One papal hand washes another papal heinie -- and so it goes

Above the fray: The saintly, now sainted, John XXIII
once again provides cover for a darker "promotion."

"[I]t is a bit sad to see Pope Francis, who has been doing wonderful things in his short time at the Vatican, play the old game of self-certification at the top of a saint-making factory. Many hope he will make needed changes in the church. But in promoting John Paul II he is exalting a man who fought every one of those changes."

-- Garry Wills, in a new NYRB blogpost,
"Popes Making Popes Saints"

by Ken

At first the news seemed inscrutable: the new pope shoving Pope John XXIII the final step to sainthood -- and waiving the second-miracle requirement to do so! Don't all those Vatican types hate John XXIII? Even after all the decades that have elapsed since that genuinely saintly John's brief reign was terminated, don't they still get night sweats at the thought of a pope who imagined that the Catholic Church could actually serve the spiritual needs of its worshipers, and believed that that included serving their human needs as well?

But wait, you say. The new pope isn't really a Vatican type.

Maybe so, but all you had to do was read a bit further to smell what was going on. As part of a canonization twofer, who gets zipped along to sainthood in (relatively speaking) the blink of an eye? The hero of modern Vatican fascism, Pope John Paul II. The man who, after Pope Paul VI's unacceptably wishy-woshy efforts to overturn Vatican II, really took in hand the job of dragging the Church back into the Middle Ages.

Of course John Paul II had that veneer of piety and humility, but it was real only in the School of George Costanza, whereby "it's not a lie if you believe it." But the man did more than any other in modern times, and perhaps more than any ever, to sanctify the role of Catholics as pawns of the high and mighty purveyors of authoritarian doctrinal mumbo-jumbo.

For a moment there even I wondered if I was being overly cynical in assuming colossal bad faith on the part of the current Holy Father. And then I saw Garry Wills's new NYRB blogpost, "Popes Making Popes Saints." And Garry has the most straightforward possible reason for believing that John is being used to camouflage nefarious saint-making shenanigans. It's been done before, and by none other than John Paul II himself.

On September 3, 2000, Pope John Paul II beatified Pope Pius IX. (Beatification is the third and penultimate rung on the ladder to sainthood -- it certifies that a genuine miracle was worked through a dead person's intercession, establishes a liturgical feast day for that person, and authorizes church prayer to him or her.) Pius IX was a polarizing figure. He wrested from the Vatican Council a declaration of his own infallibility; he condemned such modern heresies as democratic government; he took a Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara, from his family -- on the grounds that Edgardo's Christian nurse had baptized him as an infant, making him belong to the church, not to his infidel parents.

Promoting such a man was a touchy matter for Pope John Paul -- but he helped ease Pius into the ranks of the blessed by simultaneously beatifying the popular Pope John XXIII. Though liberals of all sorts disliked Pius IX, only hardened Curial types and sedevacantists -- "throne-empty" believers, who hold that John XXIII was not a legitimate pope -- hated John for changing the church with the Second Vatican Council. Otherwise, "good Pope John" was loved by most Catholics and many non-Catholics -- Lyndon Johnson gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The mutterings over Pius were practically drowned out by the cheers for John.

"Now," says Garry, "Pope Francis has come up with another ablutionary pairing."

He is canonizing John Paul II in record time (Benedict XVI had already waived the normal five-years-after-death period to allow the beatifying process to begin.) Though John Paul II is not as hotly resented by liberals as Pius IX, he is still subject to deep criticism. He presided over the church during its worldwide pedophile scandal, and he gave the handling of that problem to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Congregation on the Doctrine of the Faith -- the very man who, succeeding him, would waive the time-lapse needed to begin his predecessor's canonization. (Who can think that a saint in heaven ever protected a predatory priest?) John Paul had treated as "irreversible" his stands on matters such as homosexuality, married priests, and women priests. He is a symbol, for some people, of things that need remedy in the church.

But -- not to worry -- the "good Pope John" is again being pressed into service. He was beatified to take the sting out of Pius IX's promotion. He is now being canonized to make a joint heavenly pair with John Paul II. To rush John XXIII forward, Pope Francis is even waiving the normal requirement of a second miracle for canonization. John XXIII is the feel-good pope in a time of turmoil, even though he is being used to sanction the turmoil caused by John Paul II.

The Vatican no doubt feels that combining a liberal hero with a conservative hero shows how big a tent its sacred baldacchino is; the holy institution transcends earthly politics.

Garry points out that John Paul II "canonized and beatified people by the hundreds (far more than any other pope)."

Each stamp of entry into heaven above authenticates the pope's power of the stamp here below. And each time a pope canonizes a pope he is completing a circuit of reciprocal authentications. Is it surprising that so many popes have been canonized?

This whole sanctification ritual, Garry notes, isn't built into the faith.

This is not like the early church's prayers with and for and to the dead -- voiced long before there was a pope to certify what prayer was or was not allowed. The idea that all believers, alive and dead, are members of the mystical body of Christ was given expression around the burial place of martyrs. Chesterton called tradition "a democracy of the dead" -- by which ancestors still vote with us. That was the Christian community's sense of a continuing oneness in all its members. Instead of that, we now have a cumbrous, officially monitored, and extremely expensive way of getting a person declared a saint who can be prayed to at Mass.

And the nasty secret about the canonization process is that it's good for business.

Religious orders, like popes, have a pecuniary advantage in getting their founders made saints -- as Opus Dei's founder, Josemaria Escriva, was canonized by John Paul II. A religious order can mobilize great resources -- for canvassing, certifying, lobbying in Rome -- from its houses, members, and benefactors. The expense of time, energy, and cash is well worth it if the founder is canonized. The founder-saint's feast day, sites or shrines, and relics -- all of these promote the order, its works, its recruiting of new members, and further fund-raising.

There is a kind of sad humor in the effort some good-hearted people are making to promote the canonization of the social activist, pacifist, and founder of The Catholic Worker Dorothy Day, using methods of subsidized glorification that mock her own values and concerns. In the same way, it is a bit sad to see Pope Francis, who has been doing wonderful things in his short time at the Vatican, play the old game of self-certification at the top of a saint-making factory. Many hope he will make needed changes in the church. But in promoting John Paul II he is exalting a man who fought every one of those changes.

#

For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

"I thank God there is no God to see what we've done to the world" ("part-time pessimist" Charles Simic)

"Recently a reviewer complained that my new book of poems is much too preoccupied with death. He appeared to suggest that I ought to be more upbeat, dispensing serene wisdom in the autumn of my life, instead of reminding readers every chance I get of their mortality. Just you wait, I said to myself, till you reach my age and start going to funerals of your friends. Nobody warns us about that when we are young, and even if they ever did, it goes in one ear and out the other."

