But It's Getting There

How wise is the conventional wisdom? We're about to find out.

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post had big stories yesterday on the depth and extent of voter anger. The Times conclusions, based on their polling, was the most devastating: parts of the Obama coalition are defecting, especially women:

The poll provides a pre-Election Day glimpse of a nation so politically disquieted and disappointed in its current trajectory that 57 percent of the registered voters surveyed said they were more willing to take a chance this year on a candidate with little previous political experience. More than a quarter of them said they were even willing to back a candidate who holds some views that “seem extreme.”

Individual polls suggested that apparent Democratic gains over last weekend had disappeared. Yet the tenor of coverage today is a little different. Several stories (in Salon, at TPM),
picked up by cable TV say that the expected Democratic losses are in line with recent history for midterm elections in a bad economy, and that Republicans would be even farther ahead if the Tea Party candidates weren't so awful.

Still, the outcome is yet uncertain--despite all the ads and robocalls, the election is still days away, and even if most have made up their minds by now, it all hinges on who goes to vote. Several polls that either make sure to nab cell phone users or include statistics on cell phone v. land line calls show that cell phone users (presumably younger voters) would vote Democratic in larger numbers--enough to make close winners out of the many close races on the boards. The question is whether they will vote.

Americans have a choice: to take out their anger and confusion on all incumbents or the majority party, or to avoid making things worse. Americans never seem to foresee just how much worse their impulsive choices can make things. Bush v. Gore remains the most vivid example.

It's worth remembering that Republican anger isn't new. Rabid right GOPers were angry when Bush was in the White House. (One poll shows that 96% of Tea Partiers voted for McCain.) What is new is the primitive extremism of many of the candidates, from muddled theocrats like Sharron Angle to the out and out thugs supporting Rand Paul.

It may be our normal politics of two-steps-forward, one-and-a-half steps back (or two-and-a-half), but even that's not good enough. As it is, we're probably not making enough progress towards what we need to give us a fighting chance for an intact future. But this kind of an outcome, and the ensuing cacophony of idiocy we're in for, makes that possibility even more remote.

Well, it's not dark yet...

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"The man who cannot wonder is but a pair of spectacles behind which there is no eye."

Thomas Carlyle

Election 2010: Guard the Change

The following is a bit of encouragement I'm posting on various political blogs today. I don't post there very often anymore, but I thought I'd add my voice now and hope that it helps.

It's the last week before the elections. It's the moment when potential voters are most focused. It's the time to nail down organizing for GOTV and get it started, especially in early voting states.

It's the time for action. And if you need a few words to keep you going, I suggest these: Guard the Change.

Because when you strip away the side issues, that's what this election is about.

President Obama said it in September: "The last election was a changing of the guard. Now we need to guard the change."

Part of the electorate is discouraged that the change isn't faster. Part of the electorate is going to scapegoat the President and blame the party in power for bad economic times. But the energy on the GOPer side is coming primarily from those who are afraid of change.

They are mostly white people who are feeling overrun by demographic change. They are afraid of Mexican immigrants and Muslims. They see President Obama as the leader who is taking away everything from whites and giving it to blacks and browns. They want their country back.

These voters are being managed with complete cyncism by corporate interests and their millions, who must hide themselves to retain credibility. They really want their country back.

This energy is coming also from people who see liberals as lording over their lives, anxious to take away the last of what they have--their SUVs, their big screen TVs--with the excuse of global warming.

The importance of the change underway can be measured by the extremism of the opposition. Many of the GOPer candidates don't even pretend to know very much, or base their actions on anything more than discredited ideologies and narrow religious faiths.

We know the political change that has begun will benefit everyone in this time of inevitable stresses, and especially that it is crucial to a decent future.

It's time to guard the change.

Some voters can still be persuaded, because many extremist zealots running for the House haven't been sufficiently exposed for what they are. I suspect most voters would prefer that the people they elect to be the government are competent.

But the most important task is to get Obama voters of 2008 to vote in 2010. This message is particularly potent for them: Guard the change.

What GOPers fear most is that black voters, Latino voters and young voters who believed in Obama will rally to his defense, to guard the change he began. That's why they are busily engaged in the voter intimidation tactics for which they are so justly infamous.

Change is hard. Political change is messy and often ugly. President Obama at USC:

"But I told you this was going to be hard. Power concedes nothing without a fight.

Inch by inch, day by day, week by week, we’ve been grinding it out. That’s the nature of change in a big complex democracy. And it seem so distant from those wonderful times [of 2008 and the Inaugural.] We haven’t gotten everything that we hoped for. Maybe a neighbor is out of a job, but don’t let anyone tell you that our fight hasn’t been worth it, or that we’re not making a difference.

Because of you, there are people right here in CA who don’t have to choose between cancer treatment or going bankrupt. There are women who can look their children in the eye and say, yes you are going to college. Businesses able to keep their doors open during a recession. 100,000 brave men and women home from Iraq. We will continue to fight to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. We will have an energy policy for the future of America.

So don’t let them tell you that change isn’t possible. Here’s what I know. Change is always hard. And if your parents, if our gradparents, if our great-grandparents had listened to the cynics, we wouldn’t be here today."

This election is important, if only for this one reason:

Guard the change.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"I believe in original sin. I also believe in original virtue. Look around!"

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Timequake

Election 2010: Fearing Forecasts

It's the home stretch for the 2010 elections, with a flood of final polls and forecasts ahead. One veteran forecaster at Kos writes of this election, "I don't have a freaking clue." Neither apparently does the superstar of evaluating polls, Nate Silver (now working for the New York Times.)

One fascinating reason is this (according to the above cited post): early polling was largely coming from Republican or Republican-leaning sources. Even now nearly half comes from such sources, while less than 10% comes from Democratic sources.

This could be why the polls haven't made much sense. There simply aren't that many Republicans--or Tea Partiers--to account for the percentages. But the outcome will depend on what it always was going to depend on: Obama Democrats showing up to vote, and enough Independents who aren't convinced by extremist zealots with nothing but push-mouth slogans and fantasy ideology to guide them in the important, complex and difficult tasks of governing.

Election 2010: To Turn the Tide

President Obama spoke at USC in LA before an audience that university officials estimated at 37,500. There was also a stop in Las Vegas, before a crowd of 9,000. All across the country Democratic candidates for the Senate, Congress and governorships are gaining support, closing gaps in polls or moving farther ahead--often just after Obama has spoken in the state. Meanwhile, the Newsweek poll says that Obama's approval rating has jumped from 48% to 54%. Democrats have higher approval, and according to Newsweek the "enthusiasm gap" has disappeared.

