You might not have noticed since it was pretty dull and a lot of other things were happening, but the Sitting Decider and some asshole Mormon upstart spent an hour and a half talking about basically nothing last night, the first such exercise in extemporaneous theatre of a scheduled series of three.
As is my wont, I’m going to talk a little about it.
The Influencing Machine is a work of graphic nonfiction, written by Brooke Gladstone of On The Media fame, and illustrated by Josh Neufeld, probably best known for a journalistic serial he drew about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I first heard about it when Gladstone was interviewed on the Colbert Report in support of the book last year. 
The interview was interesting and I’ve enjoyed On The Media, so when I happened to notice it at the Elliot Bay Book Company not long ago I picked up a copy. It was well worth the sticker price.
The goal of the book is to critically examine the nature of the American media, roughly beginning with the rise of print in the colonies. Its thesis is that there is no “Influencing Machine” if that phrase means to imply that the media are some kind of external, possibly sinister force that control or direct outcomes in public life. The media are instead a mirror, Gladstone argues: “We get the media we deserve.”
The 11th annual Sasquatch music festival happened Memorial Day weekend at the Gorge Amphitheatre near the hilariously named city of George, Washington. It was four days of sun, dirt, dramatic daily temperature swings, tens of thousands of total strangers variously drunk or high or on vast quantities of controlled substances — or, as is more likely, an increasingly unplanned combination of all three — all sharing portable toilets and farmland for camping. All this was done to bring to pass a music festival at one of the most scenic venues in the world, the likes of which haven’t been seen since last year.
The Bomb is a posthumously published essay by noted historian (or “master of agitprop”) Howard Zinn. It features a short preface, written by indie publisher and activist Greg Ruggiero, in praise of Zinn’s work and advocacy of civil disobedience ahead of the main text divided in three parts.
Part the first: Introduction. Zinn describes his return to the US for a month’s furlough following the end of the Second World War in Europe. While in New York, he read about the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and recalls rejoicing with his wife over that fact, not knowing what it meant except that his furlough was about to become indefinite since the war was surely over.
Zinn describes some of his experience as a bombardier, far removed from the people and buildings who were his targets from an elevation of 30,000 feet. Indeed, he makes the claim that “to this day, the vicious reality of aerial bombing is lost to most people in the United States,” as it was to him during the war. Despite improvements in technology, Zinn points out that innocent casualties still persist today when the lives of “suspected terrorists” and Afghan wedding parties alike are ended by drone missiles.
But Zinn’s “shock of understanding” came after reading John Heresey’s interviews with Hiroshima survivors. The grisly details of the effects of fallout and radiation poisoning caused him to recall his own bombing missions, during which he “mindlessly dropped bombs on cities without thinking what humans on the ground were experiencing,” and in particular the horror of his last bombing mission three weeks before that furlough, in Royan, France.
Part the second: Hiroshima. In typical fashion in this, by far the longest part, Zinn deconstructs the standard narrative of the need to drop the bomb. Moving from horrific descriptions taken from first-hand accounts of people without hands and feet and eyebrows, moaning and screaming after the shockwave of the explosion had passed, Zinn tries to understand how it is that such a thing could have been done. A major theme throughout the book is the individual’s ability to rationalize away personal responsibility, throwing themselves into the anonymous collective of the nation-state or the military united in common purpose against an enemy, be it facism, communism, terrorism, or whatever other demon is sufficiently established in the public imagination.
There is also a focus on military and government actors. Zinn summarizes his finding, also articulated in his masterwork, A People’s History of the United States, that the war with Japan was more likely a trade expedient than it was an existential defense or a righteous war against teutonic fascism and genocide. Zinn cites the racism of the barring of blacks from the military and the Japanese internment to debunk that last idea that WWII was a righteous crusade to save the Jews. Instead, the thesis appears to be that much of the brutality of the war can be explained by a desire of military elites to exercise new weapons technology and a “euphemism — ‘undermining of the morale'” to justify excesses.
