly missed and posturing for the cameras was something new. No one seemed to notice how even the most populist members among the Senators failed to define the issue so that people could come back into the picture. There were two exceptions that prove the rule – Barbara Mikulski and the late Paul Wellstone. Especially Barbara. Her nostalgia was eloquent. She recalled how, with the help of political volunteers in Baltimore at the outset of her political career, she knocked on 10,000 doors to “beat the machine” and win a seat on City Council. But did she move from this recollection to observe how there seemed to be no room for volunteers in the “reform”(ed) political future envisaged by McCain-Feingold? No. Sen. Wellstone’s performance during the debates was marked by two proposed amendments:

1. One to extend the ban on “issue advocacy” by corporations and unions to non-profit organizations, an amendment that many political commentators and opponents of Wellstone (like Sen. McConnell, who voted for it) think ultimately may sink the McCain-Feingold ship

because of its likely unconstitutionality. This amendment passed in spite of McCain’s opposition.

2. Another amendment to give states the option of extending public financing (a.k.a.“Clean Money”) to federal office candidacies. This amendment failed even though supporters pointed admiringly to the “Maine model” and tried to force federal reform into a “states rights” wrapper rhetorically embellished by some Senatorial rappers.

The only concern expressed for time as a resource in politics was a concern for Senators’ time – the time they need to spend (too much) raising money (too much) in order to finance multi-million dollar campaigns. The value of time contributed by political volunteers had disappeared from their radar screens as a result of “the money chase.” In the old days, candidates would spend more time calling for volunteers than dialing for dollars. The Senators felt free to blame TV for most of the time they had to spend fund raising to feed the maw of the media. None of them, however, felt strongly enough to introduce an amendment calling for even minimal allocations of free TV time to enable them to “get their message out.”[6] The fact that they had to raise money to pay big bucks to political consultants who also stood to make more big bucks from media “buys” – this fact earned (dis)honorable mention by some. But the connection with people’s absence from politics was lost. No one observed that political consultants are increasingly taking over grassroots political functions that used to be performed by volunteers – one of the basic reasons why the cost of political campaigns continues to rise at three times the rate of inflation! Also, no one in the Senate thought to suggest that the increasing costs of campaign finance regulation might itself be a factor aggravating this incredible rate of inflation. Even though there was some high flown rhetoric about a political system in danger of sinking, no one used the Titanic as a metaphor. Perhaps they didn’t want to be seen to be rearranging deck chairs. Opponents of McCain-Feingold pointed to another danger – federalization of elections. The danger was already apparent in a memo to the Federal

Election Commission (FEC) from the Commission’s General Counsel that was discussed at the FEC’s September, Y2K meeting. This memo also reveals that the urge to control the political process to move any possible perception of “corruption” knows no bounds. As Bradley Smith, FEC Commissioner, indicated: “McCain-Feingold threatens to limit the voter registration and GOTV activities of state and local committees.”[7] The reason why a lawyer can make a case for state and local controls under federal law (“federalization”) is that political party activities, traditionally, have involved “working for the ticket” at all levels, from local to federal. The mix is called “bundling.” Thus, the FEC General Counsel proposed regulations in the form of financial allocation rules and federal oversight that amount to a crude, perverse form of un-bundling of political activities that belong together. Look at this from the standpoint of a party precinct worker (volunteer). Rather than going door-to-door at one time for non-federal candidates with one set of handouts and another time for federal candidates with another set of handouts, wouldn’t you want to go once around for all your party’s candidates? If you were the Chair of an local political party committee, would you want to keep time accounts for each volunteer, in order to report to the FEC how much time your Committee volunteers spend working for candidates to federal office? After McCain-Feingold was handed over to FEC staffers to set the rules for the law’s administration, the issue of federalization arose with a vengeance once party committees were faced with implementation and enforcement of the new regulations. It has also arisen in the context of pressure for other reforms as we shall see further on. Yet the CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR concluded, immediately after U.S. Senate passage of McCain-Feingold as amended:

“Perhaps the biggest benefit of this legislation: Citizens might feel they can return to civic participation in this new political space created by the lessening of money influence in Washington…the American people can…lose some cynicism, and more actively participate in national politics.” [8]

This statement is exceptional. It’s also a reach or stretch. There is little basis for it. One can only hope that it turns out to be more than an article of Christian Science faith. CFR: Legislation Lest McCain-Feingold be seen as the be-all and end-all of reform in legislative terms, let us note that the most energetic and extensive efforts at reform have been occurring at the state and local level. Sub-national units of government are “laboratories of innovation” in a federal system.[9] As already noted, the “Maine model” earned a good deal of attention during debates on one of the Wellstone amendments to McCain-Feingold. The state efforts have come to focus primarily on the so-called “Clean Money” ballot initiatives which, somewhat ironically, try to take money out of politics by substituting public money for private. Such initiatives have been passed, not only in Maine, but in Arizona, Massachusetts and Vermont. In the past, similar initiatives have been passed in New York City, New Jersey, Minnesota and a few other places without relying on the apochryphal “Clean Money” billing.[10] The latter seems to suggest the political counterpart of the “Good Housekeeping” seal of approval. It helps to have an ironic sense of humor in this business, for ironies abound. Another is that the Clean Money ballot initiatives that have succeeded owe their success to political volunteers doing old-fashioned people-to-people, door-to-door, street-wise politics – canvassing, getting signatures, writing letters to editors and getting out the vote. It’s interesting to observe that many of these volunteers arrive in buses from locations outside the state where the initiative would be voted on by in-state voters, but that’s another issue which we can table for now. What’s even more interesting is that the interest in political volunteerism seems to wane once initiatives are passed. Politics is still a money game but it’s played with someone else’s money. Consider the highly touted “Maine model,” for example. How do its admirers measure its reputed success? Let us count the ways. Quoting

statistics on people’s political participation – to see whether the “reform” may have led it to increase in terms of voluntary commitments of time – this is not among them. The primary indicators are otherwise – increases in numbers of candidates and seats contested. So let us sing hosannas for reform – the fact that we have increased political opportunities for the usual suspects – the already politically self-interested – to run for office and build their political careers at lower cost to themselves, their families and their friends because we, the taxpayers, are financing their campaigns with public money. We probably should not sneer at the Maine performance benchmark in a state like Massachusetts where are so few competitive races for state offices and the disease has been spreading to the local level. As one columnist noted:

“In both 1998 and 2000, Massachusetts was tied for last among the 50 states in the percentage of contested primary races. Last. Virtually the entire Legislature and congressional delegation returned to office on a pass.”[11]

This columnist also remarked on frequent references to “the will of the people” by proponents of the Clean Election Law – “a well-intentioned if deeply flawed effort to reduce the decisive role money plays in state politics.” Many would challenge use of the word “decisive” here but not the phrase “deeply flawed.” One flaw is that the “Law” recognizes candidates but not parties as actors in electoral politics. It would provide no public funding to or through political parties even though the ballot question as worded would not preclude a law enacted by the Legislature from doing so.[12] “Clean Money” would go only to candidates, thus further diminishing the role of parties in the political process. Reliance upon initiative and referendum (I&R) as the primary tool of reform undermines the role of parties in the first instance, even before an initiative would take effect if passed. In my home state of Massachusetts, ex-Governor Cellucci is recognized as someone who successfully promoted the use of I&R but who whose leadership of the state GOP served to further undermine his already weakened Party. There has been some research, books and many articles that point to the

undemocratic nature of “plebiscitary” democracy via I&R – another irony that should earn a frown rather than a smirk.[13] So, here is yet “another nail in the coffins of parties” brought about through the well-intentioned efforts of those characterized as reformers by media writers who understand no more of the political process than the so-called reformers do. More generally, the debate over Clean Elections initiatives features those who favor “direct democracy” vs. those who respect the fact that our governments at all levels, constitutionally, are representative democracies. Another basic controversy implicit in the debate is that between “public” and run-of-the-mill journalism. Journalists like the one last quoted did nothing to probe the issue sufficiently to inform the public before they voted on it; thus, when the voting is over, they hide behind the “popular will” as sufficient justification for ex-post rationalization of an initiative that some recognize as “deeply flawed.” Yet another irony seems to have escaped observers of reformers’ efforts even though it is well known to public finance economists. This is that the introduction of significant amounts of public money into some segment of the political economy almost invariably has an inflationary effect. Goods and services purchased with public money tend to increase in price faster than the CPI. U.S. Senators participating in the CFR debate called attention to political inflationary factors in a situation where the only public money has been that committed to Presidential campaigns but where the prime driver has been heavy infusions of private “soft money.” Thus, Clean Money reformers, like others who have had to face the lessons of past reform history, can anticipate seeing their initiatives fulfill the “law of unintended consequences.” By centering their reforms on money, they will increase the cost of campaigns and make them more, not less, dependent upon money over time. The latter irony does not begin to speak to yet another. Reformers, most of whom are fundamentally apolitical because they view politics as “dirty,” are putting “Clean” campaign financing increasingly at the mercy of politicians. At some point, once all the reformers’ hype and media attention to it blows

over, state legislatures will be increasingly reluctant to budget public money for private campaigns. This was the case in Massachusetts even at the beginning of Clean Money initiative implementation. The state legislature’s reluctance to appropriate money led the Supreme Judicial Court to intervene. They ordered the auction of public property to raise money to implement the Clean Elections Act. Enough was raised to enable Warren Tolman to undertake a multi-million dollar campaign for Governor whose reliance upon negative advertising helped to discredit the Act. Thus, when legislators hostile to the Act, headed by the Speaker of the House, put up a ballot question that asked whether voters wanted to use public money to finance political campaigns, the initiative was passed. So Clean Elections became a dead letter in Massachusetts. These initiatives haven’t fared much better in other states. As indicated earlier, only Maine reports some limited positive impacts, but a recent study may serve to further undermine the credibility of Clean Elections, even in Maine. The field of public finance helps to provide some additional perspective on the issue of taxpayer subsidies for political campaigns. This is the so-called “dead weight” issue. Subsidies are a wasteful “dead weight” to the extent that they subsidize activity that would have been undertaken anyway. There’s a lot of this in Clean Elections. Nearly all of incumbents would be running for re-election. They’re subsidized, along with a significant portion of the politically interested who would run for office even if public funding weren’t provided. Especially from an economist’s standpoint, it’s pretty amazing that this issue was not raised in the Clean Elections debate in Massachusetts. Already, in a state where the Legislature was challenged to appropriate $10 million to implement the Act, there were complaints from proponents that Clean Elections would be under-funded at a level of $22 million. Given the “inflationary” issue already noted, the amount of subsidy is likely to be a bone of contention year after year in state Legislatures faced with the challenge of implementing such initiatives. The state fiscal crisis provided the final death knell, providing a ready-made excuse for the state legislature to kill the Clean Elections Act, in Massachusetts in 2003. Given the high degree to which the overall elections’ subsidy is “dead weight,” an economist would have to conclude that Clean Elections is a

pretty inefficient solution to the campaign financing problem. In a way, that’s not surprising, since the costs and benefits of people’s time hasn’t been figured into any overall cost/benefit analysis (there hasn’t been one). What’s ironic here (and again!) is that reformers tend to want “efficiency” in politics.[14] As if anyone with any political experience had any reason to believe that politics could be efficient. Or shall we count “inefficiency” as another example of “the law of unintended consequences” that has plagued CFR initiatives all along? Overall, the most important legislative common denominator between the federal-level McCain-Feingold and state-level Clean Money reform initiatives is clear: They both certify the dominance of money in politics and further diminish the importance of people. The latter irony is not funny at all. It is rather threatening to the future of our democratic republic. Recall the remarks of Ben Franklin to those waiting to hear the results of the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. When asked what the Convention had accomplished, he responded: “A Republic, if you can keep it.” The danger of losing it is further aggravated by the fact that so-called reforms at both levels will weaken parties that, as a national survey reveals in Chapter 5 of my new book, are already weak at the grass roots with respect to their local party committee foundations. Traditionally, these committees have relied heavily upon volunteers. It is also ironic that McCain-Feingold would ban “soft money” that was intended for “party building” and could have been devoted to such activities by re-directing rather than banning it.