Republicans and their shadow billionaires and corporate sponsors are recognizing some of this. They concentrated some $40 million in Nevada to defeat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, but now must send millions to Pennsylvania, where Joe Sestak is gaining momentum for the Senate.

But so far the media has not recognized this. Though political pros were telling them on Friday that the Democratic message is getting through--that the GOPer extremists threaten Social Security, tax relief for the middle class, student loans, Wall Street and credit card reform, health care reform and the federal budget itself, and that their candidates are being financed by millions from unknown donors. But the pundits weren't getting it. As diarist Freestatedem noted at Kos, there is little or no national TV coverage of President Obama's speeches and appearances, even though they are shaping up to quite possibly be a political phenomenon.

As I've noted recently, the GOPer media bias may be "a combination of 'what sells papers' emphasis on conflict and novelty, and their corporate interests." Now half of this is going to be tested, because the most natural way the media would go now would be to tire of the "GOPer tidal wave" mantra they've been pushing--it's old news now--and go for the novelty, the reversal of fortune. If Obama and the Democrats are coming on strong, then that's the news. Will this be their new angle? Or will they stick with pushing the no-longer-novel Sharron Angle and her fellow extremist zealots? Angle in particular is feeding the families of many a media person in Nevada with her advertising barrage. Is there any integrity left in news? We're about to find out.

And Now for Something Completely Different

All those great Obama songs helped make 2008 a lot of fun as well as inspiring. This is probably not in their league, but it's funny and fun. The song is "I Like Jerry Brown," concerning the governor's race in California.

Election 2010: Of Tea Parties and Kings

Yet another story details the reasons that Barack Obama has had the most impressive first two years as President in modern times--this one in Rolling Stone, summarized here at Daily Kos. And so the question recurs: why is this news to people? Why isn't he getting the credit? Why do people even believe the contrary of what's true: for example, that he's raised their taxes, when in fact he's lowered them?

There are a lot of complaints about "messaging," and that's part of it. So is the dominant media narrative, which somehow always seems to track with GOPerness, which I take to be a combination of "what sells papers" emphasis on conflict and novelty, and their corporate interests.

But there's something else, something more fundamental, at least in terms of the national psyche. It has to do with Kings.

It may be, as someone said, that humanity's greatest invention is the sentence. But quite possibly its most harmful invention was the King. Human beings lived for thousands of years without kings--but I suppose as populations increased and small groups merged into big ones, and organized warfare became more organized and more deadly, the emergence of the King was a reasonable if fatal step.

Despite the rewriting of prehistory, I suspect that the concept of the King emerged at more or less the same time as the concept of the single god. Which came first may not matter, for they each seem to depend on--and reflect--the other.

In any case, the King became the single ruler, the absolute power, who was directly connected to both the god above and responsible for everything that happened in the kingdom. So when things went well, it was the King's glory. And when things went bad, it was the King's fault.

At first (the story goes) the King's subjects took this pretty literally, so if the King failed, the King was killed. But this got changed, so that the King was symbolically killed, at first through killing a substitute person--a mental and/or physical defective, a fool--and then through killing a substitute animal, like a goat. Like a goat that lets the King escape his fate. The scapegoat.

These days we have Presidents, and though they have a lot of limitations on their governing, they remain the symbol of power. Sometimes what happens is mostly or somewhat their fault, and sometimes it's not at all. But it doesn't matter. They are Presidents of projection. When things go wrong, they become the scapegoat.

This is a powerful tendency, though there are others associated with the King. The King is a symbol of the nation, especially when it is at war. So people do rally around the King, the President, when war is front and center. It probably underlies why G.W. Bush got a second term.

But today there's the sick economy. People feel helpless about it, and need to punish someone, and that's often enough the President. Probably some of those people are going to vote GOPer, though I think mostly they will be among those who don't vote. Frankly, I don't think this is as big a political problem for Obama as some--it's more to do with the party in power--but it is a problem for Dems.

More important though is President Obama as the scapegoat for change. There are a lot of people who are afraid of change. White people mostly. They're afraid of change that at this point is mostly a product of demographics, and in some respects is inevitable. But that doesn't matter. They see the first black President, and they want their country back. "Liberal" to them means "favors blacks and mostly brown foreigners over whites."

Now, Washington liberals, government bureaucrats, self-serving progressives--they (and we) all bear some responsibility for the suffering of others. But much of the truly awful change that is affecting their lives is the product of GOPer policies of the past decade, and the policies of American and multinational corporations and banks. But there's this convenient scapegoat, the black man in the White House.

This is the Tea Party in a nutshell. This is why, as Rachel Maddow pointed out this week, we have the largest number of extremist zealots ever to be running for high office, and in a midterm election, they have a better chance to get the relative fewer numbers of votes they need.

Right now the smart money is some of them making it to the Senate, and a lot of them making it to the House. But things are trending away from them, the polls are shaky, there are numbers that contradict the supposed trends (like the declining viewership for Fox News.)

I think what the Tea Party and the GOPer establishment fears the most is that black voters understand who is being scapegoated, and rise to the voting booths to protect him. To guard the change. The GOPers are already organizing their voter intimidation efforts, for which they are so justly infamous.

The move of so-called Independents away from extremist zealots is a good trend, but the conventional wisdom on that also is that House candidates aren't as exposed as Senate candidates to any kind of scrutiny, so they may get away with hiding their agenda--and lack of basic qualifications, like knowing anything--behind the usual rhetoric. But Dem prospects depend on mobilizing young voters, Latinos and other minorities, and black voters, as Obama did in 2008. The polls underestimated them, too, remember.

The President is inevitably a symbol, and people project their hopes as well as their fears, both irrationally to some degree. Irrational hopes not yet entirely fulfilled may lead to disappointment. Irrational fears are easy to have confirmed these days, with Fox running wild and other more temperate authorities eroded. But Obama is not the King, he is the President. As the evidence shows, by real world historical and political standards, he's been a very good one. His ability to make progress that benefits all Americans, that benefits the world and above all the future, will be hampered by a GOPer majority House of Representatives, even apart from the circus of investigations that will ensue.

Early voting has begun in several states. Guard the change.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Literature is not about one's personal effort to push the pen on the page. Literature is all about heritage and futurity."

Bruce Sterling
Image: Mars

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama campaign together before a crowd of 35,000 in Ohio.

Election 2010: The "I" Word, Coming to a Congress Near You?