-- poet and essayist Charles Simic, in a
NYRB blogpost, "Looking It in the Face"

by Ken

I'm not much of a poetry guy, so I'm not up much on Charles Simic's poetry. But over the years he has become a cherished companion thanks to his cultural and historical ruminations in the New York Review of Books.

"Of course, I never really believed it would happen," Simic begins this lovely new piece. "Grow old, I mean."

I knew it was coming, saw the evidence of it in my friends and relatives, but despite that, I acted as if aging had nothing to do with me. Even having people congratulate me on my seventy-fifth birthday doesn't sound right to me. Either they or I must have screwed up the count somewhere along the way. Knowing the truth, of course, is better than fooling oneself, but who wants to look truth in the face every morning?

Over the years, I've watched a few people on their deathbeds and they were not entirely convinced either about what was coming. They held on to a small hope that they would turn out to be exceptions to the rule. "You'll get caught," I remember telling a couple of chums in my youth who were planning to break into a garage in the neighborhood that night and carry off some tools. How they cackled! How they made fun of me! Dummies get nabbed, but not smart guys like them, they assured me; and promptly found themselves in jail the next day.

I know a lot of people who are likely to be delighted by Simic's own fudging of the reality of growing old.

On certain days I feel like a car with too many miles on its speedometer. There's a knock in the engine, the radiator overheats, the oil leaks, the body is rusty, the upholstery is ripped and stained, one windshield wiper doesn't work, and the muffler is full of holes. "Don't worry about it," my Doc says. He insists that I'm in terrific shape despite high blood pressure, old-age diabetes, and growing deafness in both ears. He sounds like a used car salesman to me, trying to get rid of a car that's ready for the junk yard, but I lap up his words all the same, and speed away after the checkup singing at the top of my voice and trailing a cloud of black smoke from the exhaust.

At four o'clock in the morning, after a night of tossing and turning, I'm not so cocky. I go and squint at my face in the bathroom mirror and don't like what I see. Even Peter Lorre playing a child murderer in that 1931 German movie was more wholesome to behold.

Of course the people I know who are apt to be delighted by this are my age or older. Simic understands that none of this will have much interest or even meaning for people who haven't arrived at this age of discovery.

"You'll see when you grow old," someone was always telling us when we were young. In the days before cash machines, when we had to run to our grandmothers for emergency funds, they made us sit and listen to a lecture first. They told us how the world had changed for the worst, how when they were young, boys called their fathers Sir, and girls from good homes had the modesty to blush when spoken to by boys. I would sit at the edge of my chair, nodding in agreement, waiting for grandma to click open her purse and hand over the money.

Even then, I vaguely understood that grumbling about the young was one of the few satisfactions people have left in old age. I didn't mind hearing about the calamities that befell members of our family who failed to listen to the sensible advice I was getting -- and I would get all that I could put up with, until she started sighing and telling me how I'll come to understand everything she was saying now when I reached her age. I couldn't wait to get out of there. Poor grandma, what a drag she was, though I have to admit today that she was right. With age, I do see things differently than I once did.

"I've grown progressively more exasperated about our species and foresee a day when I will no longer be able to bring myself to read newspapers and watch television out of concern for my mental health. Already I have to ration myself. I give Tom Friedman sixty seconds; George Will thirty." But Simic sets himself apart from his father, a confirmed pessimist who came to delight in reading gloomy philosophers who "confirmed his long-held suspicion: the world was going to hell." No, Charles sees himself as only "a part-time pessimist" -- "I wake up most mornings full of hope."

Not, apparently the morning several days before his 50th birthday when he woke up and "grasped the enormity" of that span.

When I was already old enough to pull the tail of our cat in Belgrade, German tanks were rolling into Paris. It wasn't the gray hairs on my head that got me, but the deluge of memories. I remembered sitting in the first grade classroom in the fall of 1945 staring at the pictures of Marx, Stalin, and Marshal Tito that hung over the blackboard. I recalled the long forgotten brands of Balkan cigarettes; Russian, French, and American pop tunes from the war years, and the 1930s movies, of which few people alive today have any notion, that were still being shown in my childhood. So many memories came back to me at once; all of a sudden my life seemed to be that of a complete stranger. It took months to get used to it -- if one can ever get used to knowing that the world and people one once knew have vanished without a trace.

Simic, as you may have gathered, is Serb-born, but he has written a great deal about the degree of discomfort he feels about that identity. He also knows that "other people are not much interested in an individual's lifetime experience and what has been learned from it."

And who can blame them? Even for the old, experience only serves to torment the mind on sleepless nights.

Which leads him to this luscious set piece:

Sooner or later, everyone with a long memory comes up against his or her own Grand Inquisitor. (A black robe and hood, incidentally, is no longer mandatory.) Tonight, mine wears sunglasses and is painting her nails red as she asks her questions:

You once said that Hitler and Stalin were your travel agents. Does that mean that you have to thank them both for what you have become?

I've been racking my brains about that this very night, Miss.

And what about God?

I thank God there is no God to see what we've done to the world.

What about the devil?

I saw him yesterday on TV kissing babies and grinning ear to ear.

You are not making any sense, Mister, she says to me. How is it possible to believe in the Devil and not in God and then go around crossing yourself from time to time?

I agree with you Miss, I tell her. Making the sign of the cross must be an inherited habit with me, since I come from a long line of village priests.

Once she stops pestering me, I steal a peek at the clock and can't believe my eyes. They say that time goes faster after you pass sixty. No question about it, it's true. Where are the long, lazy summers of my youth when I sat moping from morning till night unable to think of anything interesting to do? I recollect walking up to a mirror and repeating with greater and greater conviction, "Life is boring." On such days, the old clock barely budged, just to spite me.

You fool, I'm thinking today, that was pure bliss. The mystery of happiness was right there in that cheap clock your mother bought at Woolworth. Time graciously came to a stop in it; eternity threw open its doors and you hesitated or grew wary on its threshold and breathed a sigh of relief when the door shut in your face and the hand of the clock moved on.

#

"Let us celebrate the falling bodies . . . as a demonstration of our fealty, our bondage, to the great god Gun" (Garry Wills)

"I have often thought that we should raise a statue of [Charlton] Heston at each of the many sites of multiple murders around our land. We would soon have armies of statues, whole droves of Heston acolytes standing sentry at the shrines of Moloch dotting the landscape."