During the Senate debate on the Hagel amendment to S.27, Senators Hagel and McConnell pointed to the negative consequences of the bill for political parties – another state/federal “common denominator.” Unfortunately, as indicated earlier, the negative consequences of state-level reforms for parties has not figured in debates over Clean Money initiatives even though they are potentially more adverse. Without strong parties, how is the great American majority of unorganized, unaffiliated, “independent” individuals to make a difference in the political process? The answer is: They won’t. They will be effectively dis-empowered -- “spectators” of the

political game and consumers of pundits’ political pablum, their role simply that of voters for the “usual suspects,” not that of citizen producers or political players. Some years hence, when it becomes amply clear that the political class can’t do it all for us, there will be hell to pay as the class minority faces an angry majority. As this article was completed, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) awaited Supreme Court review. A federal district court had ruled some of the Act’s soft money and issue-advocacy advertising prohibitions unconstitutional. Then the Supreme Court, ruling on another case, found in a 7-2 decision that a North Carolina anti-abortion group should not be allowed to make direct contributions to candidates and campaigns from its general fund instead of its PAC. A decision in favor of the group would have resurrected soft money with a vengeance, since corporations and/or unions could make unlimited contributions to such general funds. Thus, one editor was led to comment that this “ruling is an encouraging indicator that the court may not be too hostile to the….Act. Whether a decision substantially upholding the Act, however, would serve to “resurrect” people’s political participation is another matter, one on which one is hard put to be optimistic. It’s easy to criticize and forecast dire consequences due to various reform initiatives. But can one come up with a better way? We can, one that recognizes the value of peoples’ time, all that most people have to contribute, and provides incentives for them to be involved as actors, not just observers, in a political system that should be THEIRS and that their participation can recover as theirs. Now that you’ve seen this bold claim, you’ll have to wait a few months until WE, THE PEOPLE is published to see how it can be fulfilled. Remember, short-term-itis, our hankering for instant gratification, is part of our problem!, so don’t be tooo impatient. Read on!

Other Reform Initiatives Stemming from Y2K Florida & the Count In addition to and advance of advance of final passage of McCain-

Feingold, the last hurrah of the Y2K wavelet of reform was the reaction to the Florida count and recounts. The hue and cry over the extended “count” in Florida led to a flurry of “electoral” reform proposals, many of which are still floating around in the halls of Congress and various state legislatures. These focused on changes in voting machines and procedures, rosters of registrants, ballot designs and election board workers. It would be very easy to get tangled among the trees of various proposals and quite lose sight of the forest of reform. It is remarkable, in fact, how this “electoral” category of reforms was disconnected from any larger reform agenda, including even the money-only agenda of McCain-Feingold. Is this another example of the right hand of government not knowing what the left hand is doing, or of legislators being unable to balance or connect two thoughts in their minds at the same time? “Ironically, the state of Florida, where the bomb went off, is one of the first states to rebuild,” remarked Kay Albowicz, Communications Director for the National Association of Secretaries of State.[15] Early in May, 2001, the Florida legislature approved and the Governor, Jeb Bush, signed, a bill to overhaul the state’s election system by:

♦ requiring manual recounts of ballots in close elections.♦ banning punch-card ballot machines.♦ streamlining absentee balloting.♦ lengthening from 4 days to 11 the amount of time allowed to certify general election results.♦ appropriating $24 million to help finance the acquisition of new voting equipment – by providing $3500-7500 per precinct to pay for optical scanners. Counties that want to use touch-screen technology can opt for this if they can afford it.♦ providing $6 million for better education and training of poll workers and voters.♦ setting uniform guidelines for manual ballot recounts.

The only link to CFR was a provision that would eliminate state matching funds for out-of-state campaign contributions. This is a feature that should be picked up by other states. It’s the state analogue to federal law designed to cut the influence of “foreign” money. Out-of-state money could talk

with a louder “voice” than the views of down-home voters. This provision was “denounced by the Democrats,” who were looking to out-of-state contributors to help unseat Gov. Jeb Bush in 2002. As for the “education and training” feature, this promises to circumvent the traditional role of political parties in this regard. To the extent that it does so, it would serve to further weaken parties. Florida put money on the table to fund its reforms. The failure of other states to do likewise truncated reform efforts or put their implementation on hold. Such was the case in Georgia even though Georgia’s effort was ahead of Florida’s both technologically and in time. Gov. Roy Barnes signed legislation in April, 2001, to place touch-screen voting systems in all precincts, but as of last reporting Georgia was still “waiting for the money.”[16] So are election officials in many other states, even though more than 130 bills related to election reform have been signed into law and more than 1,000 were pending in 35 states as of summer, 2001. Another remarkable feature of these reform debates is how the political role of us ordinary people was, once again, excised or diminished in the reform picture. Most attention focused on “technology” as the source of solutions. So manufacturers of high tech voting machines had a chance to peddle their wares and advocates of “electronic voting” via the Internet could tout “digital democracy.” We’ve already encountered the latter in last month’s SPECTACLE. It’s so typically American to look at technology for a fix. Reform was very narrowly construed even though the claims of “dis-enfranchisement,” etc. could have been heard to raise broader issues.[17] So what people were talked about? – election board workers, among the pillars of local democracy – those who work long hours at low pay on election day. They are among your neighbors. They check you in, check you out and help you out, if you need help, at the polls on election day. They include many grandmas, some disabled and some un-or underemployed locals who could use the beer and pretzel money ($60-75 per day) supplied by city or town clerks.[18] And how were they talked about? – as among the sources of electoral

malfeasance or incompetence thought to have denied some people their vote, rather than as essential sources of help in the elections’ process. Thus, among proposals for “reform” are those that would remove the role of political parties in nominating board workers by selecting election helpers on an “independent” (non-partisan) basis, with training and oversight to be provided by state agencies rather than political parties or local government. One of the last little “perks” that parties can provide to local activists would be gone. Rather than recognizing the role of local political party committees and building on their ability to mobilize volunteers, “reformers” are trying to put more nails in the coffins of parties and to take another step towards federalization of elections. The role of local government in elections is being scrutinized with a very critical eye by national observers who appear to have little or no political experience, for they have finally woken up to the fact that the conduct of elections is a localized responsibility. The NEW YORK TIMES editorialized: “For too long, local governments have been left to conduct elections with insufficient resources and guidance” (Feb.5, 2001). The TIMES was shocked, “shocked to learn that the margin of error could vary so widely across jurisdictions” (December 17, 2000). So some are now calling for national election standards, at least for Presidential balloting at the federal level, or at least to ensure uniformity within states. The ECONOMIST pronounced, for example:

“America needs a root-and-branch reform of its voting system…It needs a national system of voting…and it needs to embrace the wonders of modern technology.” [December 9, 2000]

In keeping with the above thinking, Democrats on the U.S. Senate Rules Committee deliberating on what the Congress should do in the wake of Florida 2000 were pushing for federal mandates “that the states take certain actions.”[19] If some people are losing their votes at local polling places, is the state or national elections “system” to blame? Hardly. Where were the voters of

Palm Beach County when the fabled “butterfly ballot” design was up for review? Who among them was present at a County or City Council meeting or election forum to ask questions when a candidate for City or Country Clerk was up for the job? Here, as in other areas of concern, local voters’ lack of attention is the root problem. What’s the most appropriate solution in a decentralized system? – not federalization of elections or even greater state control, but local initiative. As Chris Matthews, host of “Hardball” put it on C-SPAN: “People must put the pressure on locally” [Washington Journal, with Brian Lamb, on Friday, the 13th of April, 2001]. Of what value is a “Voters Bill of Rights” if there is no voters’ responsibility?[20] The latter issue was nicely highlighted in a letter to the editor of USA TODAY in response to the Florida reform package described earlier:

“…in all of this, no mention is made of the voter’s responsibility to vote correctly… there are several safeguards to be sure that the process is carried out correctly.

• First, be familiar with the ballot. It’s usually sent out 1 to 2 weeks prior to voting and is published in the local newspaper. If you don’t understand your ballot, consult a friend, relative, attorney or your (local) supervisor of elections.(or town or city clerk, et.al.) • Second, be sure you have the required proper identification with you at your voting precinct…• Third, know your precinct and polling place to avoid going to the wrong place…• Last, and by far not least, do your homework with regard to the candidates…”[21]

To the latter, one might add “with regard to” ballot questions. I am especially sensitive with regard to these, not only because such “questions” reflect the closest thing that we have to “direct democracy,” but because my own failure to vote on several of them during the 2001 Town of Merrimac election provides a good example of how easy it is to fail to exercise a “voter’s responsibility.” What did I fail to do? – to simply turn the ballot over after voting for candidates. Boy, was I pissed when I realized that I had not voted on the questions after casting my ballot! There

were four. They were all important. Most were controversial, including funding for the school budget, a new library and the Town’s share to enable participation in the state’s new “Community Preservation Act.” All had been discussed in a prior Town Meeting which I had attended. I prayed that the vote tallies on these wouldn’t be as close as the election in Florida, so that my failure would spell results one way or the other. Luckily, this was not the case.[22] Who did I blame for my “undervote” – the Secretary of State? The Town Clerk? The Election Board workers? The Supervisor of Elections? None of the above. Like those who railed against the “butterfly ballot” in Florida, I suppose I could have complained that the ballot was poorly designed. After all, the “Instructions to Voter” box at the top of the ballot did not advise the voter to look for “Ballot Questions” on the other side. But there was a reminder to ‘turn ballot over and continue voting’ at the bottom of the ballot. Should I blame the Town Clerk for the fact that this was tucked without super highlighting just below “Sewer Commissioner,” an office for which there was no contest? I blame only myself. I wanted to vote on the questions, and there had been a sample ballot posted inside the polling place with both sides showing, just before the table where voters check in with the election board workers and registrars. This personal aside reinforces the point made by the letter writer to USA TODAY. It’s rather curious, in fact, that politicians running about and speaking out to show that they were doing something about the problems in Florida were loathe to ask what proportion of “the problems” might be due to individuals’ mistakes or shortfalls in “voter’s responsibility”; i.e., those things that we are capable of doing ourselves if we simply pay attention and follow the basic steps noted in the letter to the editor.[23] These days, with people and media being the way they are, one sometimes has to sound outrageous to make a point. So, here it is from George Carlin:

“I think that if you are too stupid to know how a ballot works, I don’t want you deciding who should be running the most powerful nation in the world for the next four years.” [24]

Thanks for the slap, George; I needed that! (and did you, too?) Isn’t it

ironic that we’re trying to export American electoral democracy to Iraq while voting turnouts continue to be embarrassingly low at home? How many voters would react to more aggressive GOTV efforts as in the following cartoon?