Here I am, doing exactly what I've accused other blogs of doing too much of: mentioning Christine O'Donnell. But her "I'm you" ad campaign rang a bell in my memory. Wasn't there some other dubious person trying to deflect bad publicity with that phrase: "I'm you?"

Yes, there was. Her name was Linda Tripp.

Linda Tripp was the woman who recorded phone conversations with Monica Lewinsky and passed them on to Ken Starr and his $70 million investigation that led so slowly to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

Up until then, one "scandal" after another proved to be little more than the inflated terms of attack by GOPer zealots. But Linda Tripp gave the torturous investigation new life. The public didn't respond to her well, though. Especially since it looked like she had used multiple deceits to make some money with a book deal. So she hired a PR agent and gave a little press conference, where she asked the question, Who am I? and answered it, "I'm you."

But my thoughts did not follow the path of comparing Linda Tripp to Christine O'Donnell. Instead they fixed on this period that Americans who lived through it have largely blanked from their minds. Months and months of accusations and attacks, culminating in a President being impeached for only the second time in history, on grounds that few constitutional scholars could reconcile with the charge of high crimes and misdemeanors, bearing on the office of the Presidency.

But the GOPers controlled Congress, and they did it, because they could. This--along with the federal government shutdowns--was in fact the Republican Revolution. Notice that at the time, the economy was in great shape, and Clinton was a popular President.

Now consider one more possible ramification of a GOPer majority in 2010, besides frustrating any progressive legislation, or anything and everything that President Obama backs, attempting to reverse, repeal and defund whatever hard-won progress that's been made while proposing to deform the constitution, promote official bigotry and ignore earth-shattering dangers. For some GOPers in high places have already promised government shutdowns--and lots of investigations.

Investigations, ending with what? The attempted impeachment of the first African American U.S. President? You say he isn't giving them the opening that Clinton did, with complicated business deals and personal misconduct. But do you think that really matters? That this would stop them? These folks who deny he was born where he was born, and that his religion is his religion? Many are running on claims that have no basis in fact whatever (Sharia law?). Because they can, and they have the money to make pernicious illusion into consequential reality.

The Obama administration could have pursued investigations and even prosecutions--including impeachment-- into multiple areas of the Bush administration, from politicizing judicial and other appointments, to ordering torture and starting a war by knowingly lying to Congress and the American people. But they didn't. The country was in a terrible economic crisis, brought on by Bush policies. The country was embroiled in complex wars, created and mishandled by the Bushcorpse. Obama put country first.

But immense threats to the future, including the current possibility of another economic crisis, won't stop the GOPers from their sociopathic approach to politics. To their less than subtle class war, they could very well add an open race war, as well as putting the world through another disgusting, depressing and immensely damaging political crisis.

Far-fetched? Is there a standard for that?

Guard the change.

Emerson for the Day

"In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself. The other half is his expression."

Emerson
The Poet
Happy World Poetry Day!

Election 2010: Financing Lies

The news Thursday was the statistical extent to which those shadow organizations are dumping money into GOPer coffers--according to this study, they are outspending such groups for Dems by 9-1.

Some Dems sense this phantom money is itself a political issue that is resonating. But it's more than accountability for where the money is coming--it's about what the money is being spent on. And that is--surprise, surprise--lies. Blatant, systematic, repeated lies. High imagery simplistic and blatantly racist lies as well.

Apart from the sheer volume of these TV ads, and their free media support from Fox and friends, their potential effectiveness is possibly enhanced by the giddy attention that the media--including progressive media--is paying one person: Christine O'Donnell in Delaware. Her antics in that tiny state, in an election she is very likely to lose, is taking attention away from other more important races, with equally unqualified Tea Party candidates.

And I'm not the only one who thinks so. I heard a GOPer operative on TV(on CNN I believe) as I clicked through, brag that precisely this was happening--that all the attention on O'Donnell meant less attention on Rand Paul, Sharon Angle, Carly Fiorina, etc. So without attention and scrutiny, voters had only those TV campaign ads to go on. Not good.

The Best Game Ever

Today is the 50th anniversary of what some experts call the best baseball game ever (and not all of them are from Pittsburgh)--the seventh game of the 1960 World Series, won by the Pittsburgh Pirates over the New York Yankees with what is still the only home run in the bottom of the ninth to decide a Series in the 7th game, hit by the Hall of Famer Bill Mazeroski. That's the sequence in the above pictures--the middle photo of Maz floating from second to third is the basis of the statue of him that will be unveiled outside the new Pirates ballpark.

It was a vastly different baseball world. It was the last year there were just eight teams in each of the National and American leagues, as there had been for most of the previous history of major league baseball. Though baseball was the biggest sport in America, most Major League players didn't even earn a living from baseball--many if not most had other jobs in the offseason, and went back to work full time when they retired. Though there were fewer games in a season (154 instead of 162), they were worked harder. The Pirates two top starting pitchers each had 16 complete games in 1960. Today a complete game is a rarity.

The game was played at Forbes Field, in the neighborhood of Oakland. It was a storied ball park even before this Series. Babe Ruth hit his last two home runs there. The old baseball movie, Angels in the Outfield, was shot there. It was torn down as the University of Pittsburgh expanded, and the Pirates went to play at the larger Three Rivers Stadium on the North Side, where the Steelers and other local teams played. Now Three Rivers is gone, and the new Pirates park goes a long way to recreating the experience of seeing a game at Forbes Field--where I saw my first games, including this 1960 team--but it doesn't quite get it all.

I was very fortunate to be a boy so into baseball when the Pirates were putting together this team, from 1958 to 1960. I met some of them then, including Roberto Clemente and Bill Virdon, and others later. Oddly, even though Bill Mazeroski became a member of my childhood church and to this day lives in my hometown of Greensburg, I never met him. (He was also the Pirate whose name was closest to mine, so that was what my next-door neighbor called me--hey! it's Billy Mazeroski!--even though Maz was a right-handed second baseman and I was a lefthanded pitcher, and my model was Harvey Haddix.)

That 7th game was full of odd events and improbable heroes, none more than Mazeroski and his home run. Maz is considered among the best fielding second basemen ever--if not the best-- but he wasn't among the Pirates best hitters or power hitters. No one expected him to hit a home run, especially since he'd already hit one in the Series (in the first game.) Fans just wanted him to get on base, and that's what he was trying to do. He took the first pitch for a ball, so maybe he could work a walk. Instead he hit the next pitch into deep left field and over or near the highest place, the scoreboard clock.

Pittsburgh hadn't had a sports champion since 1925, the last time the Pirates won the Series. But in that one moment, the already magical 1960 season became one that people will be talking about today, and Pittsburgh will celebrate again.