"That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him."

-- Garry Wills, in a NYRB blogpost, "Our Moloch"

‪Moloch‬

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [links and footnotes onsite]

Moloch (representing Semitic מלך m-l-, a Semitic root meaning "king") -- also rendered as Molech, Molekh, Molok, Molek, Molock, Moloc, Melech, Milcom or Molcom -- is the name of an ancient Ammonite god. Moloch worship was practiced by the Canaanites, Phoenician and related cultures in North Africa and the Levant.

As a god worshipped by the Phoenicians and Canaanites, Moloch had associations with a particular kind of propitiatory child sacrifice by parents. Moloch figures in the Book of Deuteronomy and in the Book of Leviticus as a form of idolatry (Leviticus 18:21: "And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Moloch"). In the Hebrew Bible, Gehenna was a valley by Jerusalem, where apostate Israelites and followers of various Baalim and Caananite gods, including Moloch, sacrificed their children by fire (2 Chr. 28:3, 33:6; Jer. 7:31, 19:2–6).

Moloch has been used figuratively in English literature from John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) to Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1955), to refer to a person or thing demanding or requiring a very costly sacrifice.

by Ken

I had a feeling Garry Wills might be weighing in. Did he ever!

As I've noted previously, I have a hard time imagining a more futile or counterproductive exercise than trying to abridge or paraphrase Garry W, and so I'm not going to try. I'm also not going to "highlight" the text itself. However, there are some phrases that ring out so powerfully, I can't help calling attention to them -- noting that you'll find them all in proper context just below.

* "We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily -- sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children's lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector."

* "The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. . . . [To its acolytes] its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. . . . The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere . . . . Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence." (Garry Wills)

* "We are required to deny that there is any connection between the fact that we have the greatest number of guns in private hands and the greatest number of deaths from them. Denial on this scale always comes from or is protected by religious fundamentalism. Thus do we deny global warming, or evolution, or biblical errancy. Reason is helpless before such abject faith."

* "[The gun] has the power to turn all our politicians as a class into invertebrate and mute attendants at the shrine. . . . Better that the children die or their lives be blasted than that a politician should risk an election against the dread sentence of NRA excommunication."

* "Even the Supreme Court has been cowed, reversing its own long history of recognizing that the Second Amendment applied to militias. Now the court feels bound to guarantee that any every madman can indulge his 'religion' of slaughter. Moloch brooks no dissent, even from the highest court in the land."

* "Molochism is the one religion that can never be separated from the state. The state itself bows down to Moloch, and protects the sacrifices made to him. So let us celebrate the falling bodies and rising statues as a demonstration of our fealty, our bondage, to the great god Gun."

You'll also find links in the Web-posted version.

Our Moloch

Garry Wills
December 15, 2012, 5:25 p.m.

Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture. Ancient Romans justified the destruction of Carthage by noting that children were sacrificed to Moloch there. Milton represented Moloch as the first pagan god who joined Satan's war on humankind:

First Moloch, horrid king, besmear'd with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents' tears,
Though for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud
Their children's cries unheard, that pass'd through fire
To his grim idol. (Paradise Lost 1.392-96)

Read again those lines, with recent images seared into our brains -- "besmeared with blood" and "parents' tears." They give the real meaning of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning. That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily -- sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children's lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).

The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?

Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god's bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.

Adoration of Moloch permeates the country, imposing a hushed silence as he works his will. One cannot question his rites, even as the blood is gushing through the idol's teeth. The White House spokesman invokes the silence of traditional in religious ceremony. "It is not the time" to question Moloch. No time is right for showing disrespect for Moloch.

The fact that the gun is a reverenced god can be seen in its manifold and apparently resistless powers. How do we worship it? Let us count the ways:

1. It has the power to destroy the reasoning process. It forbids making logical connections. We are required to deny that there is any connection between the fact that we have the greatest number of guns in private hands and the greatest number of deaths from them. Denial on this scale always comes from or is protected by religious fundamentalism. Thus do we deny global warming, or evolution, or biblical errancy. Reason is helpless before such abject faith.

2. It has the power to turn all our politicians as a class into invertebrate and mute attendants at the shrine. None dare suggest that Moloch can in any way be reined in without being denounced by the pope of this religion, National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre, as trying to destroy Moloch, to take away all guns. They whimper and say they never entertained such heresy. Many flourish their guns while campaigning, or boast that they have themselves hunted "vermin." Better that the children die or their lives be blasted than that a politician should risk an election against the dread sentence of NRA excommunication.

3. It has the power to distort our constitutional thinking. It says that the right to "bear arms," a military term, gives anyone, anywhere in our country, the power to mow down civilians with military weapons. Even the Supreme Court has been cowed, reversing its own long history of recognizing that the Second Amendment applied to militias. Now the court feels bound to guarantee that any every madman can indulge his "religion" of slaughter. Moloch brooks no dissent, even from the highest court in the land.

Though LaPierre is the pope of this religion, its most successful Peter the Hermit, preaching the crusade for Moloch, was Charlton Heston, a symbol of the Americanism of loving guns. I have often thought that we should raise a statue of Heston at each of the many sites of multiple murders around our land. We would soon have armies of statues, whole droves of Heston acolytes standing sentry at the shrines of Moloch dotting the landscape. Molochism is the one religion that can never be separated from the state. The state itself bows down to Moloch, and protects the sacrifices made to him. So let us celebrate the falling bodies and rising statues as a demonstration of our fealty, our bondage, to the great god Gun.

#

Step right up and vote for that "transparent faker" Willard Inc. and the unknowable contents of his campaign Mystery Box

Uh-uh, no peeking! You're not supposed to know what your next president is hiding in his Mystery Box. That's the whole idea. The thing is, you don't need to know.


"Everyone could see [Romney] was a faker and could accept that because he was such a transparent faker. It's the polished faker who scares politicians, master fakers like Bill Clinton and Lyndon Johnson."

-- Russell Baker, in his contribution to NYRB's
election symposium in the November 8 issue

"Here is the Romney strategy: since you don't like what you've got, vote for what you haven't got. Whatever it is you haven't got, it is better than what you've got. . . . [T]he Romney campaign is taking what-you-haven't-got-ism to new heights of what-you-mustn't-know-ism. It supposes that revealing any details of what you haven't got will just distract from the fact that you haven't got it. . . . So we are supposed to vote for a big Mystery Box full of things we haven't got."