To the first point, Zinn begins by attacking a common justification of the bombings — that they prevented a casualty-heavy and otherwise necessary invasion of the Japanese mainland — as without merit:
There has been endless discussion about how many American lives would have been lost in an invasion of Japan. Truman said “half a million.” Churchill said “a million.” These figures were pulled out of the air. Historian Barton Bernstein’s research could not find any projection for invasion casualties higher than 46,000.
The whole discussion about casualty figures is pointless. It is based on the premise that there would have to be an American invasion of Japan in order to end the war. But the evidence is clear that the Japanese were on the verge of surrender, that a simple declaration on keeping the position of the Emperor would have brought the war to an end, and no invasion was necessary.
So what then necessitated the dropping of the bomb? Zinn posits a host of explanations: pressure from Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project managers to put to use the fruits of their years of toil; questions over whether plutonium fission or uranium fission would “work better” (hence the idea that “no one ever considered the options of delaying the second bomb drop” three days after Hiroshima, the better to test out the plutonium bomb); Truman’s desire to end the war before the Russians entered it and hence take all the glory; a sense that this glory should include the total decimation and humiliation of the Japanese before American firepower (Zinn describes — in what is one of the most memorable takeaways from the book — the final bombing of the war, five days after Nagaski, which included explosives as well as leaflets declaring that “the war has ended with the surrender of your government”); Truman’s desire for personal legacy (his immediate reaction was “this is the greatest thing in history”); and, in that same vein, the nationalistic desire to the show the rest of the world what the enterprising Americans had made.
Part the third: Royan. After reading about these horrors in 1966, Zinn went back to Royan, the site of his last mission during the war, to learn more about his impact there more than 20 years before. The bombing was not tactically or strategically useful, and it happened when the impending end of the European war was all but certain. There are allegations of violations of the chain of command in ordering the raid; to the contrary, that the chain of command was blindly and happily obeyed; the notion that morale necessitated the destruction of a town, any town (“One of the local commanders wrote later: ‘It would have been more logical to wait for the surrender of Germany and thus to avoid new human and material losses,’ but one could not ‘ignore important factors of morale.'”); ending-of-the-war ruthlessness and recklessness (“each one wanted a last moment to distinguish himself and get a bit of glory; moderation was scorned, prudence was seen as cowardice”); and even the idea that it was all just a horrible mix-up, that Royan was “destroyed by mistake!”
But the Royan bombing is famous for being “the first [use] in warfare” of napalm, and this fact is the reason Zinn suggests as the main reason that the bombing occurred. He recalls seeing the bombs “flaring like matches struck in a fog” and being “completely unaware of the human chaos below.” A local journalist summed up the bombing: “Thus was accomplished a deadly work of obvious uselessness, and thus was revealed to the world the powerful destructiveness of napalm.” A doctor and former mayor addressed the controlling general after the bombing: “The Germans had to feel our power! Permit me, my general, to tell you, once and for all, in the name of those who paid the cost: ‘La Victorie de Royan’ does not exist, except for you.” It seems that the desire to showcase a new destructive force trumped prudence, just as seemed to have happened weeks later in Japan.
The book is a quick read and an insightful one. It suffers slightly from being poorly organized: each part is a dozens-page single chapter of paragraphs. Additionally, many assertions are uncited, or at least difficult to reconcile to the book’s own endnotes. The Hiroshima section, fully half the book, cites only two sources in the endnotes, compared with Royan’s 14. This is especially egregious since Zinn’s claims about the war, and in particular the end of the war in the Pacific, are far from mainstream. On the other hand, Hiroshima has been researched a great deal more than Royan, and Zinn has personal history in the latter event, so it makes sense that he would rely more on fewer, well-established accounts in his discourse about the former. In any event, the prose is easily consumed and primary sources do appear with frequency alongside Zinn’s analysis. Given its length, coming in at under 100 pages, it is well worth the few hours to be exposed to a dissenting interpretation of a pivotal period in world history.
Always the master of agitprop, Zinn concludes powerfully by connecting the threads and emphasizing the need for individuals to stand up and resist the groupthink that leads to atrocities like these:
Everyone can point, rightly, to someone else as being responsible… no one is positively responsible for the horror that ensues. But every one is negatively responsible because anyone can throw a wrench into the machinery. Not quite, of course — because only a few people have wrenches. The rest have only their hands and feet… This may suggest that those of us who have a bit more than our bare hands, and at least a small interest in stopping the machine, that we might play a peculiar role in stopping the social stalemate.