Photos above: from high atop the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning, two classic photos that capture the moment of Maz's homer--and the beginning of the most pervasive and joyful celebrations in western Pennsylvania history.

It's been called the greatest baseball game ever played, and it was one of the few games the Pirates played in 1960 that I didn't see or hear. All summer I went to games at Forbes Field, watched the away games broadcast on TV and especially listened to them on radio, with play-by-play and commentary by Bob Prince and Jim Woods, providing a wealth of memories so specific to that time and place. A bloop and a blast, Arriba Arriba!, Benny Benack & the Iron City Six, beat 'em Bucs, alabaster blast, you can kiss it goodbye, how sweet it is! We had 'em all the way! The words may mean nothing unless you were there. And they were widely shared--most weekend afternoons you could follow the game just walking around, from the radios playing on back porches and through open garage doors, or in the corner store or the department stores on Main Street.

But now it was October, the World Series was played in the daytime then, and I was a freshman at Greensburg Central Catholic High School. Apart from the two games over the weekend (the Yankees walloped the Bucs again on Saturday, but the Pirates tied the series on Sunday), I did see the 6th game. In person, at Forbes Field. It was the luck of the draw. So many people wanted tickets that the Pirates set up a lottery: you sent in your money and if your request was picked, you got two tickets, and if not, you got your money back. My request was picked--good luck.

But the Pirates picked the game you got tickets to, which looked like great luck at first, because the Pirates were ahead 3 games to 2 and they could have won the series by winning that game. But they sure didn't. The Yankees won 12-0, and it was slow torture--they scored in 5 separate innings without a single home run. Every Yankee got a hit, including the pitcher--17 hits in all. It got so bad that out in the left field bleachers where I sat with my father feeling like I was in a dark tunnel, the Pirates left fielder that day, Gino Cimoli, was chatting with fans. In later years I comforted myself with the thought that I had seen my favorite non-Pirates pitcher, Whitey Ford (a lefthander like me), as well as the fabled Yankees Mickey Mantle, Rodger Maris, Yogi Berra... But it was nothing but pain that day.

So I was back in school for the seventh game. The prevailing ethic apparently was that you could play hooky if you had tickets to the game--one of our companions on the special bus that took us directly to Forbes Field was a priest who taught at my school. But you couldn't stay home just to watch it on TV. In school that afternoon, some teachers allowed their class to listen to the game on radio, but others didn't. They were nuns mostly, and apart from their usual motivations, I suppose some of them were from elsewhere, and didn't quite get what all the fuss was about.

But I was never far from the game--the score, which went back and forth radically--was passed along in the halls between classes. The entire school was a radio. Especially in the crucial eighth inning, as our school day was winding down, virtual play-by-play was passed across the aisles of desks, starting from the kids nearest the open windows, straining to hear the radio broadcast drifting down from the classroom on the floor above. I remember getting the word on Roberto Clemente's crucial infield single as we stood for final prayers.

By the time we were dismissed, the game was tied. My classmates streamed to their buses, but I was one of the few students to walk my short distance home. But as I was leaving someone told me that there was a television set up in one of the large classrooms on the third floor, where the football team was watching before practice. I had just found a seat near the back when It Happened--I saw the Mazeroski homer on TV, pretty much the only part of the game I saw.

The room erupted, western Pennsylvania erupted. People driving home from work in Pittsburgh had pulled over on the side of the Parkway before going into the Squirrel Hill Tunnel, where they would lose radio reception. When they pulled back into traffic after the homer, it was to join the blaring horns echoing through the tunnel. I've imagined that scene many times. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has posted stories from the next day's paper about what happened in the city, and it was something that playwright August Wilson and I talked about--he recalled the people running into the streets, all up and down Forbes Avenue and Fifth Avenue. And of course, I heard later about the pandemonium among my classmates on the school buses.

Since then I've seen the highlights of the game many times, and I have a video narrated by Bob Prince that has a lot of footage from the Series. Since you had to use your imagination even to see the games you heard on radio, the fact that I hadn't ever actually seen that game didn't occur to me--until several weeks ago, when I read this story.

The story said something I didn't know--that for 49 years and change, no complete copy of the TV broadcast of that 7th game of the 1960 World Series was known to exist. The Best Game Ever! And then it said something that nobody knew--there was such a recording, a pristine kinescope (the pre-video tape form) that hadn't been watched in nearly a half century. It was found in a wine cellar. Belonging to...Bing Crosby.

Singer Bing Crosby was a minority owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, but he was in Paris when that game was played. The story said that he went to Paris intentionally so he couldn't watch it, he was so nervous. But he hired a company to record the game--something not everyone could afford to do--so he could watch it at home...if the Pirates won. He kept it with mounds of other film and tape reels. A researcher pawing through it all to prepare a DVD on Crosby's career found it late last year.

So it's only a matter of time before that game is on DVD or online, and more than 50 years later I may actually see it. Even if it is Mel Allen doing the play by play in the late innings. But I can hear Bob Prince saying it anyway---How sweet it is! We had 'em all the way!

Election 2010: Oligarchy in America

Another story in the New York Times focuses on another front group for GOPer corporate attempts to buy the upcoming election, this time with the typically ironic name of American Future Fund.

But perhaps even more striking is the extremely blunt column by E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post which begins: "The 2010 election is turning into a class war. The wealthy and the powerful started it.

This is a strange development. President Obama, after all, has been working overtime to save capitalism. Wall Street is doing just fine, and the rich are getting richer again. The financial reform bill passed by Congress was moderate, not radical.

Nonetheless, corporations and affluent individuals are pouring tens of millions of dollars into attack ads aimed almost exclusively at Democrats. One of the biggest political players, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, accepts money from foreign sources."

He concludes: "The country doesn't need this class war, and it is irrational in any case. Practically no one, least of all Obama, is questioning the basics of the market system or proposing anything more than somewhat tighter economic regulations -- after the biggest financial collapse since the Great Depression -- and rather modest tax increases on the wealthy. But even these steps are apparently too much for those financing all the television ads, which should lead voters to ask themselves: Who is paying for this? What do they really want? And who gave them the right to buy an election?"


Well, the who is generally clear: the oligarchy is seizing its opportunity to tighten its grip on power. The only question I have is: are they just recently taking advantage of certain opportunities--like the Supreme Court decision Dionne explains as a result of naivete or arrogance, and the successes of the Tea Party movement? Or has this been designed since November 2008?