-- Garry Wills, in his contribution

by Ken

I've been trying to figure out how to clue you in to the New York Review of Books's election symposium in the generally remarkable November 8 issue. The individual pieces, by 13 contributors including a number of the magazine's most prized regulars, don't even have titles. They're just interspersed through the issue in four groups, which you will now be able to access directly online via this little guide (with apologies for the woefully inadequate summaries):

I.

Michael Tomasky on the mangled politics of the coming four years ("If Obama wins, we will see a battle within the Republican Party the likes of which we’ve not witnessed in modern history. . . . And if Romney wins, which Romney will govern?").
Elizabeth Drew on the prospects for a second Obama term ("[Q]uite remarkably, Obama lost the definition of the health care bill he was battling to get through Congress. . . . A second term will show us how much he learned from his first one").
Cass R. Sunstein, former White House regulation overseer, on the thousands of rules and regulations issued by the Obama administration and their fate at the hands of the future federal judiciary ("Of course it is true that the 2012 presidential election will help to establish the meaning of the Constitution. Perhaps equally important, it will help to establish the fate of numerous rules designed to protect public safety, health, and the environment").

II.

Frank Rich on the descent to 2016 ("As a retail campaigner, Romney’s human skills fall somewhere between those of Richard Nixon and Hal the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey").
David Cole on national security and human rights ("Of course, President Obama has not exactly been a beacon of light on such critical rule-of-law issues as transparency and accountability . . . Still, as the latest 'torture memo' illustrates, President Romney would be far worse").
Ronald Dworkin on the stakes for constitutional law ("The record of the Roberts Court is already one of the worst in our history. . . . Perhaps it is impossible to make independent voters alert to these dangers. If so, that is a shame").
Russell Baker on the candidate the Republicans hate but were stuck with ("The nine [presidential wannabes] who took the stage for the Republicans' first televised debate reminded all America that ours is not a great age for producing statesmen"), for which they hated him even more ("Many obviously hated him for being inescapable, but what could be done?").

III.

Darryl Pinckney on Willard and the politics of ethnic division ("Romney's kind control the country's wealth, but they cannot get back in charge, psychologically, and this induces a kind of mania in people like John Boehner and the Koch brothers . . . . Such white folk cannot forgive Obama for winning in the first place").
David Bromwich, the Yale English professor, on invisible campaign issues ("Obama clearly believes that political democracy cannot survive in the face of extreme and widening economic inequality. Unless he finds a way of saying so without embarrassment, his largest differences with Romney will seem to the uninformed a matter of recondite details").
Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton on the likelihood of wrongly learned lessons from Obama's first term ("Administrations are often credited with initiatives that were really undertaken by their predecessors. . . . The problem is that if the wrong person gets the credit, we learn the wrong lesson").

IV.

Steven Weinberg, the Nobel physicist, on the disappointments of the Obama first term ("If I lived in a swing state like Ohio or Florida, I would doubtless swallow my disappointment and vote for Obama. In any case, I would not allow disappointment with Obama to keep me from voting for truly liberal candidates for Congress, such as Elizabeth Warren").
Garry Wills on the "Mystery Box" Willard has chosen to ask voters to vote for ("The strategy of no full disclosure at the top of the campaign silently meshes with the party of no full confession below. Under all the other hidden things, the Mystery Box is hiding a lethal level of radioactive racism").
Jeffrey Sachs on the insanity, built into our political system, of operating the U.S. government, "the world’s largest enterprise, with $3.7 trillion in outlays, $2.5 trillion in revenues, and 2.1 million civilian workers," and "also the most complex, operating in every sector of the world’s largest economy, in every country of the world, and in every possible setting: markets, technology development, social programs, basic science, and much, much more" without any kind of planning beyond our day-to-day seat-of-the-pants partisan brinksmanship.


JEFFREY SACHS'S PIECE MAY BE THE MOST IMPORTANT,
BUT REGULAR READERS WON'T BE SURPRISED . . .

. . . that it's Garry Wills's I want to spotlight now. (However, I reserve the right to return to Sachs's, or to any of the others, for that matter.)

At the top of this post I've already introduced Garry W's idea of the "big Mystery Box full of things we haven't got" which is the core of what Willard Inc. is asking voters to vote for. Let's have him explain a bit.

Ann Romney, asked about abortion, said she could not address that since it would just be a distraction from the promised great economy (what we haven't got). Asked about her husband's tax returns, she said two years are all we are going to get (leaving all other years among the things we haven't got). Romney himself, asked what loopholes he would eliminate to fund his great new plans, said telling us that would cheat Congress of the wonderful surprise of working with him on the problem.

His views on voter-identification drives to reduce the electorate? A distraction. On requiring ultrasound exams for pregnant women seeking abortions; on "legitimate rape"? Just distractions, all of them. So, for that matter, is whatever he did at Bain Capital, or as governor of Massachusetts. The main thing we are supposed to advert to or be reminded of in his past is that he "saved the Olympics."

Even Romney's strong first debate was simply a harder emphasis on what you've got (falsely, a doubling of the deficit) and what-you-mustn't-know-ism (what deductions will be eliminated and how this will reduce the deficit) -- which Romney got away with because the president inexplicably let him limit the discussion to those terms. All the things Romney treated as "distractions" -- women's rights, gay rights, citizenship for undocumented immigrants, the 47 percent of moochers -- Obama treated as if they were indeed distractions. But they are not, and that should become clear by the election.

Even the selection of right-wing love god Paul Ryan was configured into the Mystery Box format.

[T]here was an expectation that Ryan would pop out like a jack-in-the-box, filling the air with numbers like confetti. He was the party's great thinker; he would make the campaign serious and nerdy; he would blind with pure intellect his Elmer Fudd vice-presidential rival. He would turn his Ayn Rand death ray on him and Biden would evaporate. But as soon as Ryan was asked for his great specific plans, he was told that he could not violate his master's secrecy campaign, and Jack was stuffed back into the box.

Garry points out, "We have seen this kind of mystery election before."

In the elections of 2010, we were told that the Tea Party candidates arriving on the scene would eliminate the deficit and shrink the government, somehow. Other issues were set aside. Abortion, gay rights, religion in politics -- those were all part of the old religious right, now supplanted by the deficit purists. But in a great bait and switch, the first thing the new people in Congress, the state houses, and state legislatures did was introduce a flood of bills to limit, stigmatize, or eliminate abortions, and the flood has not abated -- 944 provisions on abortion or contraception were still being introduced into state legislatures during the first three months of 2012.

"The mass of voters," Garry points out, "did not choose that."