It’s important to note that the problems uncovered in Florida were not new; they were simply thrown suddenly into high relief, given the lack of attention previously paid to them and the closeness of the Presidential vote. Various improvements that might have avoided the Florida debacle had been on the table for over many years. According to Sharon Priest, Arkansas Secretary of State and Chairwoman of the National Association of Secretary of State’s Task Force on Election Standards:

“we’ve got resolutions from meetings going back twenty years…There is nothing, at least to people in the elections business, new or earthshaking…Part of it is the simple task of following the laws that are already on the books…and part of it is looking at what the best practices are…There is no need to reinvent the wheel.”[25]

A former prosecutor in northern Florida, David McGee, said “voting fraud

was also a “great tradition” in the state, although malfeasance is most likely in races for local offices…”[26] There are best practices as well as bad examples to be seen at the local level as well as across states. They range all the way from Princeton, NJ (among the best) to St.Louis, MO (among the worse). Local variations are due primarily to local factors, including citizens’ political participation. Those of us who vote get to know their local election board workers. They are often sweet little old men and ladies who have lived in the area since Hector was a pup, who may have been recommended by local party leaders and who need a few extra bucks in their pockets. The City, Town or County Clerk need not be a stranger, either, and if you don’t like him or her, you can show up and speak out at the annual public hearing where the Clerk’s performance is up for review. You can also show up at the Clerk’s office when there is a drawing for ballot positions, to check whether there are any “sticky fingers” at work. You yourself can volunteer to be a Board Worker or poll checker. You can check on the local ballot design. You can gather at City or Town Hall to observe the counting of ballots, cheer the winners and console the losers, some of whom are likely to be friends or neighbors. Etc. Thus, even though the U.S. Civil Rights Commission Report on Y2K voting in Florida disagrees, the roots of election reform also lie in local action.[27] If state or federal authorities can provide incentives or matching grants to local authorities to help the less-than-best finance local improvements, including improved equipment and higher pay for election board workers, so much the better. After all the hue and cry generated by “Florida” had died down, the elections reform issue, like McCain-Feingold, also came down to a matter of money. Good intentions and high rhetoric ran into low budgets as state finances hit the wall of a recession, growing deficits and Republican federalism. Hundreds of bills were introduced into state legislatures all over the country. Then they waited upon federal assistance to buy new voting technologies, etc., and they waited, and waited…. As of this writing, only two states had passed major election reform initiatives –

Florida and Georgia. To avoid a repeat of the Florida 2000 controversy, the Florida legislature enacted clear standards for ballot recounts and provided funds for new voting machines. There were some good results to be seen during the 2002 elections. Other Propositions for Election Reforms Even while all this was going on, some election reform nostrums left over from past waves of concern were getting some attention, too. Term limits, for example. These had been passed in many states and cities during the ‘90’s. Now politicians and some voters were facing the consequences of their past I&R success. The New York City Council, for example, woke up to the fact that a few dozen of them would be required to give up their well-paid, perk-laden positions. A motion to overturn voters’ intent was narrowly defeated. Term limits there and in many other locations caused the music to start earlier in the political game of musical chairs. Many incumbents hustled to find other positions to run for so that they could continue in “public” service. One noteworthy exception, who views himself as a “living example” of term limits, is Gov. Mark Johnson of New Mexico. He views his public service stint as a great opportunity, something he has “always wanted to do,” but not as a career. He had a successful career as an entrepreneur before entering politics and perhaps looks forward to a successful second (or 3rd) career outside of politics. Long-standing but relatively dormant recommendations for other election reforms resurfaced in light of alleged civil rights violations in the Florida voting and of Reform and/or Green Party candidates not being allowed to participate in Presidential or Congressional debates during the Y2K election season. These other reforms include: ◊ Proportional representation◊ Instant runoff voting ◊ Changes in redistricting and/or the sizes of legislative bodies◊ Abolition or reformation of the Electoral College

◊ Voting “outside the

box” – via mail, on-demand absentee voting, or in-person early voting.

◊ Cumulative voting The first five have been getting some serious attention. Let’s focus on them. Remember Lani Guinier, Clinton’s erstwhile appointment to the Justice Department, withdrawn because of her supposedly extreme-liberal views on affirmative action and voting rights? Well, she has been one of the leading proponents of “proportional representation”(PR). This is an election system much used in Europe and many other countries worldwide whereby the number of seats in a legislative body are allocated in proportion to the votes gotten by various parties who qualify to participate in an election. It is very different from our “winner take all” system. As things now stand, the Reform Party would have to win a majority of voters in each of 44 Congressional Districts in order to hold at least 10% of seats in our House of Representatives.(10% of 435, rounded off, is 44). Under a PR system, the Reform Party would get 10% of seats if it earned 10% of votes nationwide. Advocates of PR claim, with some credibility, that such an elections arrangement would overcome obvious shortcomings of “winner-take-all;” specifically: § Low voter turnouts: Turnouts in countries with PR are much higher than in the U.S.§ Inadequate representation of minority groups, interests or parties: As indicated above, these can be represented and have some influence even without winning majorities. § Gerrymandering = the manipulation of legislative district lines by state legislatures to create districts with boundaries tortured to suit powerful incumbents or minority groups: PR makes this “far more difficult.”[28]

Two of the primary objections to PR focus upon:

1. Loss of representation based on geography: “With PR, voters find

an ideological “home” rather than a geographic one.”[29]

2. Possibly insufficient transparency, accountability and/or governability: Due to shifting inter-party coalitions and a weaker connection between public opinion and public policy, among other factors.

PR is not a new idea. It’s left over from the Progressive Era of about a century ago. Several cities adopted and later repealed it. The approach is still used by only one, Cambridge, Massachusetts to this day.[30] As a result of both domestic and foreign experience, a great deal has been learned of how to adapt PR to various goals and circumstances. It is adaptable. It could be mixed and merged with our current system, for example. The advantages of PR relative to its disadvantages are sufficiently strong to justify its adoption by some states, which could then be viewed as “laboratories” for testing the approach on a broader scale. It’s a big country, with lots of room for creative variations in election systems to better align them with regional, state and/or ideological preferences. There’s not a Constitutional issue here. Changes in state and federal law would suffice. A bill was introduced in the House to enable states to adopt PR. During the 108th Congress, this was referred to as HR 1189, the Voters’ Choice Act.[31] It would have repealed a 1967 statute mandating single-member districts. The billing given this initiative by the Center for Constitutional Rights, however, seems quite exaggerated:

“The goal of the Voters’ Bill of Rights is to correct the flaws in the administration and machinery of elections and to press for far-reaching reforms aimed at creating a more participatory democracy in our country.”[32]

Adoption of PR by some states would help to loosen up “the system” as it currently stands, reduce the sense of disenfranchisement felt by many voters and encourage the formation and growth of new parties. Another reason for giving serious consideration to PR is that it would or

could dovetail nicely with two of the other election reforms mentioned earlier – “instant runoff voting” (IRV) and changes in the sizes of legislative districts. Look at the latter first. The number of Congressional Districts has remained unchanged as the country’s population has grown, so that the ratio of Representatives to population (now about 1:500,000) is much, much larger than the founders ever envisaged. Thus, a strong case can be made for increasing the number of Districts and/or increasing the number of representatives per existing District. The latter would jibe with PR, which requires multiple rather than single-member district representation. PR also goes hand-in-glove with IRV, via which voters rank their choices. If one fails to get a clear majority, then the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated, and ballots cast for that candidate are transferred to the second choices on voters’ ballots. This process of transferring votes “simulates a series of runoff elections… until one of the candidates has a majority.”[33] Thus, IRV can serve two purposes:

1. “save money for taxpayers and campaign cash for candidates by combining two elections into one”;[34] i.e., by eliminating another leftover from the Progressive Era – primary elections, which have become increasingly wasteful and dysfunctional, as primaries attract very low turnouts that are dominated by highly motivated political factions rather than by voters representative of the public at-large.[35]

2. Elect the top two or three candidates from a longer list.

Surprisingly, IRV appeared to receive no mention in media coverage of election reforms that were reactive or responsive to the Florida controversy. This is surprising because, otherwise, IRV seems to have been the topic of increasing coverage in the news. This is evident from “Electoral System Reform in the News,” a tracking service of the Center for Voting and Democracy accessible through the Center’s website. Over the period Nov., 2000 to June, 2001, two-thirds of 118 “in the News” citations provided some focus on IRV. The journalistic interest in IRV has been reflected in a number of

legislative initiatives. Of four bills dealing with various aspects of electoral reform introduced into the 107th Congress, one would study IRV as well as PR and other pro-democracy reforms.[36] At the state level, 9 of 12 states where electoral reform legislation has been introduced report initiatives that would provide for IRV use for various elections. A bill introduced in Massachusetts would have that state study the feasibility of introducing IRV.[37] A former Member of Congress, Mickey Edwards, now at the Kennedy School, has been advocating IRV adoption as a way to make elections “more democratic” (as in the “op-ed piece cited below in footnote 35). As for the Electoral College, it’s interesting to note that some of those advocating its reform rather than its abolition are, in effect, advocating a form of PR for the College whereby the number of electors designated to vote for each Presidential candidate would be proportional to the popular vote received by each candidate by state and, thereby, overall, so that the vote in the College would more closely reflect the popular vote. As suggested earlier, the danger here is that some advocates, contrary to the very nature of our Constitution, would rather see the U.S.A. be a unitary state than a federal Republic. Thus, they would federalize elections, preferring to perfect our elections system from the top rather than have to deal with a messy, error-prone patchwork of arrangements from the bottom. Rather than this unconstitutional approach, several states have introduced, and some have passed, legislation that aligns the number of the states’ electors more closely with their popular votes for President. As for “voting outside the booth,” the jury is still out as to whether changes in election laws to enable this are a step forwards or in the wrong direction. Opinions differ. Many view changes that in any way make voting easier or more convenient to be desirable changes.[38] The National Commission on Federal Election Reform, however, endorsed the proposition that:

“voting at the polls serves basic and historically rooted objectives,” adding that “The gathering of citizens to vote is a fundamental act of community and citizenship…Though this (voting outside the booth) trend is justified as promoting voter turnout, the evidence for this effect is thin…voter turnout

may even decline, as the civic significance of Election Day loses its meaning.”[39]

In a letter to the editor commenting on the article in which the above quote appeared, Mr. Jim Triggs of Edina, Minnesota wrote: “voting is not meant to be convenient. It’s a responsibility that we should all cherish.” Another letter writer, William C. Brown, of Urbana, Illinois, chimed in to admonish: ““The Dangers of Voting Outside the Booth”…does not go far enough. Not only should citizens vote in person, but those votes should be counted by people.” [40]

Postscript to the Y2K Election So, what about voting? After all the counting was done, was there any sign of people’s participation in the 2000 elections after the presidential primaries? Yes, there were some, followed by some more in 2002. While not enough to mark a remarkable change in American politics, they suggest that political parties and campaign managers can win by bringing people back into the political game. The last several days of campaign 2000 were characterized by “Ringing Phones, Chiming Doorbells, Stuffed E-mailboxes: The Great Voter Roundup.”[41] But “last minute exhortations were…just the warm-up for Tuesday’s main event: a military-style mobilization of hundreds of thousands of campaign workers…to drive people to the polls, hand out literature outside polling stations…knocking on doors and making phone calls…” This is a latter day sidelight of politics as it used to be -- now showing a renascence?[42] The pre-election day report from which the above quotes are taken noted that the Republican Party expected to field 100,000 volunteers; the Democratic Party, surprisingly, only 50,000. The AFL-CIO, however, expected to put “100,000 campaign workers on the streets,” while the UAW hoped to swell these ranks with 800,000 “members who, for the first time, have been given Election Day off as a paid vacation day.” Meanwhile, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League

was pulling to call another 800,000 and the Sierra Club, 75,000. Can these impressive numbers be registered as representing a resurgence of grassroots political participation, when most seem to be involved because they already had a political ax to grind? Also: “For all that effort, political analysts still predict(ed) that Tuesday’s (November __, 2000) election will continue the historic slide in voter turnout, which dipped below 50 percent in 1996.”[43] Yet, here, and later in 2002, the pundits were wrong. “There was a modest turnout increase in both…caused by something that had almost been seen as extinct – grassroots mobilizing and get-out-the-vote activity in key states.”[44] Similar activity had made a difference in key congressional districts in the ’98 mid-term elections. In 2002, “The largest turnout increases were largely concentrated in states with high-profile close contests and where the candidates, parties and interest groups put…greater resources than in recent elections into grassroots get-out-the-vote efforts. If there is any doubt that such efforts “made a difference,” look at the close races where the swing votes served to change the power equation in the Congress; again, contrary to the prognostications of most so-called political “analysts.” Also contrary to the usual political expectations (or stereotypes): “The Republicans clearly outorganized the Democrats.”[45] So, are we seeing signs of a “conservative populism?”[46] Whatever. If “ordinary” people can have such an impact as little tails wagging on the big money dogs of national election campaigns, imagine what they can do as citizens taking responsibility for their politics? Put the recent experience in context and then extrapolate. As the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate (CfSAE) observed in its release cited earlier:

“while the budgets for such (grassroots) activity in both (2000 and 2002) elections did not come close to rivaling the moneys poured into political advertising, any commitment to personal (political) contact activity is a welcome change.”

Indeed, and recent election results provide hope and point the way, that such activity may increase.

Goodbye to Bill Clinton

Clinton’s departure from the White House: Was it a climax to the “Politics of Narcissism”?, or a prelude of more to come? What legacy has been left to us by a man who often seemed preoccupied with the question of what his “legacy” would be? Clinton served to bring democratic politics to a new low; now to a point from which, hopefully, it has nowhere to go but up. Let us hope that he was the last great star of a political star system promoted by Hollywood, the media and the high proportion of people who look to charismatic leaders and political careerists for solutions to our political problems. “Bubba” advanced the politics of spectator sports, of personality, of political careerism, of “pseudo events” and of money and media – all the features of politics that have turned it into a pol’s game rather than a citizens’ exercise. Notwithstanding his talent as an eloquent public speaker, he lowered the tone and depreciated the coin of our public life. Unfortunately for a man of great ability who modeled himself after JFK, the main postcript centers on his sex life, “or, as he would have it, “nonsex”” activity.

“To the insecure male, power without access to and dominance over women is not worth having…A significant portion of a generation of aspiring Democratic politicians patterned themselves after John F. Kennedy. This emulation…sometimes included the pattern of “scoring” with as many women as possible…It may be that he (Clinton) was willing to risk his power for this because being in such a position relative to women has been the subconscious objective of his quest for power all along.”[47]

When the quest for power comes to focus on empowerment of self over (an) other, then the ideal of democracy as expressed by Lincoln has been lost, by definition as well as in actuality. This is why Clinton’s legacy represents an abridgement of the American dream found in Rockwell’s painting(s) as well as in Lincoln’s language. It’s ironic that such a big-D Democrat turned out to be such a small-d politician and that a man who was so inspiring a leader in words should be so lacking true political leadership in terms of action. The upside, as others have remarked, is that Clinton’s final term may have marked the end of the “imperial

Presidency.”[48]

Prognosis, Postlude, New Beginnings and Reform Redux Where will the so-called reforms of the Year 2000 take us? – Towards “1984” as pictured by Orson Welles, or towards “2001” as envisaged by Stanley Kubrick? – our lives directed by a controlling authority, whether computerized like the movie’s “Hal” or not, everything OK as long as we stay asleep and don’t question the system? Or, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, towards a “new birth of freedom…so that the government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” We have seen that the year which, in terms of “reform,” began with a bang, ended in a whimper. Oh yes, some modest steps in the direction of political reform were taken, such as commitments to invest in better voting equipment, procedures and standards for re-counting ballots in closely contested federal elections, some chastening of the media’s aggressive election day “exit” polling and coverage techniques, and passage of some CFR initiatives. But the real wind behind the sails of reform – the wind of enthusiastic volunteers doing more than blowing hot air – this wind died down when competition ended for the major parties’ Presidential nominations. It seems as if BoY enthusiasm has been replaced by EoY pessimism.[49] As Bette Midler lamented near the end of “The Rose:” “Where’s everybody going? Where’s everybody gone to?”[50] Yet, it sometimes helps to remember the inspiring words of Margaret Mead, the late, great anthropologist:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”[51]

Strong people and great ideas go together. Unfortunately, it’s not just strong people (“thoughtful, committed citizens”) that are missing from the political reform picture as a result of Y2K and its prior political history. Great ideas are missing, too. The prevailing reform agenda is little more than a rehash of the Progressive’s program of over 100 years ago.[52] We have seen, and other’s have documented in detail how, in ‘60’s parlance,

this old agenda has long since been a major part of the problem, not part of the reform solution.[53] So, where’s a reform agenda that can excite peoples’ participation like that we saw in New Hampshire during the late winter and early spring of Y2K? Let’s see whether we can imagine a new agenda. Let’s try to gather some sheaves and lumber to at least begin to build it out.[54] As the National Civic League observed: “Now, one hundred years after the last Progressive Movement began, the cynicism and disillusionment with the modern political process calls for a new spirit of activism and a new wave of political reform.[55]

[1] Reference here is to the handshake of President Clinton with then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich , when they reportedly agreed to cooperate in pursuit of CFR. [2] Heinlein (1992), op.cit., and Bearse, P.J., WE, THE PEOPLE (forthcoming later this year).[3] Quoted by Marlantes, Liz (2003), “Outsider Dean fires up left,” THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR (June 23), adding that “If Dean’s online network grows (via another Internet service, meetup.com), it could form a grass-roots army of volunteers to knock on doors and hand out leaflets” (p.4). [4] Thus, Dick Gephardt complained of “vote-rigging on behalf of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean” in the Moveon primary, as reported by another Internet political news letter, “The Weekly Politiker” of 6/20/2003, produced by politicsonline.com. Some other candidates also complained, although they had some opportunity to try to mobilize their supporters for the Internet primary via e-mail(s), [5] Franke-Ruta, Garance (2003), “Zero Sum: Why Moveon will be the real winner of its own presidential primary,” THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, Internet edition (June 25, p.3). [6] One amendment that was adopted called for TV networks to provide time for political advertising at their lowest rates to federal candidates who abide by the rules of McCain-Feingold. Senators felt that their advertising should not have to compete with commercial advertisers for time and space. [7] Private e-mail communication to the author during August, 2000. [8] Editorial, “The Senate Shows the Way” (Monday, April 2, 2001).[9] The quoted phrase is borrowed from David Osborne (1990), LABORATORIES OF DEMOCRACY, whose book revealed how states, led by “a new breed of governor,” were leading the way towards solutions of many public problems.

[10] As for the local level, see the report on “Local Campaign Finance Reform” from the National Civic League, Washington, D.C.[11] Walker, Adrian (2001), “The Will of the People?,” BOSTON GLOBE (March 1, 2001). [12] As suggested by the example of another state, Minnesota, whose enactment of state campaign finance reforms including public financing precedes the recent wave of “Clean Elections” initiatives. Tony Sutton, Executive Director of the Minnesota Republican Party, reported: “not only candidates but parties take public money in Minnesota. A press release from the Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board said: For the 1999 tax year…$72,630 was distributed to the state parties…” E-mail to the “Politalk” e-forum on campaign finance reform (3/2/2001). Yet, even here, the parties’ role is quite minimal. $72,630 is only 6.6% of the total public finance disbursements under the Minnesota elections statute in 1999. [13] For example, see Broder, David (2001), DEMOCRACY DERAILED: Initiative Campaigns and the Power of Money. New York: Harcourt, Inc., and Lipow, Arthur (1996), POLITICAL PARTIES & DEMOCRACY. London: Pluto Press. Also note the anti-Davis referendum in California. [14] This is a sharp insight of Wilhelm (1985) arising from his discussion of CFR and time. [15] As quoted by Dana Canedy in “Florida Leaders Sign Agreement for Overhaul of Election System,” THE NEW YORK TIMES (May 5, 2001).[16] Seelye, Katharine Q. (2001), “Little Change Forecast for Election Process,” THE NEW YORK TIMES (April 26). [17] U.S. Civil Rights Commission Report (2001)[18] This does not deny the need for careful selection and some training of election board workers, which political parties and/or local election authorities should be providing. Abigail Thernstrom, member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission investigating the Y2K Florida voting disputes, stated on C-SPAN that “we heard a lot of bad poll worker stories.” (“Washington Journal,” June 28, 2001).[19] As reported by Katherine Seelye in “Senators Hear Bitter Words on Florida Vote,” NEW YORK TIMES (June 28, 2001).[20] Reference is to a 10-point set of proposals put forth by “ coalition called the Pro-Democracy Campaign” over the Internet and discussed at a “Pro-Democracy Conference” in Philadelphia on July 6-8, 2001. See Seelye, Katherine (2001), “Liberals Discuss Electoral Overhaul,” NEW YORK TIMES (January 21). [21] Letter from Jim Wright, Clearwater, Fla., in the USA TODAY issue of Friday, June 15, 2001.[22] “Luckily,” indeed. The closeness of many of the tallies underlines how every vote counts. One local office was decided by only four votes! Two of the four questions were decided by 25-30 votes. [23] Voter “spoilage” rates in the disputed Florida counties, computed by the U.S. Civil