I wouldn't be surprised if it's some combination. Somebody saw the opportunity that the Citizens United gave the Bushwhacked Court--kind of like Bush v. Gore II, only this time the intent is to steal all elections, not just one.

And Fox came all the way out of the closet, no longer trying to pass as an objective news channel, especially once it created Glenn Beck. But the Tea Party freak shows were probably just political theatre until they helped take Ted Kennedy's Senate seat and won some primaries. Then once Karl Rove got involved, the oligarchy was deep into regime change. After all, the oligarchy and the poor saps who worship Fox and wave their guns and Tea Party banners have at least one thing in common: they're old white racists.

Still, could it really have been an accident that two extremely wealthy ex-corporate execs decided at the same time to try to buy California--and that both are women in this huge and economically crucial state that has a lot of women voters and two women Senators? The oligarchy's ambition might have been to simply get a foothold here. And then suddenly the rest of the country opened up.

Whatever level of conspiracy existed, it's clearly big now. But sorry, Tea Party chumps: you're just plantation labor for the rich. The endgame is the oligarchy.

A Season of Choices

After speeches in Pennsylvania, including this one before 18,000 or so in Philly, back at the White House Monday morning President Obama renewed his call for a $50 billion infrastructure investment to stimulate employment now and the economy of the future. The 'roads, railroads and runways' proposal is more than fixing badly neglected infrastructure, but investing in "a smart system of infrastructure equal to the needs of the 21st century," the President said.

After outlining its benefits and how it will be paid for, President Obama concluded: "So there is no reason why we can’t do this. There is no reason why the world’s best infrastructure should lie beyond our borders. This is America. We’ve always had the best infrastructure. This is work that needs to be done. There are workers who are ready to do it. All we need is the political will. This is a season for choices, and this is the choice: between decline and prosperity, and between the past and the future."

Nightwatch: Sun to Mon

I've seen some reports on the 10-10 Global Work Party in daily newspapers (like the San Jose Mercury News that counted 24 events in its Santa Clara County, 400 in California and 7,000 globally) and local TV news sites. But as of the end of Sunday, the progressive blogs like Kos and the larger and/or fashionable climate crisis/ enviro blogs like Climate Progress have been totally silent. (One exception is the Natural Resources Defense Council blog.)

Maybe they believe this project was ill-advised or otherwise not worth their attention. Instead, Climate Progress focuses as usual on how crazy Republicans are, and the latest dire climate information. Or maybe it was Sunday and they'll get to it as Monday goes on. But I have yet to see the progressive and enviro blogosphere all come together on this issue, especially when one big voice might be heard, especially about thousands of grassroots projects. And until that voice grows big enough, the disunited States will continue to allow national governments to squabble on the issue (as they did in China this weekend), and GOPers to stick with denial as an effective party strategy.

Apropos progressives, Paul Krugman's latest column goes after the Obama administration for not spending enough to increase employment, particularly in the Recovery Act. It's not a new position for Krugman, but he states his case strongly and well, in ways that progressives online should note: he gives the Administration credit for what they did and its consequences in keeping the economy from totally tanking, and he doesn't conclude that the administration is therefore traitorous to the cause, or engaged in trying to fool people, or so disgusting that people ought to punish them by letting GOPer fanatics destroy the country and teach them a lesson.

Meanwhile, Frank Rich deflates the notion that the revolution will be social media-ized. But by far the most depressing piece I read was the Times report on bullying. In kindergarten. By girls.

My own Sunday not taken up by my jobs-related stuff was mostly baseball-related, as reflected in my only post of the day, on the SF Giants series with Atlanta, over at what's now my sports network at American Dash.

Update Mon to Tues: The silence of the blogs continued on Monday concerning the Climate Crisis Global Work Party activities Sunday, and it was noticed by at least one participant who expressed his astonishment at Climate Progress, which is too busy getting into obscure scientific association controversies and misinterpreting Paul Krugman. Climate Progress continues to go after President Obama for apparently not recognizing the Climate Crisis as a more important problem than health care or economic recovery, yet blows off meaningful support for action that would prove its own commitment.

Lennon at 70

"How terribly strange to be seventy," sang Simon and Garfunkel in 1968, when they were 27 (Paul will turn 69 on the 13th of this month, and Art on the fifth of November) and John Lennon was 28. It's hard to imagine John Lennon at 70. But that's what he would be today--October 9-- had he not been shot and killed in 1980, a couple of months past his 40th birthday.

But maybe it's not so hard to imagine the writer of "Imagine" at 70. If he continued to master his demons as he seemed to be in the last years of his life, the decades since might have been quite different. Apart from the flash of the 60s and the tumult of the 70s, John Lennon was that rare combination of an inspiring idealist and an inspired ironist, who wrote lines like this: "sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun/If the sun don't come you get a tan from standing in the English rain." In the middle of the surreal "I Am the Walrus," those are lines they could be teaching in poetry courses.

It's tempting to think of him as the spokesperson and lightning rod for causes, the role he sought at times, and which got him shadowed and harassed by the Nixon police. That's a role that's difficult if not nearly impossible to sustain, especially with the increasingly low boredom threshold and the ageist attitudes that survive virtually unchallenged. But he was able to break so many rules, so who knows? He might have been the champion for Climate Crisis awareness say, and Lennon Saves would be a legacy instead of a fondly recalled button from the 60s. Although Lennon, first among equals, saved many a rainy day, English and otherwise in those years.

We would undoubtedly have more Beatles music, and now that we know that you can still rock when you're supposed to be in your rocking chair, we might still be hearing from Lennon. His absence did create room for his former band mates to shine in their own light--Paul McCartney is a global figure, Ringo Starr has found peace on the road, and it took George Harrison's death to reveal so clearly that his talent and accomplishments were major and lasting, and that at his best his song-writing was equal to Lennon and McCartney.

But I have to say that in the last Paul McCartney tour video I saw, the lack of any reference to the other Beatles, particularly Lennon, began to stand out ever more prominently as it went on. And the lack of any Lennon representative at the wonderful memorial concert for George Harrison (which featured McCartney and Starr) was eerie and sad.

It would have been very interesting to observe Lennon as he aged. The anger that seemed to have fueled that incredible energy--and together with his wit and high spirits, made him the model of charming insolence--seemed almost to destroy him, but in his late 30s he seemed to have come to a different place. The energy was different, but it was there in those last songs. What would have come next? There's only 30 empty years to contemplate.

But in those 40 years he left us music to express almost everything, from the vision of "Imagine" and "All You Need is Love," and the social vision of "Working Class Hero," to the bitter ironies of his version of "Nobody Loves You"; the involvement of "Give Peace a Chance," and the detachment of "Watching the Wheels"; the surrealism of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" to the raw pain of "I'm So Tired." He wrote and sang about being a son and a father, and all the emotions of relationship from young passions to Starting Over.