Published 2010, 91 pages.
Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute (a fiscally conservative small-government think tank co-founded by billionaire asshole Charles Koch), has a new op-ed in the National Review Online, that preeminent organ of right wing opinion. It caught my attention with the provocative headline “The Income-Inequality Myth” and is sufficiently horrible (for many reasons which I will discuss below) that it deserves a sound deconstruction.
Tanner’s off to a wicked start by including a CBO graph from October 2011 that shows the share of income ‘after transfers and federal taxes’ for the top 20% of American income earners grew roughly 10% from 1979 to 2007, while falling about 2% for everyone else. 
Maybe the point is that it might have been worse since the rectangles aren’t that different? So far I’m not convinced that income inequality is mythical, but if that isn’t bad enough, the first two paragraphs aren’t a substantive analysis of why income inequality is a dirty leftist lie, but rather a purely ad hominem broadside against Occupy Wall Street and a summary of a dystopian Vonnegut short story about a society which employs a “Handicapper General” to ensure that its citizens live in perfect equality.
Finally we get down to business: “most studies of inequality” have it all wrong, Tanner asserts, and he knows this thanks to studies about how the tax code has evolved over time done by one of Cato’s own, Alan Reynolds! As near as I can tell through the confusing and poorly worded summary of Reynolds’s findings, changes to capitals gains taxes and the 1986 tax reforms resulted in more wealth becoming taxable income. Basically, the rich aren’t getting richer, it just looks that way since more of the vast wealth they already had is taxed these days! Meanwhile, poorer workers are increasingly being compensated in less tangible “non-cash benefits” like health care and pensions, which are often not taxed, so pay hasn’t risen as sharply as it might have otherwise and the data are skewed. Tanner even repeats a claim that any perceived inequality can be explained away when you consider how ludicrously expensive health care has become. Yippee? Most obnoxiously, he seems to suggest that when you account for “non-cash social-welfare benefits such as food stamps, housing subsidies, and Medicaid” that “the gap between rich and poor may not be nearly as large as thought.” Allow me to rephrase: “Yes, you may be so crushingly poor that you can’t even afford housing and food, but an inadequate and shrinking safety net virtually makes up for that, so quit whining! And hands off the Benz.”
But then, without warning, Tanner shifts from arguing that inequality is just a talking point for Obama, a “significant misreading of the data,” to admitting it exists and that it is all the fault of “high-school dropouts” and “large segments of our society [that] remain unprepared for a 21st-century economy.” Whatever the reason for this inequality that suddenly does exist after all, Tanner tells us not to blame the Bush tax cuts or “tax cuts for the rich.” Why not? Because anonymous “studies” tell us it isn’t their fault!
Get ready to shift gears yet again, because now the discourse becomes not about whether income inequality exists, but rather about how inequality is good for us! In order to see this comes a three-part assault on rules of logic and composition.
First, we get a hypothetical scenario in which everyone’s income is magically doubled, and we avoid the ensuing catastrophic inflation troubles (as well as a discussion of how that was possible, or even that it would be an issue) to discover we have eliminated “an enormous amount of economic hardship” but at the expense of increased inequality! Wrapping up the thought experiment is Margaret Thatcher condescendingly channeling Ayn Rand (is there any other way?) in this choice straw man assault: “So long as the [income] gap is smaller, [those who would obsess over inequality] would rather have the poor poorer.” Yes, nothing like those bitter, success-hating liberals to ruin a perfectly good plutocracy.
Next, we get a rousing defense of live-and-let-live, reward-driven capitalism, but with a twist: the economic pie is not fixed, implying a zero-sum game; no, “in reality, though, the size of the pie is infinite.” Yes, in reality, pie is infinite in extent! It gets better in the very next sentence, where we have suggestions for the sort of ambitious risk-takers “ever striving for more” that we need to “make it grow.” That’s right, we need to grow an infinite pie! Surely his point is clear enough if you’re willing to assume he meant something other than what he said, but shouldn’t we expect better metaphor from a man the New York Times called “a lucid writer and vigorous polemicist”? After all, the Times is usually top-notch at telling it like it is.