Rights Commission, summed counts of “under”- and “over-votes” in their numerators. “Undervotes” were those where there was no vote for President, not unusual in a race where significant numbers of people didn’t care for either candidate. “Overvotes” were ones where more than one candidate was punched, which could well be the result of voter error in significant numbers of cases. [24] “According to George Carlin,” June 18, 2001, as received via second-hand e-mail.[25] Quoted in Seelye, Katharine Q. (2001), “Panel Suggests Election Changes That Let States Keep Control,” NEW YORK TIMES (February 5). “Let”? Aren’t we a federal Republic under the Constitution?[26] Silverman, Gary (2000), “How vote ended up in a very odd state,” FINANCIAL TIMES (November 9).[27] During a debate on the Report on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” of June 28, 2001, Christopher Edley, Member of the Commission, stated: “I hope that the Report will galvanize action in the Congress and at the state level as well,” with no mention of action at the local level even though the Commission’s analysis of elections’ data relied upon county and precinct-level data. And even though Abigail Thernstrom, a dissenting member of the Commission stated flatly that “there is no evidence of racial disenfranchisement in the data,” we should remember that local discrimination against blacks’ voting in the South was a prime impetus behind the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1974.[28] On this and other points, see “The Case for Proportional Representation,” by Robert Richie and Steven Hill. BOSTON REVIEW (February/March, 1998). Online at WWW.polisci.MIT.edu/BostonReview. Richie and Hill are Executive Director and West Coast Director, respectively, of the Center for Voting and Democracy, a good resource on election reforms, online at WWW.igc.org/cvd/. [29] Richie and Hill, op.cit., p.14.[30] Cambridge still fancies itself as “progressive.” The City Council recently voted to lower the voting age to 17, “the first city to do so.” Associated Press (March 26, 2002).[31] Unfortunately for the bill’s credibility, it was introduced by Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D,GA,4th CD), who was discredited as a Congresswoman and defeated in her quest for reelection in 2002.[32] Statement included in the Center’s announcement of a “Pro-Democracy Convention” in Philadelphia, June 29-July 1, 2001, found online at WWW.pro-democracy.com. [33] Richie and Hill, op.cit., p.6.[34] Richie and Hill, op.cit.,p.9.[35] There are very many examples of this; e.g., the NJ gubernatorial primary of June 26, 2001, won by conservative Jersey City Mayor Bret Shundler on the basis of a light turnout. Another: Congressman Stephen Lynch’s “election to Congress was essentially determined in the Democratic Party primary, a contest in which 61% of 9th District (MA) voters indicated they wanted someone else to represent them” (Mickey Edwards, “Making Mass. elections more democratic,” BOSTON GLOBE, March 30, 2002). See also “Few

vote in Primaries…” CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR (March 21, 2002). [36] This is the DeFazio-Leach Study Bill, HR 57, sponsored by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D, OR) and Rep. Jim Leach (R, IA), first introduced on Nov. 15, 2000, and re-introduced on Jan. 3, 2001.[37] As reported in “Pending Legislative and Ballot Measures” by the Center for Voting and Democracy as of April 5, 2001. The National Conference of State Legislators also keeps track of state legislation on electoral reform. Electoral reform commissions have been active in several states, so those interested in this area of reform will need to follow up to find the aftermath of a wide variety of efforts. See WWW.ncsl.org. [38] See Leslie Wayne’s article, “Popularity is Increasing for Balloting Outside the Box.” NEW YORK TIMES (November 4, 2000). [39] Quoted by Norman Ornstein in “The Dangers of Voting Outside the Booth.” NEW YORK TIMES (August 3, 2001). [40] NEW YORK TIMES (August 4, 2001).[41] NEW YORK TIMES (November 7, 2000).[42] Most people don’t know that there was a 12th century “renascence” – a brief revival from the “dark ages” – that preceded the Renaissance that began in the 14th century. Will it take 200 years for us to recover from our political dark ages?[43] Dao, James (2000), “Ringing Phones, Chiming Doorbells, Stuffed E-mailboxes: The Great Voter Roundup,” op.cit.[44] Committee for the Study of the American Electorate (2002), “Turnout Modestly Higher; Democrats in Deep Doo-Doo; Many Questions Emerge.” News Release. Washington, D.C. (November 8).[45] Committee for the Study of the American Electorate (2002), op.cit.[46] If so, the signs may amount to a weak signal or a stillborn revival. According to Ken Weinstein, Director of the conservative Hudson Institute’s Washington office, the Institute’s “Project for Conservative Reform” has folded. The CfSAE goes on to say that “the underlying fact remains that the electorate is…largely disengaged from politics and that…(the) percentage (disengaged) is growing.”[47] McElvaine, Robert S. (2001), EVE’S SEED: Biology, the Sexes and the Course of History. [48] This remains to be seen, as the centralization of power in Washington – under a Republican administration! – in response to 9/11, as well as our focus upon the President, seems to suggest otherwise. Many commentators have observed that “big government” is back. [49] “BoY” and “EoY” are common abbreviations for “Beginning of Year” and “End of Year,” respectively.[50] Midler, Bette and Alan Bates (1979), THE ROSE: Original Soundtrack Recording, A Mark Rydell Film. New York, N.Y.: Atlantic Recording Corporation.[51] I had the privilege of working with Margaret Mead along with a select set of others

on a special project of the American Association for the Advancement of Science during the summer of our bicentennial year.[52] There is even some talk of “a new progressive era.” For example, see Peter Levine’s article of the latter title in the KETTERING REVIEW (Spring, 2001).[53] For more on this point, see Syder, Claire (1999), “Shutting the Public Out of Politics: Civic Republicanism, Professional Politics and the Eclipse of Civil Society,” An occasional paper of the Kettering Foundation. Dayton, OH: The Kettering Foundation.[54] As I try to do in the last two chapters of the forthcoming book WE, THE PEOPLE.[55] Report on “Local Campaign Finance Reform,” p.1.

A Dream Field of Our Own

By Sy Schechtman subtlesy@optonline.com

Something there is in me that specifically loves the sight of a baseball diamond. Unadorned, except for the usual neat base paths with the base bags at each of the three base positions and home plate with its apex neatly in place pointing to the slightly raised pitcher’s mound just sixty feet way. And, of course, all the vast expanse of green grass all over the outfield, carefully mowed in those serried alternate rows of dark and lighter shades of warm and welcoming green grass. A reassuring aspect of mother nature’s prime color arranged for our esthetic as well sports viewing delectation. And unsullied even by any of the contestants showing before the game we have come to witness.

A football field also fills me with somewhat the same feeling of anticipatory pleasure, although the impending violence of the game dims to some extent the more serene and somewhat more cerebral pleasure evoked by the much more leisurely game of baseball. There is the same reassuring mass of green, this time lined at five yard intervals by white chalk sripes. Twenty in all for a hundred yard grid with a goalpost ten yards beyond each end. Foretelling as in baseball, a controlled situation where the confrontation about to begin will be related to the instinctive (green) thrust of our natural impulses, and the animosity and hate engendered will be dissipated and transcended in the competition, to the physical and emotional benefit of all.

Wordsworth, in some of his immortal pantheistic phrases said "we come trailing clouds of glory from God".. and that "the child is father to the man" indicating an aura of heavenly sanctity for the newborn utterly innocent infant. And yet we know that this newborn innocent comes squalling out from the struggling mother’s straining birth passage into a strange, unfamiliar, and perhaps, at times a seemingly hostile environment. Beginning an existence balanced tenuously between struggle, achievement, joy and sorrow. And sometimes perhaps mercifully dying before the the normal allotted seventy to eighty years we now enjoy, as some "lads that will die in their glory and never be old", as "silence sounds no worse than cheers, after earth has stopped the ears". ( A.E Housman) Indeed, life certainly can be a vale of tears at times and the sporting life, either fandom or actual athletic competition is a mixed blessing.

Indeed, I only tolerate or actively dislike certain sports. And two of these, ice hockey and basketball, have no soothing green turf or color to reinforce the psyche or soul.

But it is much more than that. The hard wooden basketball floor or frozen ice surface of hockey are repugnant because of the activity they sponsor. To me it is almost senseless running or skating to the boundaries of the designated areas with only minimum cerebral content. Much grace and perhaps guile, but the basic strategy is infantile. This is true, too, of soccer which, of course, has endless green turf, no intervening field stripes and two rather cavernous goal nets at either end. And endless running back and forth trying propel a ball with nimble footwork as they run. Some sort of inane ballet seems to be at work: grace and artistry of a sort is at work, of course, as in basketball and hockey, but the premium is endurance and the innate bodily skill needed to make those instinctive moves and maneuvers to thwart your opponent. And the physical stamina to outlast your opponent. Out thinking your opponent is merely the instinctive bodily reaction to unfolding events on the field. And professional hockey has the added attraction of fisticuffs spontaneously evoked also by unfolding events and flaring tempers. (Much to the delight of the attending fans.)

There is more thinking, mental planning and strategy in one minute of a baseball or football game than in entire games---or seasons-- of the other above mentioned contests. Be it hockey, basketball, or soccer. And the allure of the green playing field in the baseball or football encounter is to me the the splendid human symbolic euphemism to manifest hope over reality. It is said that "on the playing fields of Eton the British Empire was sustained". I take that to mean that a controlled, planned athleticism was in place to achieve victory; there was honor, valor, group loyalty, and knowledge and conviction in the group strategy and plan to win.

But this is merely upper class sophistry. Baseball and football have neighborhood lots and even city streets where creative variants of the formal game were contrived-- stickball, anyone?, or touch tackle? That is where we kids brought the games we adored down our level of reality. To the democratic commonality of "we the people". And basketball, too, in my formative years before even World War Two, when it was medium size lithe and limber athletes who played the game, not the hulking, clunky types of today. (Does anyone remember Sid Tannebaum, Ash Resnick , Ozzie Schectman-no relation--or Dolph Shayes?) In those days it was almost a New York sport which seemed to spread nationwide and become contaminated by those monsters we now have to put up with, much like the Suvs and Vans today that give the rest of us so much agita!