For those of us who were just a few years behind him, our aging was unaccompanied by new tunes and insights from him, and this absence, this void, was felt, though as one among others. But we always had what we still have, the songs, the images, the words he produced in what amounts to less than 20 years. That's more than most get, but it's a lot less than we wanted, or that we could have used.

click collage to enlarge

On 10/10/10

On Sunday, which is this portentous date--a very powerful one, if I remember my basic numerology--Bill McKibben's 350 organization is holding a Climate Crisis Global Work Party, which McKibben explains:

"On 10/10/10 we'll show that we the people can do this--but we need bold energy policies from our political leaders to do it on a scale that truly matters. The goal of the day is not to solve the climate crisis one project at a time, but to send a pointed political message: if we can get to work, you can get to work too--on the legislation and the treaties that will make all our work easier in the long run."

The event has been announced and in the process of being organized for months, and I hope that come Sunday the participation is high and the media notices. And maybe by Saturday all the progressive and enviro blogs will be reminding everyone that it's happening. But as of today, the online silence is eerie. I was about to say that it isn't even on the homepage of 350.org, but between the time I started this post and now, it has appeared!

But in a quick click-through of the relevant sites on my "Climate Crisis Future" bloglist, it's prominently mentioned only on Climate Crisis Coalition , the Environmental News Wire, Environment at change.org, Grist and World Changing, which is not nothing, but still... Let's hope that the rest of the sites get to this Saturday, along with the social media tools.

For this is a test not only of participation but of the environmental movement's ability to work together effectively. There are a lot of organizations--some very large ones--with their own agendas, who don't seem to work together much. And there are a lot of sites with smaller organizations clustered around a key figure and his/her (actually, almost always his) books and speaking engagements.

But if this is a transcendent moral issue, a crisis that threatens civilization and portends hardships that some are already suffering and many more will in a few short years, then it is long past time for everyone to transcend their agendas and egos and make one big voice.

Our Common Wealth

From the first day I stepped into a library, as a gradeschooler entering a fairly modest brick building on South Main Street, to pretty much every time I walk through the stacks, following the coded numbers that will lead me to the magic of an unknown book in the (public) university library some three thousand miles from there, I've felt it all as a kind of miracle, outside the normal rule. How could I have such free access to all this wealth? I suppose I always knew they were going to take it away.

This wealth has been the birthright of Americans for generations now. The public library in particular was once a mark of the progress of our civilization as well as a shining product and exemplar of our democracy. I suppose part of what made it so unlikely to exist, even in my child's mind, was that it was supported by so many people who seldom if ever used it. But it was valued and supported. And they were right--for their children may have used it, or others who used it and the knowledge there would provide for the town in many different but ultimately substantial ways.

But municipalities of all sizes are cutting back on services, and libraries are often victims. So it happened that some hard-pressed towns heard the siren song of privatization--you know, since it works so well in health insurance--and the library was put in corporate hands. Then the next step--and a financially healthy town in California privatized, leading to some cries of outrage.

If I ever had any doubt about the effect of privatization on libraries, I only would need to listen to the CEO of the company taking over, which specializes in libraries, as quoted in the New York Times:

There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”


Yes, somehow they have. Somehow they are sacred organizations. That seems to make him pretty mad. He mocks the idea. He sounds like somebody out of Dickens--if I might make a literary allusion to a fellow who lives chiefly in libraries.

I don't know the specifics of this union situation in Santa Clarita, but this doesn't sound like the librarians I've known:“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”

The Mayor says this is not true privatization, because the library stays open to the public. Privatization always seems sweet at first, however, until the real profit motive shows up--usually when a corporation gets control of enough of the "business," that is, the libraries. Then watch out.

The consequences of the corporate predation known in corporatespeak as privatization has more obviously cruel consequences than taking over libraries, as the recent situation I mentioned at the end of the earlier "Follow the Money" post--the family watching their house burn, with their pets dying inside, because they hadn't paid the $75 fee for fightfighters, who stood beside them and let it all burn. While perhaps not precisely a privatization example, it suggests where it is going.

But while the cruelty of closed or restricted or profit-oriented libraries may not be so obvious, the example of libraries makes one aspect of privatization crystal clear: it is a corporate threat to our common wealth, to profit a few.

There are other pressures on the library, like this machine I'm using at the moment. But that's more a result of human folly, a little more correctable and open to argument than the corporate grip. I suppose if the library goes, I won't actually be surprised. I'm too surprised it's still there every time I'm there. It's lived not only because people dreamed it and worked to build it and keep it going, but because people like Mr. Pezzanite were restrained by at least some strong belief in the library and what it stands for as, yes, a sacred--public--institution.

Election 2010: Follow the Money

There's a lot to be said about the politics and the psychologies involved in this upcoming electoral expression, and of course a lot is being said and will be said. But a lot of it will be disproportionately evaluated, because a lot of it may be less relevant than the cold hard cash silently changing hands. Right now as Dylan said, money doesn't talk, it swears.

So before I meander down those roads, let me state what should be obvious: the super rich and the merely rich are trying very hard to buy this election for the Republicans.

The general approach is ancient, as old as oligarchy. The rich stir up the fears and prejudices of the poor, and flatter them with attention temporarily by making a few stars from their number to voice their platitudes and mockery of their enemies. They do it to serve their own interests, not at all the interests of those they inflame and flatter. And they do it with money. They use money to bribe and buy people. Money to fund institutions that buy people, and buy them influence. Money to buy media, to buy media time, and to fund political campaigns. And of course, they do it chiefly for money. The kind the Tea Partiers they finance will never see.

This year they are empowered by a Supreme Court decision that both allows unprecedented amounts of money into the political system, and hides where it is coming from. Odd that it should come at such a propitious moment, after the Obama campaign showed how much cash as well as energy could come from the grassroots, and the Democrats as a party began to raise money more effectively than the official Republican party. They're doing so in 2010 as well.

But the evidence is growing that the secret corporate and rich folks money is overwhelming, and applied to GOPer candidacies. First a little exposing of a shadowy tax-exempt group operating in Alaska and elsewhere. Then another phantom in Oregon. Then articles exposing the billionaires behind the Tea Party movement. President Obama called it an insidious attempt to take over democracy.