There was no way it could. No one knew what was in the 2010 version of the Mystery Box. In the same way, if we vote for "the economy only" Republicans, the old causes will again race to the top of their agenda -- challenges to women's rights, gay rights, global warming, religious education, and Supreme Court nominees. All of a sudden, other things will not be distractions from the bad economy.

When Willard does get specific, Garry says, it's "a specificity about the non-existent.

He will not apologize for America -- as if that were occurring. He will not cut work requirements from welfare -- and neither has anyone else. He will not take God's name off our coins -- lifting a burden of fear from the beleaguered "Keep God on Our Coins" movement.

"On the other hand, he was very specific about one thing": Anyone who wanted to be his vice presidential running mate would have to produce ten years' worth of tax records.

Romney was too smart to let anyone standing for that office tell him it was none of his business. No one could use mysteries on the Mystery Box candidate. But we are not supposed to be as smart as Romney when it comes to taking risks about important offices. What was required to become a candidate for the vice-presidency is off limits for becoming the president. That is still in the Mystery Box, and it has to stay there.

As with the Teabaggers in 2010, 2012 Willard conceals what's in his Mystery Box by waging "a revulsion campaign . . . rid[ing] the diffuse and partly disguised distrust of Obama."

Romney could explicitly voice only one aspect of this revulsion, Obama's economic performance. But under the vague general feelings about Obama -- reports to pollsters that he is not quite one of us, perhaps not a citizen, not a Christian -- there were radioactive centers too hot for a candidate to handle directly. He could, nonetheless, profit from their broader toxic waves, an unconfessed (sometimes, perhaps, unconscious) force. It was rightly said that a historic boundary had been crossed when a black man was elected president. That breakthrough partly escaped but did not cancel a long sad record of historic American racism. A proof that many were not willing to live with this new level of tolerance is that twice as many conservative Republicans (34 percent) now say that Obama is Muslim as the number who said it when he was elected (16 percent). The number of Republicans in general who say it is 30 percent.

That is not because more evidence has emerged in the last three years, or because the evidence has been more carefully considered. It is because a number of people are digging in their heels even more firmly against where the nation is going. As I say, there is no open racism in the Romney campaign. But it has to be fiercely concentrated on other things (like the economy) to turn its eyes from what sizzles below the surface, and sometimes not very far below.

Dinesh D'Souza's book Obama's America became number one on the New York Times best-seller list, and the film based on it has played in over a thousand theaters, yet its chapter on Obama's mother revives one of the oldest racist stereotypes, that a white woman must be a slut if she has sex with a black man. A "documentary" with that same theme has been mailed to thousands of voters in key states, screened by Tea Party groups and by Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum Council. Guess which man the audience for these, and for hundreds of obscurer tracts, will vote for?

Romney, of course, does not cultivate these voters. He does not have to. He does not denounce them, either. He needs them. He cannot disown a third of his party -- and those are only the hard-core Obama revulsionists. Who knows how far the penumbra of softcore revulsionism has spread among the less candid or more cautious harborers of it? The strategy of no full disclosure at the top of the campaign silently meshes with the party of no full confession below. Under all the other hidden things, the Mystery Box is hiding a lethal level of radioactive racism.

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The Willard Watch: Garry Wills wonders, "Why is this man laughing?"

"He opens his mouth wide, emits a very loud sound, and gesticulates: that is to say, he is laughing. But he's not laughing like the rest of them: his laughter feels like a copy among originals." (Milan Kundera, not about the Incorporated Willard but about a man he had seen many years before in a crowd, laughing uncomprehendingly and uncomfortably)

"If I have never forgotten this tiny episode it is because it was a brand-new experience for me: I was seeing a person laugh who had no sense of the comical and was laughing only to keep from standing out from the crowd, like a spy who puts on the uniform of a foreign army to avoid recognition."

-- Milan Kundera, quoted by Garry Wills
in a NYRB blogpost, "Why Is This Man Laughing?"

by Ken

Certain behaviors seem always to have come naturally to our Willard, like his now-celebrated prep-school merry prank when, taking on the role of lead jackal in a band of overprivileged sociopaths, he joyfully assaulted and gleefully lopped off the long locks of a fellow student he had decided was gay. Many everyday behaviors, however, seem beyond his capacity even to simulate -- and in many cases it's not for want of trying.

Which brings us to what Garry Wills in this recent New York Review of Books blogpost calls "the non-laugh laugh of Mitt Romney." Garry describes it as "a kind of half-stifled barking," and wonders, "What does it mean?"

It is blurted out as abruptly as it is broken off. Is it a kind of punctuation, part comma, part full stop, part interrogatory mark? What, if anything, is it trying to convey? Why does it seem more like coughing or burping than laughter?

Does it mean: "I know you are saying something critical about me, and I don't know how to answer it, so I'll just pretend that you did not mean it seriously"?

Or: "I want to show I am just a regular fellow, so I'll try out my regular-fellow laugh"?

Or: "I hope you will take what I just said as something humorous, though I doubt it, but I'll see if I can start a laughing chain reaction"?

Or: "I want to change the subject, but there is no natural way to do that, so I'll just throw in this comic rictus as a non-sequitur"?

Or: "The Cheshire Cat could evanesce by leaving just a smile behind, so maybe I can avoid attention by disappearing away from my laugh"?

It's at this point that Garry offers us Milan Kundera's indelible description of an instance of senseless laughing he encountered, as recounted in his essay "The Comical Absence of the Comical (Dostoyevsky: The Idiot" (included in the essay collection Encounter). We've already read a couple of crucial chunks, but here's a fuller version of the Wills citation:

[Kundera] finds examples of humorless humor in the defensive-aggressive response of Prince Mishkin to other people's senseless laughter.

Or he sees it as Mishkin's ill-focused expression of defiance. Or he sees it in a woman's derisive response to Mishkin's inconsequence.

But then Kundera describes an experience of his own. He saw a man standing uncomfortably in a crowd, not knowing what to do, and therefore he laughs when others do, not knowing why they do it but hoping this will make him fit in:

He opens his mouth wide, emits a very loud sound, and gesticulates: that is to say, he is laughing. But he's not laughing like the rest of them: his laughter feels like a copy among originals. If I have never forgotten this tiny episode it is because it was a brand-new experience for me: I was seeing a person laugh who had no sense of the comical and was laughing only to keep from standing out from the crowd, like a spy who puts on the uniform of a foreign army to avoid recognition.

Garry wonders if this isn't "the best description of Romney's idiosyncratic barking."