Finally, we get some stirring quotation from Nobel Prize winner — and former Cato Institute fellow! — F.A. Hayek, who concluded that rapid progress requires inequality and would “be impossible without… some far in front of the rest.” No rationale is provided for this view, but I guess we should take Hayek’s word for it. After all, Nobel Prize winners are always deserving, and it provides a nice segue into a closing platitude about how we all want a “prosperous, growing economy, with less poverty.” Amen!
However, a cursory inquiry into the context of this Hayek quotation yields significantly more insight than Tanner is willing to impart through his spare reproduction of it. Taken from Hayek’s 1960 work The Constitution of Liberty (which coincidentally made the National Review‘s top 10 list for best 20th century nonfiction), a lengthier reproduction (with the bit Tanner cherry-picked in bold) is worthwhile to see that Hayek was not talking about the virtues of income inequality at all:
New knowledge and its benefits can spread only gradually, and the ambitions of the many will always be determined by what is as yet accessible only by the few. It is misleading to think of those new possibilities as if they were, from the beginning, a common possession of society which its members could deliberately share… it will have to pass through through a long course of adaptation, selection, combination, and improvement before full use can be made of it. This means that there will always be people who already benefit from new achievements that have not yet reached others.
The rapid economic advance that we have come to expect seems in large measure to be the result of this inequality and to be impossible without it. Progress at such a fast rate cannot proceed on a uniform front but must take place in echelon fashion, with some far ahead of the rest. The reason for this is concealed by our habit of regarding economic progress chiefly as an accumulation of ever greater quantities of goods and equipment. But the rise of our standard of life is due at least as much to an increase of knowledge which enables us not merely to consume more of the same things but to use different things, and often things we did not even know before. And though the growth of income depends in part on the accumulation of capital, more probably depends on our learning to use our resources more effectively and for new purposes.
Tanner has taken the sentiment completely out of context. If anything, I would guess that income inequality is, in Hayek’s view, a tragic artefact of the slow pace of innovation, imperfections and lag time in distribution, and a reluctance to adopt and apply new modes of knowledge and information; not an indispensable precondition for progress. The inequality Hayek refers to is that of access to “new knowledge and its benefits,” and he even criticizes the view that “growth of income” depends mostly on “the accumulation of capital” and the “accumulation of ever greater quantities of goods and equipment.” Tanner’s use of this quotation in concluding his thesis — self-aggrandizingly calling it out as coming from “another Nobel Prize winner” — is shamefully dishonest.
Now I don’t want to make a habit of writing a critical op-ed twice as long as the one it criticizes; if I did that every time some horrible op-ed came along, I would have no time to do anything else. But this Michael Tanner hack seems to be a big deal. I’d never heard of him before I stumbled upon this disgrace, but according to his Cato biography, Tanner has written several books that were well-received, frequently appears in prominent newspapers and on cable television, has testified to Congress many times, and helped Cato to launch the “Project on Social Security Choice, which is widely considered [by whom?] the leading impetus for transforming the soon-to-be-bankrupt system into a private savings program.” Obviously that last remark allows us to take anything Cato has to say with a grain of salt, since so-called experts disagree about the viability of Social Security. But the point is this guy matters to the mainstream media (despite his opening salvo in this piece against the mainstream media), and more importantly, to the conservative masses.
But more than that, this op-ed in particular is the sort of thing that poisons the discourse on a centrally vital topic. Citizens United wouldn’t be such a horrible decision with democracy-altering power if wealth distribution weren’t so wildly skewed toward corporation-people and the top hundredth (and even more, the top thousandth) of income earners. The fact that it is, and is only likely to get worse, is among the worst properties of American political life today. So purveyors of noise like Cato Institute senior fellow Michael Tanner, whether out of thinly veiled self-interest or the almost inconceivable notion that they actually believe this shit, are a huge problem that needs to be reckoned with. No wonder he starts out with a baseless attack on Occupy Wall Street, one of the few groups that has been able to halfway decently sound this alarm. It is important to see that dishonest, illogical tripe like this miserable op-ed is about the best the right wing has to offer to justify its transparent greed.