Now the closer we get to election day, the more obvious it is--though only if you pay attention. At First Read Tuesday: AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said he expects labor unions will be outspent 20-to-1 by corporate groups aligned with Republicans. The CS Monitor focuses on the infamous Karl Rove, and his funneling of millions to GOPer candidates--the Monitor wonders if it is legal, but when has that stopped Karl Rove before?

Update 10/7: President Obama continues to hammer this issue, noting that Democrats are being outspent 6 and 7 to 1 in many races, usually by outside groups--including at least one race in which an outside conservative group is outspending Dem and GOPer candidates combined, on behalf of the GOPer candidate. He also pointed to evidence that some of this money is coming from foreign corporations--something he warned might happen at the State of the Union where one member of the Supreme Court that allowed this was seen to disagree. Some of the evidence of foreign money was turned up by Think Progress.

"A note to Tea Party activists: This is not the movie you think it is. You probably imagine that you’re starring in “The Birth of a Nation,” but you’re actually just extras in a remake of “Citizen Kane.” So begins a column by Paul Krugman, noting the other strategy of corporate interests funding institutions and people to press their case--especially the phenomenon of Fox. As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy." But that's hardly all that Fox does. While still claiming to be a news network, it relentlessly pushes one point of view and now, particular candidates, with no respect for accuracy or fairness, and with relentless distortion and innuendo in its daily toolbox. As Krugman and others note, the Tea Party movements owes much if not most of its rise to Fox News.

This simply adds new money, new muscle and new megaphones to old sleaze, and there's no better symbol of that, writes Bob Herbert, that the GOPer who could become Speaker of the House, John Boehner. Herbert recalls that he was the guy who literally gave out money from Big Tobacco to sympathetic members on the House floor. Boehner is even more of a tool of corporate interests today, he writes. "Both major parties have, with great enthusiasm, turned more and more of the government over to corporate and banking interests. But the G.O.P., with Mr. Boehner currently the point person, is fanatical about it, has barely tried to hide its willingness to offer up the government wholesale, no questions asked." He concludes "The U.S. is in terrible shape right now because far too much influence has been ceded to the financial and corporate elites who have used that influence to game the system and reap rewards that are almost unimaginable. Ordinary working Americans have been left far behind, gasping and on their knees. John Boehner has been one of the leaders of the army of enablers responsible for this abominable state of affairs."

The America the GOPers want is what their patrons want: very low taxes for the super rich, to be paid for by the cumulative poor of future generations; incomes for the super rich rising into further obscenity while most Americans slip back and more fall into poverty; corporations allowed to pollute their way to higher profits, to sacrifice the planet and life as we know it to their further financial enrichment and temporary power. And they will tell the most outrageous lies--pleasant ones and vicious ones--and with their own network, and others too scared to contradict them, they are given the legitimacy to do so.

They may get the country back all right, to be further exploited and despoiled, thanks to invisible money financing campaigns, and their visible shills--such as the failed actor Glenn Beck, noting with approval the spectre of a family watching their house burn down, killing their dogs and cat, alongside the fire fighters that refused to put the fire out, because the family had not paid their $75 fee to the privatized fire company. This is the GOPer future, and it could be coming to your town, too.

So when I write about other aspects of this election, other kinds of portents, please don't forget that politics and psychology may be potent factors, and ultimately the psychology involved may be the most basic. But for the winners and losers and what it all means, don't for a minute forget to follow the money.

Emerson for the Day

“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.”

Emerson

(Or maybe this Magritte painting is better to illustrate the Village Voice story, White America Has Lost Its Mind...)

The Green Comet

Look, up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, no--it's a green comet! The recently discovered Comet Hartley is coming to a sky near you. Right now it's visible through backyard telescopes and in some places (with very old-fashioned darkness at night) with the naked eye. (This is one skywatcher photo among many already.) It's a fairly small comet with a long tail, and it makes its closest encounter with Earth on October 20, so eventually it will be visible through binoculars at least in a lot of places. Then in November, a NASA craft has its close encounter with the comet, but just for photos . So from now on, look up (towards the constellation Cassiopeia) and think green.

Forward

The 10-2-10 One Nation Together rally brought tens of thousands (which could also mean hundreds of thousands) of people to Washington Saturday, a very good turnout for a rally that wasn't all that well publicized. But it was a Democratic base rally--lots of unions, churches and other organizations did the organizing. Media accounts I saw were nondescript--participants noted the diversity (in marked contrast to the Beckistan rally) and good feeling. Here's what it looked like ( a diary posted at Kos by The Red Phone is Ringing, from which the above photos were liberally borrowed.) It's exactly a month until the election, and it's being recognized that if the Dems turn out, they win. Especially with info like this poll, which says that on all the issues polled (except terrorism), the majority of voters trust Democrats to do the better job.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"What I'm very proud of is that we have, as an administration, kept our moral compass, even as we've worked through these very difficult issues. Doesn't mean we haven't made mistakes, but I think we've moved the country in a profoundly better direction just in the past two years."

President Obama in his Rolling Stone interview. Photo above is from the rally this week in Madison, Wisconsin, with a crowd estimated by local officials at 26,000.

Politics of Governance

If as expected, President Obama announces the departure today of Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff, there's likely to be a lot of blather all day and night about the evil Rahm, his style etc. ad nauseam, and in particular from self-anointed progressives who blame him for leading Obama astray into compromises and misguided sissy attempts at bipartisanship. And maybe even a little worry that his replacement, Pete Rouse, isn't enough of a progressive fighter. (Interesting piece on Rouse in the W Post.)

While I'm reluctant to dive back into this mess at the point that progressive politicos may finally be focusing on winning midterm elections rather than whining, I'm still shaking my head over their conduct. Sure, they've got legitimate disappointments, and differences on how to get things done (the outside game of pressuring Congress by going to "the people" on issues vs. the inside game of carving out legislation and getting votes for it) but I'd like to point out that their inability to shift from braying constantly about politics to examining and analyzing governing is part of the problem, and one of the chief reasons for any "enthusiasm gap" that might exist. A big result of that is they talk much more about GOPers than they do about Democrats and President Obama (except of course to complain.)

For example, late last week President Obama went back to the U. of Wisconsin campus where he made headlines during his campaign by drawing an audience of 17,000. This time his audience was 26,000 with thousands unable to get in. He gave a rousing speech, which he duplicated to a smaller but very enthused audience of younger voters on Thursday. But both speeches were pretty much ignored in the progressive blogosphere (only the reliable blackwaterdog at Daily Kos diaried the former some 24 hours later, and an apparently very young and not very ept diarist did the latter), and while Rachel Maddow presented part of the Madison speech, other progressive gabfests turned to the complainers, one of whom--with unearned arrogance dripping from his Ready-for-K Street suit--said he was heartened because Obama used the word "fight."