The genesis of the proper modeling for heroic and valorous behavior that benefits society begin in the neighborhood with childhood--both male and female-- emulation and vicarious enjoyment through fandom, and active participation in some form of a national athletic game of choice. And for most incipient men of the future baseball and/or football was the path to follow. Did I at that time have active desires to be a Carl Hubbell, a Mel Ott, or even wonder of it all! Bill Terry, all Hall of Famers from

the New York Giants baseball team, or to meet Mel Hein, Tuffy Leemans, or Ed Danowski of the football New York Giants? Probably not. I was, even then at about age 12, somewhat too intellectual for my own good . But that was also one of the shining glories of baseball and football. It gloried in the statistics and records that made for prime sports baseball and football chatter. Even unto glorious minutiae of the games, and if you could not hit a spaldeen ball two sewers to validate your athletic prowess, your knowledge of how good Bill Terry of the Giants was against left handed pitching compared to Lou Gehrig of the Yankees, was often enough to merit solid respect among those other initiates in the neighborhood sacrosanct sports group who had more innate athletic ability. (This is 1935, man, way before Bobby Thomson hit his world famous home run in l951!)

And the prime thing then was that while they were legendary heroes they were people from our ranks of relatively modest salaries and almost of exemplary behavior in their private lives.

The point is the need for the vicarious but vigorous outlet, real or fancied. Baseball, which, by the way, has no set time deadlines for the play of the game is to me the prime paradigm of the aspiring life; the verdant field in simple diamond form, mowed in serried green orderly rows is the most hopeful evidence of humanity’s civilized thrust upward in the control of our essentially animal nature. The lust, anger, jealousy, and fear that is innate in us is exposed in an orderly athletic competition and mostly expunged or transcended and exhausted in the ultimate realization of our commonality of mutual interest. That we are all God’s children. And as in baseball, sometimes we must go extra innings to achieve this, or as in football and some other sports, go into overtime to work out our proper ending. An ending that denotes both a proper winner but also a loser who can still have the honor of honest striving and effort. Whether in reality or conjectured hope---a dream field of our own-- this saving image must remained untarnished, and nurtured no matter how much layered over with all the sophistry and science of the day. And the green baseball or football field preserves this hope, or delusion, for many of us.

Our President is a Criminal

Daniel Patrick Welch wpdanny@aol.com

It's well past time to say it. Despite the weaseling and finger-pointing--in fact, because of it--the Forged Niger letter is indeed the smoking gun, and the chips have yet to stop falling. Who wrote the damn thing, and on whose orders? Who cares whether Tenet, his job on the line, acquiesced to including a literal truth that actually amounts to one of the great frauds of the century? The sheer audacity and cynicism of this coterie of hacks and hustlers is simply astounding. As a teacher, I won't let six-year-olds get away with such transparent sophistry. The bottom line is that Bush knew the information was bogus, and used it anyway to convince millions to go along with his phony war.

For that alone, for the memory of the thousands of dead Iraqis and Americans, he deserves the il Duce treatment (figuratively speaking, Mr. Ashcroft-no need to start tapping my phone or putting me on no-fly lists). The criminal enterprise called the Bush administration is (Helen Thomas was right) the worst ever. Their campaign in furtherance of the conspiracy to defraud the public into buying the Iraq war is one of the the most cynical abuses of power in U.S. history. It deserves to be treated as such.

Alarmist? You bet. This guy already thinks (and occasionally tells foreign leaders) that he gets his orders from God. If these radical extremists can get away with this, then the dumbing down of America will be complete, and the stage will be set for the next wave of the nascent fascism. La Cosa Bush (apologies to the mafia) is, like all crime families, violent, arrogant, and beyond the reach of the law--so far. Bush's handlers no longer even have the decency, courage or self-restraint to prevent his criminally stupid comments from wreaking havoc around the globe. Was last week's pseudo-macho invitation to "Bring 'em on" even a mistake? Or was it another calculated ploy to make him look "tough" to the American people, playing to the ugliest side of the American psyche while once again enraging thinking people the world over. No matter--he must be stopped. This cabal has been lying, cheating, and manipulating national tragedy to force their right wing agenda down our throats long enough.

And half-measures won't do any more. None of this vague safe rhetoric about "misleading" or cautious calls for those who "know who they are" to step down. WE know who they are, the junta that has hijacked our government and our national agenda. The cartel must go: Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle should all resign, be fired or impeached immediately, before their conspiracy of lies

and their mutual pact of self-protection is allowed to further endanger the country and the world. Cornered criminals, especially stupid ones, are a dangerous lot, and there is no telling to what lengths they will go to cover their own behinds.

On a mission from God, installed by a viciously partisan Supreme Court, the skids are greased for a further slide into misadventure, bankruptcy and ruin. With the addition of Congress on their side, they are acting with particularly reckless abandon--and impeachment is not in the cards as long as the GOP circles the wagons. None will have the courage or integrity Goldwater showed when he told Nixon the jig was up. Power corrupts, and the Republicans are so drunk with it they won't turn on their Lord Fauntleroy until he robs a bank on camera in broad daylight.

But that is no reason not to tell the truth: whatever their chances, some of the braver souls in congress should introduce impeachment legislation immediately: Conyers, Kucinich, Lee, Paul? The media has already shown they will not help; moneyed interests overwhelmingly favor the right. A campaign based on the old game of raising oodles of money and buying ads is a sure failure. The only thing that can save us now is a grassroots, velvet revolution, the principled, impassioned movement calling for these people's head on a spike.

And maybe, just maybe, this one isn't an impeachable offense, but I'm just plain getting sick of Rumsfeld's smug, arrogant grin on the tube. What the hell is he smiling at all the time? Is it funny, somehow, that thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead after his "precision" bombing? It is ironic, admittedly, another fraud, to be sure-but hardly amusing. Maybe it's just part of what you do when you think you can get away with anything.

Senate Intelligence Chair Pat Roberts foreshadowed just how twisted the logic is going to get when he said that what concerns him most "is what appears to be a campaign of press leaks by the CIA in an effort to discredit the president," Yeah, right. The black bag set, whose penchant for secrecy and service verges on pathology, are the real problem here--not the curious fact that even some of them have finally decided that things are so bad that someone, somewhere has to speak out.

It's time to close the curtain on this Bizarro World. Saddam loyalists--not nationalist resistance to occupation--are the real problem in Iraq. Protesters are terrorists, but we are fighting for our freedoms. Bush's popularity remains robust, yet huge shows of force and repressive rules on free speech are needed to keep the viewing public from seeing that he is dogged by prostest at every turn. War is peace, freedom is slavery, and some animals are more equal than others. The lies won't stop until we fire the liars.

© 2003 Daniel Patrick Welch. Reprint permission granted.

Welch lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts, USA, with his wife, Julia Nambalirwa-Lugudde. Together they run The Greenhouse School. He has appeared on radio [interview available here] Past articles, translations are available at danielpwelch. We would appreciate your linking to us.

The Great Media Meltdown

...and what lies beyond: Open-Source Media

By Evan Coyne Maloney evan@brain-terminal.com

How many times can the media cry wolf before people stop listening?

With alarming frequency, the traditional news media works itself into a lather about things that never happened. Remember the (supposedly) wholesale looting of the Iraqi National Museum? In what was then described as "a rape of civilization," we were told that 170,000 antiquities were stolen. Turns out the actual number of stolen artifacts is 33. If the initial numbers represented a rape, then the reality turned out to be more like a kindergarten game of run-catch-kiss.

No matter. Whether the traditional media gets minor details like facts wrong is secondary to whether the media portrays what it believes is the correct impression of reality. And the reality is that looting and rioting are widespread in Iraq, neither water nor electricity are flowing, and hospitals and schools are closed. Or maybe not.

It's easy to draw the conclusion that the media's repeated misreporting is the result of political bias, because in just about every case, the bogus reports support the contentions of those on the left. Consider the left's argument that the Iraq war was a "war for oil": unable to use facts to present its case, The Guardian took out of context a few words in a phrase uttered by Paul Wolfowitz and turned it into a story whose headline blared: "Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil." When astute readers pointed out that Wolfowitz said no such thing, the resulting embarrassment forced The Guardian to retract the story.

Similar misquotes made it into the pages of The New York Times recently, and not just in the stories of Jayson Blair. Opinion columnist Maureen Dowd recently misquoted President Bush by chopping key clauses from consecutive sentences. Dowd's surgical strike on the president's statement conveniently changed the meaning entirely--into something Dowd subsequently attacked. (Apparently, Dowd can find so little wrong with what the president actually says that she is now forced to concoct her own quotes just to have something to complain about.) That the Times never issued a correction shows that the paper tolerates Jayson Blair tactics as long as they serve a political purpose; dozens of other papers that used Dowd's version of the quote later issued retractions.

Deciphering the Chatter

You don't have to be an intelligence analyst to connect the dots: in each of these cases, the mistakes, misquoting and misreporting had the effect of sowing doubt about U.S. intentions, President Bush's veracity, and our military. Even if there was no conscious effort behind any of this, the net effect is that media consumers received a distorted view of reality, one that carries with it a definite political slant to the left.

Fortunately, the left's monopoly on the news media is crumbling, and Fox News and The Washington Times aren't the only ones wielding the pick-axes. During the last five years, a new form of media emerged online, one that provides an important check against bias and sloppy reporting in the traditional media. Some are calling this movement open-source media, because it is revolutionizing the news business in much the same way that open-source software is revolutionizing the software industry.

The rise of the Internet enabled people scattered all over the globe to collaborate on software projects. Instead of software being the product of a single company whose internal processes are hidden from view, open-source software exposes the development process to the world and encourages participation. Many remarkable projects have resulted: the most widely-used web server in the world (Apache), and the operating system that Microsoft views as the biggest threat to its monopoly (Linux) to name just a couple.

The open-source process tends to produce software that is more secure, more stable, better performing and less buggy than closed-source software. That's the benefit of exposing the development process to more eyes and therefore greater scrutiny: higher quality results. The same is true with open-source media. In the past, errors committed by the traditional media were much less likely to be discovered, and when they were, the errors were more easily covered up. This is no longer possible, thanks to open-source media.

When Goliath First Stumbled

In January 1998, the open-source media scooped the traditional media for the first time when Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story after learning that Newsweek planned--and then killed--a cover story on the scandal.

Naturally, many in the traditional media weren't too happy that their power was being challenged; as Drudge rose to prominence, some news veterans squawked that Internet reporting was not true journalism. Because web reporters are not filtered by

finicky fact-checkers and experienced editors, the argument went, they simply couldn't be trusted. But that argument is quite flimsy in light of the traditional media's recent errors; now, all the fact-checkers and editors in the world can't clothe the nude emperors of the old media.

Since that pivotal moment in 1998, Internet reporting has developed an entirely new form of editorial infrastructure: one that provides a highly-interconnected form of information propagation similar to online file-swapping services, and one that encourages participation like an open-source software project.

This infrastructure comes in the form of web logs, or "blogs". Blogs, which generally consist of short commentaries centering on reports from other sources, represent the second revolution in online reporting. They're a solution to the original criticism of Internet media: that it lacks the editorial infrastructure of established outlets.