Making Our Democracy Work is the work of a left-leaning sitting Supreme Court Justice, Stephen Breyer. Well-titled, the book is a treatise that explains the goals of the Court as set out in the Constitution and its successes and failures over the last couple centuries, as well as the means that its author believes ought to be emphasized today in order to realize a constitutional democracy based on civil rights, not simply on paper but in actual practice. Justice Breyer suggests an arsenal of tools and focuses that he believes — convincingly — the Court can and should use to maintain a public trust in enforcing “our Constitution’s liberty-protecting limits.”
The book is just as no-nonsense as you might expect and require of a sitting high court judge: it is divided into discrete, functional parts that each build in their own way in spare but effective prose to the ultimate and multifaceted thesis.
The first part explores the historical basis for the remarkable trust and deference that the American people grant the Court, explicitly relying only on well-accepted but detailed historical accounts of a few important cases. Breyer explores in entertaining prose the first great test of the nascent Court in Marbury v. Madison; points out a miscarriage in the treatment of the Cherokees under the Jackson administration when he ignored a Court order protecting their rights; visits what is hailed as one of the worst decisions the Court ever made in Dred Scott; counters with a triumph of cooperation between the judiciary and the executive in Brown v. Board of Education and school integration in Little Rock; and concludes with an analysis of the contentious 2000 decision Bush v. Gore. The exercise was to demonstrate that ours is “a nation that has gradually come to place confidence in the Court.”
The second part is Breyer’s vision for the manner in which the Court ought to function to preserve Constitutional guarantees by maintaining the public trust while not yielding to political pressures. This is clearly easier said than done, and the proffered mechanism of emphasis on the purposes (whether determined or inferred) and the consequences (more often real than imagined) of legislation — as opposed to fealty to wording or precedent or archaic interpretation, which are acknowledged as well to have a place in crafting decisions — seems phrased specifically to convince strict constructionists like Breyer’s colleague Antonin Scalia. But it is easy to forgive the explicit emphasis on these tools given the herculean job Breyer performs in justifying their application both through specific examples and accessible abstractions. Breyer’s approach is multifaceted too, as he also explores justifications in depth for qualified deference to the specialized expertise of executive administrations, state authorities, and lower federal courts. I was struck by the breadth and restraint of Breyer’s judicial vision.
The third and final part is devoted to an exploration of the Court’s duty to protect individual rights. Between detailed and painful discussions of Court failures with WWII Japanese internment cases and recent relative successes with Terrorism cases like Hamdi and Boumediene, Breyer demonstrates how the Court has and (sometimes) uses the power to check executive excesses to guarantee constitutional liberties. Importantly, he underscores the tenuous successes of the Court in maintaining a functioning democracy by quoting Bush 43’s reaction to the Boumediene ruling: “We’ll abide by the court’s decision — that doesn’t mean I have to agree with it.”
Overall, the book is an eminently readable, educational treatise unlikely to be less informative than any text book on the subjects it addresses, and it has an aggressive collection of notes. There are also a pair of appendices: the first is a collection of images relating to the cases discussed throughout the book that Breyer hopes will remind readers that they “were decided by, and the principles have a profound effect on, human beings” in order to drive home the real importance of these issues; the second is among the shortest and most effective descriptions of what it is the Supreme Court actually does that I have ever read, which is indispensable for anyone unfamiliar with or prone to needing to explain to others the function that our government’s third and ‘weakest’ branch (according to Hamilton) performs. I fault the book for repeating certain phrases and themes a little too often, but that seems more like a failing of sloppy editors, a symptom of the desire to make the book exceedingly consumable to the layman, or perhaps a forgivable idiosyncrasy of the author; and it is my only major criticism. I recommend the book heartily, and close with the final passage from its conclusion, which summarizes its laudable purpose:The stories this book sets forth are told from the point of view of one judge. I have drawn my own lessons from them. I hope that they lead others to study the stories and ponder their lessons about our constitutional history. Then they too will be better able to help make our democracy work. I hope so. That is why I have written this book.Published 2010, 270 pages.