On the day of the Madison speech, Obama's in-depth interview with Rolling Stone hit the net, and was quite amazingly ignored by these blogs and shows. I hope to write about this interview more than once in the next few days, but for now, I want to quote just this from President Obama:

"When I talk to Democrats around the country, I tell them, "Guys, wake up here. We have accomplished an incredible amount in the most adverse circumstances imaginable." I came in and had to prevent a Great Depression, restore the financial system so that it functions, and manage two wars. In the midst of all that, I ended one of those wars, at least in terms of combat operations. We passed historic health care legislation, historic financial regulatory reform and a huge number of legislative victories that people don't even notice."

Why didn't people notice? Maybe because on progressive blogs, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party get more ink than Obama and the Democrats. Maybe because the blogs and shows are so focused on the latest Tea Party racist xenophobic comment, the latest Republican lie and GOPer mini-scandal. Look at Friday's posts on TPM, which I regard as one of the better sites: one after the other about Christine McDonnell and her resume fibs. And not much else.

Some may say these kinds of stories are sexier, but I really don't get that. What's so sexy about gossip, which is essentially what these most resemble? I'm not denying they are relevant to a candidate's fitness for office. But so is what they've actually accomplished in office.

The way I see it is this: the progressive blogosphere and media couldn't break their addiction to politics long enough to cover governance. And Obama--and Nancy Pelosi--were about governance, in a time of multiple crises that deeply threaten(ed) the country on several fronts at the same time.

This was true more broadly. As President Obama said in Rolling Stone: "What is true, and this is part of what can frustrate folks, is that over the past 20 months, we made a series of decisions that were focused on governance, and sometimes there was a conflict between governance and politics. So there were some areas where we could have picked a fight with Republicans that might have gotten our base feeling good, but would have resulted in us not getting legislation done."

But what frustrates people including me is this obsession with the GOPer freaks and with everybody's opinion on how things should be done instead of reporting on what was being done. Apart from the diarists propelled chiefly by their glands and the usual inflated egos attracted to the big political stage, a lot of it is due to this tight Washington/media game that big time blogs are now part of. People get reputations and air time for being controversial and as extreme as they can get away with. They talk to each other on each other's shows, and they bounce around in the same echo chambers.

I know I'm not the only one who followed them with bated breath during the campaign who has been largely turned off by them since the Inauguration. This is a cumulative thing--individual hosts and writers can probably point to stories they've done on governance issues. But careers apparently aren't made there anymore.

They basically have been playing the GOPer FOX game: they talk about the same GOPer folks on progressive blogs and shows as Fox News does, except that Obama is probably on Fox more. And they wonder why the Obama administration makes some intemperate comments about them.

Besides which, I doubt that it's effective. Except for the gossip buzz, nobody outside of Delaware cares about just how weird Christine O'Donnell is, and moreover, nobody outside that tiny state can vote for or against her. The only national story with impact on local elections is what President Obama and the Democratic Congress do or don't do. That's the story that hasn't been very well told.

Taking a tabloid or more pertinently, a social media approach to issues and elections doesn't cut it, at least not by itself.

Tony Judt

The last two quotes posted here, from Emerson and William James, both apply to Tony Judt. There's a fine memorial piece on him by Timothy Garton Ash in the New York Review of Books. Here are some excerpts:

"Critical though he was of French intellectuals, he shared with them a conviction that ideas matter. Being English, he thought facts matter too.

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of polemical intellectuals. There are those for whom the taking of controversial positions is primarily a matter of personal peacock display, factional or clique positioning, hidden agendas, score-settling, or serial, knee-jerk revisionism. Then there are those who, while not without personal motivations and biases, are fundamentally concerned with seeking the truth. Tony Judt was of the latter kind.

Sharp and cutting his pen could be, but his work was always about seeking the truth as best we can, with all the search tools at our disposal—from the toothpick of Anglo-American empiricism to the searchlight of Gallic overstatement. Unlike the other kind of polemical intellectual, he was always in good faith. And he was always serious. Not drearily earnest—he enjoyed the acrobatics of intellectualism as others enjoy baseball—but morally serious. This was as true in private chat as in public discourse. In what he said and wrote, there was always that moral edge. He felt what he himself called, in a study of three French political intellectuals, the burden of responsibility.

Tony Judt was a very public intellectual but a very private man. He had a rich, close family life. In the last months of his illness, his wife, Jennifer Homans, and their sons, Daniel and Nicholas, set up for him a screensaver slide show on his desktop monitor. Besides happy moments from family holidays, it showed a lot of mountains (particularly the Alps) and railway stations—trains and mountains being two of his private passions.

Tony was a fighter, and he fought this illness with all his strength and will. Not for him the consolations of imagined eternity or Kübler-Rossish “acceptance.” We laughed at the great line that the English playwright John Mortimer reported coming from the mouth of his dying father: “I’m always angry when I’m dying.” He was a clear-sighted realist about what was happening to him, and what would or would not come after. Less than three weeks before he died, I said something to the effect that I knew he was going through hell. “Yes,” he said, with the eye equivalent of that no longer possible shake of the head, “but hell is a nontransferable experience.” So better to talk of other things: friends, bêtes noires, politics, books.

With the dedicated support of his family, devoted students, and professional carers, he found a way to go on doing what he did best—thinking, talking, and writing. In fact, the two years of his fatal illness were the occasion for a creative outpouring, with the Remarque Lecture on social democracy expanded into a short book (Ill Fares the Land, 2010); a set of memoir essays, composed in his head in those long periods of immobilized solitude, and then dictated (some have been published in these pages; the complete set will appear in book form as The Memory Chalet); and a book in which Tony talked through his planned intellectual history of the twentieth century, in conversation with Timothy Snyder. On e-mail—for once, an unmixed blessing—he could continue to “speak” in his old voice.

It is probably inevitable that his life and work will now be viewed, at least for some time, through the prism of his cruel illness—and the quite public way in which he described and fought it. But death should not be allowed to define life. These were, after all, only two years out of sixty-two. As a hardheaded, nonreligious, unsentimental realist, Tony would have greeted any formulaic sentimentalities about what “lives on” with that dismissive shake of the hand. But in some important sense, his intellectual Czernowitz is still alive; and his books will long be walking and talking among us."

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

“We measure ourselves by many standards. Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which warm our heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things and able to suffice unto itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort we can put forth...He who can make none is but a shadow; he who can make much is a hero.”
William James