Blogs: The New Editorial Board

Blogs are both democratic and Darwinian. They're democratic because anyone can participate by creating a blog. As a result, blogs cover stories that are deemed worthy of note by a much larger portion of the population than what's considered "fit to print" by a handful of liberals on 43rd Street. Blogs are Darwinian because untruths eventually disintegrate under the watchful eyes of self-appointed fact-checkers who revel in ferreting out inaccuracies. As a result, open-source media is self-regulating: truth eventually receives the amplification it deserves, and fraud eventually receives the criticism it requires.

Of course, this new form of media requires different ways of digesting news. Most blogs are maintained by individuals or just a few people. As such, blogs are likely to represent a more distinct bias than traditional news outlets. This is not inherently bad; in fact, because bloggers rarely attempt to hide their biases, news consumers can evaluate what they read in light of the bias of the source. Traditional media outlets, on the other hand, do not acknowledge their biases and instead take great pains to convey the impression that they are without bias. As a result, when bias does seep into the reporting of traditional outlets, it tends to be much more subtle and harder to detect, making it difficult for news consumers to properly evaluate the reports they receive.

Detecting hidden bias is like detecting an accent; the greater the difference between someone else's accent and your own, the more likely you are to label that person as "having an accent." Similarly, if you encounter someone who has the same accent as you, you will probably think of that person as having no accent at all. The truth is, just as everyone has an accent, everyone has a bias. The likelihood of picking up

someone's bias depends upon how much that bias differs from your own. That's why you can find plenty of people who say CNN has a bias, and plenty of people who say Fox News Channel has a bias, but rarely do you find someone who sees bias in both.

Meet the Balkanized Press

What happens when audiences begin to receive news from only those outlets with biases close to their own? An increasingly fragmented media may make it less likely that people will be confronted with uncomfortable truths that do not align with their worldview. It is possible that entire segments of society will only receive news tailored to their beliefs and that they will be unaware of news that isn't conveyed by their chosen outlets. In fact, this has already been happening for years: people who only read The New York Times, watch CNN and listen to NPR have a vastly different view of the world than people who venture off the liberal plantation.

As the media continues to fragment, the political fault lines dividing the populace will become more acute unless consumers make a concerted effort to receive information from several sources with differing perspectives. Doing this will be difficult as long as traditional news outlets refuse to acknowledge their biases. However, traditional outlets may soon realize that they have a market incentive for leveling with consumers: until they do, outlets will continue to shed the portions of their audience that find the denial of their bias as maddening as the bias itself.

This may explain why CNN--once the undisputed leader of cable news--now consistently trails Fox News Channel in ratings. Not only do a significant number of people detect bias in the reporting of CNN, they also find it frustrating that nobody at CNN will own up to it. This gives the audience two reasons to leave. First, the denials make certain segments of the audience feel like they're being played for fools. Second, to people who detect bias in CNN's reporting, the denials leave the impression that they are being deliberately deceived, giving them reason to question the credibility of everything else CNN reports.

As long as traditional news outlets cling to their pretensions of complete objectivity--is complete objectivity even possible with these very subjective beings called humans?--the influence of outlets like blogs will continue to rise. The question isn't whether the Internet is a legitimate reporting medium. (It is.) The question is, how long will it take for the traditional media to figure out why more and more people are turning to alternative online sources to enhance their understanding of the news?

Evan Maloney's political commentary is archived at http://brain-terminal.com.

Civility Makes a Great Scam

by Alasdair Denvil alexdenvil@aol.com

You'd think that with all the complaints about the "tone" of politics these days that it would actually improve. After all, the same people who say that current political debate is carried out in an uncivil and vehement manner are the same people who conduct political debate in an uncivil and vehement manner. Of course, it isn't improving, and the reason why has to do with the way a good cause can be turned into just another hypocritical, underhanded political tactic.

Consider: On the one hand, Democrats object that their criticisms of Bush's military and homeland security policies are met with accusations that they are unpatriotic. On the other hand, Republicans object that their criticisms of Democrat proposals on economics and social programs are met with accusations that they don't care about senior citizens, about children, the poor, that they are racist, etc. That is, Republicans question the patriotism of Democrats, while Democrats question the humanity of Republicans. And then each side says that the other is poisoning the well of open debate.

Now consider the example of Terry McAuliffe, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In a speech last May to the Ohio Democratic Party, McAuliffe said that President Bush "has unleashed a New McCarthyism that, under the cloak of a time of crisis and peril, has vilified and questioned the patriotism of those who have policy and political differences with him and his administration."

Then, later on in the same speech, McAuliffe criticized the president's economic policy, saying "The story goes that as the lifeboats were being loaded, the wealthy of the passengers of the Titanic pushed aside the women and children. The values of this administration would be quite at home aboard that ill-fated ship." So Bush questions the patriotism of those who disagree with his military and foreign policy, and McAuliffe cries foul. But he then feels free to characterize those who disagree with his own economic policy as trivializing human life.

I don't mean to imply that Republicans are any less hypocritical - they complain about Democrats questioning their humanity while feeling free to question their patriotism - but McAullife's speech is a perfect illustration of how one-sided and hypocritical this commitment to civil debate has become. I'll be charitable and assume that this hypocrisy is on all sides unintentional, but that doesn't make it

pardonable. In fact, by espousing civil debate in this self-servingly selective manner - that is, denouncing demonization and name-calling when it's used BY your opponents even while using it ON your opponents - it's been turned into just another duplicitous political tactic. That is, the call for civil debate has been twisted into something as underhanded as UNcivil debate.

And it has given both parties a delusional sense of self-righteousness. Democrats have been consoling themselves in their recent defeats with the thought that their losses have been virtuous, because Republicans have been stooping to tactics that Democrats would never lower themselves to. And many Republicans seem to think that they've been WINNING because they've taken the high road. Rush Limbaugh routinely says that liberals care only about emotion, not logic, while Hillary Clinton says that "debate is not one of [Republicans'] higher values." Democrats say that Republicans have exploited Americans' patriotism and concern for national security, and Republicans say that Democrats have exploited Americans' compassion and concern for minorities and the needy.

In reality, both sides have lousy records when it comes to sensible, reasoned debate. Both sides rightly criticize the demonizing tactics of their opponents, but are blind to such failings on their own side. They both take the low road, and then they both "lament the politics of personal destruction" in which they both freely and enthusiastically engage.

The truth is that there are reasonable opinions on either side of economic and national security issues. This is not to say that all such opinions are correct, let alone that they are expressed in a manner that is dignified, and respectful of dissent. But there are legitimate disputes about what economic consequences will result from different kinds of legislation or fiscal policy. And there are legitimate disagreements regarding how various economic consequences (e.g., lower unemployment, greater economic growth, wider income distribution) should be prioritized. And there are parallel empirical and conceptual discussions to be had regarding military and foreign policy.

But the prevailing practice is to rebut opposing views by demonizing those who have them. This snuffs out sensible debate, not so much by scaring people into silence, but by replacing rational argument with spiteful, close-minded recriminations. Debates turn into contests about who can depict their opponent as the worse human being, rather than investigations into which policy has the most to be said in favor of it. All political controversies are reduced to "I'm right; you're a jerk." (Now, THERE'S a bumper sticker.) It feels very satisfying to say stuff like this, to savage the people you disagree with, and it likely wins you some political support. But such behavior is unproductive with respect to public policy, and also serves to make us coarser as people.

Anyone who truly opposes uncivil debate, demonization and the politics of personal destruction can do so in the way we normally oppose misbehavior: first, by setting a good example and not personally indulging in it; second, by even-handedly and consistently criticizing it when it appears in others, even if they are in your own political party. That is, Republicans should condemn other Republicans who question the patriotism of Democrats, and Democrats should condemn other Democrats who question the humanity of Republicans. (What you're now hearing from your nose and mouth is the sound of someone not holding their breath.)

You don't get rid of underhanded tactics by complaining when you're on the business end of them and then happily using them against the opposition. It's not just shameful when the other guy does it.

© 2003 Alasdair Denvil

Letters to The Ethical Spectacle

For some years I have been on a campaign to see every Shakespeare play performed. I am about three-quarters of the way through the canon. I have seen some of the really obscure ones, like King John and Richard II, but have a few of the histories and less-interesting comedies still to see.

I spent two full days this summer trying to attend Henry V in Central Park. The first day, I stood on line for hours outside the Public Theater, only to be the second person on line not to receive a ticket. Determined to see the play by force of will, I spent another few hours on the stand-by line in Central Park. The man who got the last tickets at the Public came by to give away one of his, didn't recognize me and gave it to someone else. I commiserated with an elderly lady standing next to me; we struck up a bit of a friendship until she leaped six feet to grab another extra ticket from a good samaritan, astonishing and pre-empting three men on the line who would have accepted it. Never mind; I was glad she got it.

I went back a few days later at eight thirty in the morning, and was second on line at the Public. Over the next few hours, I made friends with number 1, a theater addict who spent all her disposable income seeing everything in town, and with a professor of medieval literature. Six hours later, I received my ticket. As I walked to the subway, the heavens opened up with a Shakespearean thunderstorm (quoted from Lear) and never shut again the rest of the night. So I still haven't seen Henry V.

Yesterday we saw a wonderful Taming of the Shrew in the Hamptons. The young, energetic, very professional cast took turns playing the role of Bianca (represented by a blow-up doll) and the father (a volleyball with sunglasses). At one point, while one of her suitors sang a song, they swung the Bianca doll on the end of a rope in wide circles from the top of a small tower on the outdoor stage. One unusually versatile actress with a malleable face played a servant, an elderly suitor and a wide variety of other roles. Shakespeare's language fused seamlessly with the invented physical farce, leaving me marvelling again at how open the frameworks of the plays are, leaving so much room for invention, while modern classics like Godot and Death of a Salesman are hermetically sealed and must be performed very close to the author's stage directions.

Jonathan Wallace jw@bway.net

Spectacle Letters Column Guidelines. If you write to me about something you read in the Spectacle, I will assume the letter is for publication. If it is not, please tell me, and I will respect that. If you want the letter published, but without your name attached, I will also respect that. I will not include your email address unless you ask me to. This is in response to many of you who have expressed concern that spammers are finding your email address here. Flames are an exception. They will be published in full, with your name and email address. I have actually had people follow up on a published flame by complaining that they thought they were insulting my ancestry privately. Nope, sorry.

Dear Mr. Wallace:

I spend a fair amount of my leisure time arguing with the animal rights nitwits. I found your essay (Natural Rights Don't Exist) one of the most concise and cogent arguments I have seen against the AR claim of "natural" rights.

Thank you.