Does he "emit a very loud sound" to put on the uniform of ordinary citizenness that is foreign to him, hoping "to avoid recognition"? If so, he is no more successful than was the laughing man Kundera observed. If anything, such random outbursts just make everyone else feel uneasy. Rather than fitting in, he drives off.

Just as there are people who dismiss the significance of Willard's prep-school bullying, despite the clear indication that it ideally prefigures the "elite attack-pack" mentality that seems to underlie his entire adult career, there will no doubt be people who write this matter of Willard's non-laughter off as irrelevant, like NYRB commenter hedgehog6, who wrote:

The issue of his laugh is a side-show, fair game for pundits and comedians. Does it tell us much else? Is he nervous; is public psychoanalysis of the trait that helpful? I doubt it. It is, perhaps, even a relief that this candidate cannot be as carefully physically choreographed as some others. What is far more disturbing is his persistent inability to connect with average workers, his inability to articulate an understanding of people outside his own narrow world.

The thing is, hedgehog6: Aren't Willard's creepy impersonations of laughter all about "his persistent inability to connect with average workers" and "his inability to articulate an understanding of people outside his own narrow world."

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Paul Krugman on "the depression we're in": "We could end it both more easily and more quickly than anyone imagines"

NYRB caption: "An unemployed man selling
apples during the Great Depression, circa 1930s"

"The depression we're in is essentially gratuitous: we don't need to be suffering so much pain and destroying so many lives. We could end it both more easily and more quickly than anyone imagines -- anyone, that is, except those who have actually studied the economics of depressed economies and the historical evidence on how policies work in such economies. . . .

"With a boost in spending, we could be back to more or less full employment faster than anyone imagines. . . .

"[T]he experience of Obama's first term suggests that not talking about jobs simply because you don’t think you can pass job-creation legislation doesn't work even as a political strategy. . . ."

-- Paul Krugman, in "How to End This Depression,"
in the May 24 New York Review of Books

by Ken

First, notice that Paul K carefully uses the word "depression." Indeed, later in the piece he carefully distinguishes between this depression and the recession that has gone with it: "It has been more than four years since the US economy first entered recession -- and although the recession may have ended, the depression has not."

The crux of the argument won't be surprising to anyone who has been following PK's writings:

The truth is that recovery would be almost ridiculously easy to achieve: all we need is to reverse the austerity policies of the past couple of years and temporarily boost spending. Never mind all the talk of how we have a long-run problem that can't have a short-run solution -- this may sound sophisticated, but it isn't. With a boost in spending, we could be back to more or less full employment faster than anyone imagines.

But don't we have to worry about long-run budget deficits? Keynes wrote that "the boom, not the slump, is the time for austerity." Now, as I argue in my forthcoming book [End This Depression Now; Norton, 2012] -- and show later in the data discussed in this article -- is the time for the government to spend more until the private sector is ready to carry the economy forward again. At that point, the US would be in a far better position to deal with deficits, entitlements, and the costs of financing them.

Meanwhile, the strong measures that would all go a long way toward lifting us out of this depression should include, among other policies, increased federal aid to state and local governments, which would restore the jobs of many public employees; a more aggressive approach by the Federal Reserve to quantitative easing (that is, purchasing bonds in an attempt to reduce long-term interest rates); and less timid efforts by the Obama administration to reduce homeowner debt.

Even in the quick-take, studiously nontechnical version of his case that Paul offers in this NYRB piece, he has a good deal more to say about two broad subjects:

* the evidence for his insistence "that more government spending would actually promote growth and employment," even though "many politicians fiercely reject that idea, insisting that the government can’t create jobs," and "some economists are willing to say the same thing."

* a counter to the argument that what he's proposing is politically undoable. He has different answers for the three different 2012 election scenarios: Obama reelection with Democrats holding onto the Senate and retaking the House; a Romney victory; and Obama reelection with Republicans controlling one or both house of Congress.

My favorite line concerns the Romney-victory scenario:

if Romney adhered to Republican orthodoxy, he would of course reject any government action along the lines I’ve advocated. It's not clear, however, whether Romney believes any of the things he is currently saying. His two chief economic advisers, Harvard's N. Gregory Mankiw and Columbia's Glenn Hubbard, are committed Republicans but also quite Keynesian in their views about macroeconomics. Indeed, early in the crisis Mankiw argued for a sharp rise in the Fed's target for inflation, a proposal that was and is anathema to most of his party. His proposal caused the predictable uproar, and he went silent on the issue. But we can at least hope that Romney's inner circle holds views that are much more realistic than anything the candidate says in his speeches, and that once in office he would rip off his mask, revealing his true pragmatic, Keynesian nature.

Of course, a great nation should not have to depend on the hope that a politician is in fact a complete fraud who doesn’t believe any of the things he claims to believe. . . .

My favorite political argument in the piece, one I think will resonate with all DWT readers:

[W]hat about the fairly likely case in which Obama is returned to office but a Democratic Congress is not? What should Obama do, and what are the prospects for action? My answer is that the president, other Democrats, and every Keynesian-minded economist with a public profile should make the case for job creation forcefully and often, and keep pressure on those in Congress who are blocking job-creation efforts.

This is not the way the Obama administration operated for its first two and a half years. We now have a number of reports on the internal decision-making processes of the administration from 2009 to 2011, and they all suggest that the president's political advisers urged him never to ask for things he might not get, on the grounds that it might make him look weak. Moreover, economic advisers like Christina Romer who urged more spending on job creation were overruled on the grounds that the public didn’t believe in such measures and was worried about the deficit.

The result of this caution was, however, that as even the president bought into deficit obsession and calls for austerity, the whole national discourse shifted away from job creation. Meanwhile, the economy remained weak -- and the public had no reason not to blame the president, since he wasn’t staking out a position clearly different from that of the GOP.

In September 2011 the White House finally changed tack, offering a job-creation proposal that fell far short of what was needed, but was nonetheless much bigger than expected. There was no chance that the plan would actually pass the Republican-led House of Representatives, and Noam Scheiber of The New Republic tells us that White House political operatives "began to worry that the size of the package would be a liability and urged the wonks to scale it back." This time, however, Obama sided with the economists -- and in the process proved that the political operatives didn’t know their own business. Public reaction was generally favorable, while Republicans were put on the spot for their obstruction.

And early this year, with the debate having shifted perceptibly toward a renewed focus on jobs, Republicans were on the defensive. As a result, the Obama administration was able to get a significant fraction of what it wanted -- an extension of the payroll tax credit, not an ideal stimulus but nonetheless a measure that puts cash in workers' pockets, and maintenance for a shorter period of extended unemployment benefits -- without making any major concessions.