Esther Schrager

Dear Mr. Wallace,

I began your most interesting essay on Proust initially because I've become curious as to whether Proust had any influence upon Joyce's Ulysses. In his biography of Joyce Ellman describes a casual but rather stiff and unproductive meeting between them and leaves it there. However, I'm fascinated by some of the endings in Ulysses and their epiphanal similarity to endings in Remembrances...not the same subject matter but in power and effect very similar. Eg, the ending of the Cyclops chapter in Ulysses and the wonderful conclusion of the first portion of Within A Budding Grove. Another great similarity between Ulysses ( and Finnegan ) and Remembrance is their common fascination with and incorporation of science...almost unique in my reading of the great western books of that period.

I just finished rereading O My America Johanna Kaplan's first - and unfortunately so far only - novel. It's a masterly first novel but somehow leaves me feeling she hasn't yet plumbed the depths. The narrator, in some ways her alter ego, is much like the person I knew briefly years ago. In actual life an only child, Merry appears in the context of a story that is not directly related either to her own immediate family or, for that matter, to much in her own experiences...which conversely are referred to so poignantly in her short stories. For reasons I don't wish to discuss, I really don't think

M's Kaplan is capable of dealing with any of this more fully, especially in a public way...it's far too painful, and the wish-fulfillment in the kind of substitute universe she creates in her novel of ideas intrigues me. This gets me to thinking about what you say about Marcel and the real Proust. For lots of reasons I don't think he wished to portray the character, whom he intended to be seen as an alter ego, as homosexual. Unlike Gide the book is not intended as confession, and I think Proust deliberately moulded the experience of his narrator to fit the universe he wished to create. So I don't really feel he's being dishonest. True, the Joyce we encounter throughout is much more the real Joyce, but, afterall, Joyce didn't have so much to hide..a double whammy if you will, both Jewishness and gayness. How would the public have reacted? But even more important, if you take literally what Proust says about inversion in Sodom and Gomorra, might not one postulate that he also took pleasure in portraying as female that part of him he might so much have wanted to be so even if in actuality his fictional women were really based upon gay men. And with Charlus he succeeds in creating a truly monumental character who's gay. By the same token the violinist, who may in some ways bear a resemblance to Hahn - and this I don't know - is really one of the novel's chief villains...not because of his sexuality but rather because of the way he preys upon those who love him. And needless to say Proust had far more trouble portraying his Jewishness openly. Look, even in MASH, a tv series of the '60's Hawkeye Pierce as created by Allan Alda is so very Jewish but still cannot be openly the Jew he so obviously is.

One thing that always strikes me about Proust are the names of his women, usually female derivatives of male names. A frequent convention in France, this may be just coincidental, yet it does make me wonder. But when you speak of "dishonesty" what troubles me far more is how he depicts the intensity of his love for Albertine as directly proportional to his fear of her betrayal. But when she's satisfied, loving, and comfortable he finds her most boring and often fantasizes about giving her up. This is not quite the case with Gilberte, whom Marcel appears to have liked much more and who remains his friend throughout the book. But I find his spending so much time on someone he really doesn't really like very much, let alone love in any real sense, is one of the truly disjunctive aspects of the novel.

Conversely, I think you're too severe when you claim he's dishonest by making himself the "mascot of the regiment." Afterall in real life Proust served in the army and did fight duels. Moreover, given the nature of military service in peace time I don't find the soldiers strong regard for him to be any less surprising than that of the so many different kinds of characters throughout who were seduced by his charm. In this sense, I regard Marcel - if not Proust himself - as almost a journalist who knew how to make great connections.

As for Bloom, I always regarded him as positive character. But have you ever read, however jaded they may be, Henry Roth's comments about Bloom and about Joyce in

general? Without Ulysses it is difficult even to imagine Call It Sleep, and so I have never been reconciled to the middle-aged Roth's condemnation of his greatest mentor. On the other hand, Bloom represesents the sensitive but physically helpless and defenseless Jew. In this regard part of what Roth says is correct, viz, that Joyce attributed his own physical cowardice to someone else and to a Jew, thus reinforcing the stereotype. And in a truly fictional wish-fulfillment, the character of the father in Call It Sleep is much different than Roth's real father, who, bully that he may have been at home, was as cowardly and cringing as the Jewish butcher who doesn't have what it takes to stand up the Italian garbage man. ( Hanna Wirth-Nesher, who wrote an Afterward to the '90's edition of CIS, with which in some respects I've firmly disagreed...and been vindicated by Roth's writing as an old man...has written an essay about Proust, Kafka, and Roth and the Jews' relation to the city, an essay that's unfortunately still on my waiting list.)

Finally, I regard Proust's relationship to Swann as Jew to be far more ironic than demeaning. There's really something quite grand about him, and I think that of all the characters in the book Swann is closest to how Proust imaginatively regarded himself. For that matter with regard to Marcel's own development Swann is the book's generative father. On the other hand, Bloch's such a buffoon that with all his Homeric babble as a Jew he's really quite embarrassing. On the other hand, I recall the young fellow, a brother or cousin of one of the girls, that Marcel meets at Balbec. On the surface - and much like some people in my own family - almost a stereotype of the empty and upward bound Jewish bourgeoise, and as such we rapidly dismiss him. But just look at how he's mentioned at the end. I wonder after whom he was patterned, if anyone. Somehow I always regarded both Verdurins as Jewish but perhaps here I'm being unfair...and to myself as well. Afterall he does distinguish them from Sir and Madame Rufus Israels. But the funniest name of all is M Nissim Bernard. For some reason that cracks me up.

Just a quick note about Axel's Castle. When I first read it years ago I recall how condemnatory Wilson was to Proust and, even worse, how little joy he finds in Swann's Way. I'm so glad that this ultimately said far more about Wilson - a closet antisemite in so many ways that Johanna's Ez Slavin would have punched him out too - because, with all the pain and suffering that's depicted there are few novels - Ulysses of course is the significant 20th Century equivalent in English - that are so rich, so funny, and most deeply, especially when it comes to the creative process - and its aperception by the reader - so deeply and joyfully worth reading.

All best,

Jack Eisenberg

Dear Jonathan Wallace,

I'm writing a piece of, well, academic writing, on movie adaptations of James's The Portrait of a Lady and Edith Wharton's House of Mirth and that is basically I am bothering you. I've just come across your remarks on House of Mirth and its movie version and found them sobering : )) and inspiring - thank you very much. BTW, contrary to your intro, I still believe The House of Mirth is an example of Great American Novel.

With regards,

Anna Krawczyk-Laskarzewska

Dear Mr. Wallace:

Actually I'm glad that the cybersitter software I'm buying for my kids will not show these sites. As a parent If this kind of content is going to be expressed to my children then I want to be the one to share it with them so that it can be explained in it's proper context. Free speech does not mean that children should be exposed to any and every viewpoint, many are not mature enough to understand. Free speech is an adult issue. We need to stop treating children as adults. Let be children and enjoy their childhood, there will be plenty of time for the daily rituals of stress, disgust, and indignities of life.

David W. Mester

Dear Mr. Wallace:

I searched your site:www.spectacle.org for "Jackson State" and found ...nothing.

Kent State was significant, but it is also significant that it so overshadowed Jackson State.

Regarding forgetting history in The Ethical Spectacle: How about Jackson State, 10 days after Kent State? They went in with "Buck Shot" (Think about it) with the intention to kill. One of their targets was a nun, and one of the cops was FROM NESHOBA COUNTY! (He stabbed a priest in the face with a fork!) Why not an essay on Jackson State? Or at least links... http://labs.google.com/cgi-

bin/keys?hl=en&q=%22Jackson+State%22+May+1970&btnG=Google+Search

Dear Mr. Wallace:

Re Karla Fay Tucker:

so you believe that anyone who commits a heinous murder and then becomes a good person, that they should be spared. Did you ever think that people might feign such a transformation because that just might grant them over-ruling for a death penalty. They would try their hardest to avoid death, especially if they fear daeth, like most people. She might have overcome her fear for death, but that is probably because she, like most people, is afraid of death and they desperately seek out some kind of religion or belief in something to find some kind of strength to leave this world without fear. I guess killing someone and then developing a new affirmation for religion would be the neccesary therapy to overcome the fear of death. Pathetic.

Paul Mellor

An Auschwitz Alphabet

Dear Mr. Wallace:

Hi, my name is Beatriz, i'm a mexican girl, i'm pretty interested about all this holocaust stuff, and I'm totally agree about the thigs you wrote down. I think Holocaust is the worst thing than could ever happen to this planet. It's so unffair to judge people because they doesn't share our same oppinion, or because they don't look like the rest of us. The only thing that i don't understand it's why did you jewish people never made anything, like a governmet or something to protect you all, maybe if you all, (instead of be affraid), had fight for your freedom, you could get it, even today, because I see that you still be judgegin for people. I'm catholic, if you can make a movement or a team, or something, to promove your ideas to share to the others what you people thinks, maybe you won't be that missunderstood, don't you think so?, unfortunally, this world is for the people who fights harder, and you must learn to fight. Holocaust is something that everybody wants to forget, but we can't erase it, and it's so much harder for you, but one thing that we can do it's to don't let it happen again. Thanks for your attention, I hope you're ok. Have a nice life.

Dear Mr. Wallace:

I have linked my 7th grade Language Arts classroom webpage to your webpage for our Anne Frank Unit at http://mlplatt.homestead.com/index.html I would like to have an "ok" (permission) from you, to place your website address and link on my resources,credits, and links page.

Thank you (hopefully) ahead of time,

Maryann Platt/teacher

HELLO

I write about the word "muselmann" - I M not sure at all it means "muslim" in this case but I guess it's a German neologism of that time 2 say "smashed man" (Mus = mush in English & Mann = man). The English translation could B "mushyman".

Salut

Laska...

to jon

i am a 14 yr old living in England, my dad and his family are jewish they left russia before the second world war. My mother and her family are not religious refusing to participate in 'such things' (in any relgion) i count myself as a jew. recently at school our year have been studing the holocaust. I dont want to sound stupid but i was disgusted at how little my classmates seemed to know, we were asked to finish our studies by compiling a project, on any accpect of the holocaust. i serached the net for incperation and allthough not actually choosing to Auschwitz i found your site increadibly helpfull. your end essay in particular brought up many important and relevant questions which i found a great help. i have been reading about the holocaust since i was about 11, i feel very strongly that the holocaust should not be fogoten and should be taught at a young age. after experiences of my own i hope you have not had to suffer any anti semitism bullying or ever will, but if by an unfortunate chance you do i hope this does not discourage you from remembering and helping others remembering.

thanks for your help

kate

Dear Mr. Wallace:

I just finished reading your Auschwitz Alphabet and I found it extremely interesting. I am 29 years old and Jewish. Throughout my life I have had a great interest in studying various aspects of the Holocaust. I have a collection of books, documentaries, etc. My grandfather comes from Poland, and although he arrived in the United States before WW II and eventually fought for our country in the war, he lost many relatives who perished in the concentration camps. Fortunately, my grandfather is still alive to tell his stories of hid life, his family, and his experiences in the army liberating these concentration camps. Once again, congratulations to a job well done.

---Robyn Berger