In short, the experience of Obama's first term suggests that not talking about jobs simply because you don’t think you can pass job-creation legislation doesn't work even as a political strategy. On the other hand, hammering on the need for job creation can be good politics, and it can put enough pressure on the other side to bring about better policy too.

I should note that PK makes his case in the opposite order: the politics first, and then the economics. So that in his conclusion he's referring specifically to the shorthand case he has just made for the known soundness of increased spending to right the economy.

There’s much, much more evidence, but I hope this brief overview gives a sense of what we know and how we know it. I hope in particular that when you read me or Joseph Stiglitz or Christina Romer saying that cutting spending in the face of this depression will make it worse, and that temporary increases in spending could help us recover, you won't think, "Well, that's just his/her opinion." As Romer asserted in a recent speech about research into fiscal policy:

The evidence is stronger than it has ever been that fiscal policy matters -- that fiscal stimulus helps the economy add jobs, and that reducing the budget deficit lowers growth at least in the near term. And yet, this evidence does not seem to be getting through to the legislative process.

That's what we need to change.

#

I don't have many heroes, but Richard Feynman is one of them, even though I understand hardly anything about his work in physics

"Feynman’s dramatic exposure of NASA incompetence and his O-ring demonstrations made him a hero to the general public. . . . Afterward, he was admired by a much wider public, as a crusader for honesty and plain speaking in government. Anyone fighting secrecy and corruption in any part of the government could look to Feynman as a leader."

"Feynman was radical in his disrespect for authority, but conservative in his science. . . . He tried to find new laws of nature, but the result of his efforts was in the end to consolidate the existing laws in a new structure. He hoped to find discrepancies that would prove the old theories wrong, but nature stubbornly persisted in proving them right. However disrespectful he might be to famous old scientists, he was never disrespectful to nature."

-- from Freeman Dyson's "The 'Dramatic Picture' of Richard
Feynman," in the July 14 New York Review of Books

by Ken

I don't have a lot of heroes, but the late Richard Feynman (1918-1988) is one of them. I'm pretty

In May 2010, I wrote a post called "Déjà vu all over again: Who could have foreseen the Deepwater Horizon disaster?," in response to "disclosures" about the oil-spill catastrophe which had "revealed" -- surprise! surprise! -- that not only was the disaster not "unforeseeable," it had in fact been foreseen by competent technical people familiar with the off-shore drilling technology in use.

This reminded me all too forcefully of the lesson I had learned from the investigation into the explosion on lift-off of the space shuttle Challenger: that these shocking, seemingly out-of-nowhere "accidents" rarely come out of nowhere, but in fact are foreseen by competent technical people whose foresight was not only ignored but usually actively and forcefully suppressed.

In the wake of a disaster as public as the Challenger one, naturally a commission of inquiry was appointed, headed by safe and smooth old establishment pol William Rogers. To anyone in the know, it was clear that the principal function of the Rogers Commission was to not rock the boat: to find conclusions that would sort of explain what happened, but in a way that provided a clean bill of health for the status quo and everyone who mattered inside it. (In such cases it's permissible, if necessary, to designate a scapegoat, but you can be pretty sure it's not going to be somebody important, not somebody "who matters" to the powers-that-be.)

We'll never know what the Rogers Commission would have "found" if Richard Feynman had followed his inclination to decline an invitation to serve on it. As I wrote back in May 2010:

Apparently Feynman was by nature, as you would expect any great scientist to be, a questioner and doubter, possibly to the point of being a positive pain in the posterior. . . .

My recollection is that it was an ex-wife of Feynman's who recalled how dubious the scientist had been about accepting appointment to the commission. He felt it would just be a dozen people being herded from official briefing to official briefing swallowing officially sanctioned talking points for the purpose of arriving at an officially sanctioned conclusion. The ex-wife, as I recall, pointed out to him that that's what the commission would be without him, whereas with him it would be 11 people shuttling from official briefing to official briefing plus him prowling around asking unofficially sanctioned sources inconvenient, likely embarrassing or even incriminating questions.

One thing I didn't now till now is that an important part of Feynman's disinclination to get roped into what he suspected was meant to be a whitewash was that he was dying -- fighting a grueling, draining battle against cancer. Freeman Dyson tells the story in a New York Review of Books review of two new books on his onetime mentor and then colleague, "The 'Dramatic Picture' of Richard Feynman":

[W]hen Feynman was mortally ill with cancer, he served on the NASA commission investigating the Challenger disaster of 1986. He undertook this job reluctantly, knowing that it would use up most of the time and strength that he had left. He undertook it because he felt an obligation to find the root causes of the disaster and to speak plainly to the public about his findings. He went to Washington and found what he had expected at the heart of the tragedy: a bureaucratic hierarchy with two groups of people, the engineers and the managers, who lived in separate worlds and did not communicate with each other. The engineers lived in the world of technical facts; the managers lived in the world of political dogmas.

He asked members of both groups to tell him their estimates of the risk of disastrous failure in each Space Shuttle mission. The engineers estimated the risk to be of the order of one disaster in a hundred missions. The managers estimated the risk to be of the order of one disaster in a hundred thousand missions. The difference, a factor of a thousand between the two estimates, was never reconciled and never openly discussed. The managers were in charge of the operations and made the decisions to fly or not to fly, based on their own estimates of the risk. But the technical facts that Feynman uncovered proved that the managers were wrong and the engineers were right.

Feynman had two opportunities to educate the public about the causes of the disaster. The first opportunity concerned the technical facts. An open meeting of the commission was held with newspaper and television reporters present. Feynman was prepared with a glass of ice water and a sample of a rubber O-ring seal from a shuttle solid-fuel booster rocket. He dipped the piece of rubber into the ice water, pulled it out, and demonstrated the fact that the cold rubber was stiff. The cold rubber would not function as a gas-tight seal to keep the hot rocket exhaust away from the structure. Since the Challenger launch had occurred on January 28 in unusually cold weather, Feynman’s little demonstration pointed to the stiffening of the O-ring seal as a probable technical cause of the disaster.

The second opportunity to educate the public concerned the culture of NASA. Feynman wrote an account of the cultural situation as he saw it, with the fatal division of the NASA administration into two noncommunicating cultures, engineers and managers. The political dogma of the managers, declaring risks to be a thousand times smaller than the technical facts would indicate, was the cultural cause of the disaster. The political dogma arose from a long history of public statements by political leaders that the Shuttle was safe and reliable. Feynman ended his account with the famous declaration: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

Feynman fought hard to have his statement of conclusions incorporated in the official report of the commission. The chairman of the commission, William Rogers, was a professional politician with long experience in government. Rogers wished the public to believe that the Challenger disaster was a highly unlikely accident for which NASA was not to blame. He fought hard to exclude Feynman’s statement from the report. In the end a compromise was reached. Feynman’s statement was not included in the report but was added as an appendix at the end, with a note saying that it was Feynman’s personal statement and not agreed to by the commission. This compromise worked to Feynman’s advantage. As he remarked at the time, the appendix standing at the end got much more public attention than it would have if it had been part of the official report.

Feynman’s dramatic exposure of NASA incompetence and his O-ring demonstrations made him a hero to the general public. The event was the beginning of his rise to the status of superstar. Before his service on the Challenger commission, he was widely admired by knowledgeable people as a scientist and a colorful character. Afterward, he was admired by a much wider public, as a crusader for honesty and plain speaking in government. Anyone fighting secrecy and corruption in any part of the government could look to Feynman as a leader.

Dyson (born 1923) gets why his old friend and colleague is one of my heroes, though I wonder if he hasn't defined it too narrowly. "Anyone fighting secrecy and corruption in any part of the government" indeed, but more broadly, anyone who values the quest for truth, especially at a time when a cancerously ferocious ideology has put truth at the top of its hit list, anyone who believes that without that commitment to truth we're pretty much lost as a species.

I'm obviously in no position to evaluate Feynman's importance as a physicist, because I don't understand anything about his work, though I have a much better general sense now from Dyson of the kind of work he did. It's my understanding that among physicists Feynman's standing is very high. I'm similarly unequipped to evaluate Freeman Dyson's standing as a physicist, though again my impression is that he is regarded highly by physicists. I do know that Dyson, NYRB's go-to guy not just for physics but frequently for matters of broader scientific interest, is an exceptional writer, from whom I have learned a great deal about the scientists and even the scientific issues he has written about.

One of the two books about Feynman which Dyson is reviewing, Feynman by writer Jim Ottaviani and artist Leland Myrick, is highly unusual in format:

It is a comic-book biography of Feynman, containing 266 pages of pictures of Feynman and his legendary adventures. In every picture, bubbles of text record Feynman’s comments, mostly taken from stories that he and others had told and published in earlier books.

Dyson points out that the appropriate Japanese term for such a book is not the commonly used manga ("idle picture"), but gekiga (""dramatic picture"), and judges this "a fine example of gekiga for Western readers," whose "images capture with remarkable sensitivity the essence of Feynman's character," speaking "with the voice of the real Feynman." He notes, by the way:

It comes as a shock to see myself portrayed in these pages, as a lucky young student taking a four-day ride with Feynman in his car from Cleveland to Albuquerque, sharing with him some unusual lodgings and entertained by an unending stream of his memorable conversation.

And it's hard not to envy Dyson his association with Feynman. However, this seems to be the happy case of a student singularly equipped to take advantage of the opportunity for mentorship by such a formidable practitioner.

"Toward the end of Feynman’s life," Dyson writes, "his conservative view of quantum science became unfashionable." But "he had no patience" for the fanciful philosophical speculations of his younger colleagues. "According to Feynman, the road to understanding is not to argue about philosophy but to continue exploring the facts of nature. In recent years, a new generation of experimenters has been advancing along Feynman’s road with great success, moving into the new worlds of quantum computing and quantum cryptography."

He returns now to the other book under review, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science by Lawrence M. Krauss, which he has described as "a narrative of Feynman’s life as a scientist," by "an expert physicist and a gifted writer of scientific books for the general public," which shows us the side of Feynman’s personality that was least visible to most of his admirers, the silent and persistent calculator working intensely through long days and nights to figure out how nature works."

Krauss shows us a portrait of a scientist who was unusually unselfish. His disdain for honors and rewards was genuine. After he was elected to membership of the United States National Academy of Sciences, he resigned his membership because the members of the academy spent too much of their time debating who was worthy of admission in the next academy election. He considered the academy to be more concerned with self-glorification than with public service. He hated all hierarchies, and wanted no badge of superior academic status to come between him and his younger friends. He considered science to be a collective enterprise in which educating the young was as important as making personal discoveries. He put as much effort into his teaching as into his thinking.

He never showed the slightest resentment when I published some of his ideas before he did. He told me that he avoided disputes about priority in science by following a simple rule: “Always give the bastards more credit than they deserve.” I have followed this rule myself. I find it remarkably effective for avoiding quarrels and making friends. A generous sharing of credit is the quickest way to build a healthy scientific community. In the end, Feynman’s greatest contribution to science was not any particular discovery. His contribution was the creation of a new way of thinking that enabled a great multitude of students and colleagues, including me, to make their own discoveries.

Even more than before, Richard Feynman is one of my heroes. And I'm pretty darned grateful for Freeman Dyson too.

#

Why should WaPo dolt Robert Samuelson "get" the Irish mess better than anything else, or better than any other infotainment noozers?

An abandoned new house on the Dublin–Sligo road,
County Leitrim, Ireland, April 2010

by Ken

I've been meaning to write something about the economic catastrophe in Ireland since I read Granta editor "Ireland: The Rise & the Crash," Ian Jack's discussion of the subject in the form of a review of Fintan O'Toole's book Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Irish Tiger in the Nov. 11 New York Review of Books. Obviously I have no expertise in the subject, but Ian Jack's NYRB piece sure rings true, and leaves me feeling I have a surer grasp of the situation than, say, Washington Post and Newsweek financial columnist Robert J. Samuelson, whose recent column on the subject, "In Ireland's debt crisis, an ominous reckoning for Europe," I admit made me pretty crazy.

(In case you too were wondering, let me assure you that the dolt Robert Samuelson is no relation to the great Nobel-winning economist Paul Samuelson, author of the economics textbook that dominated the teaching of introductory economics in this country in the second half of the 20th century.)

Interestingly, it's not, as one might first assume, that the dolt Robert Samuelson is totally ignorant of the facts of the Irish crisis. This much of what he wrote is, it seems, actually true, as far as it goes:

That Ireland, after Greece, has come to grief is ironic. Until recently, it was admiringly dubbed the Celtic Tiger for emulating Asian countries in attracting foreign investment - Intel and others - and achieving rapid export-led growth. From 1987 to 2000, annual economic growth averaged 6.8 percent; unemployment fell from 16.9 percent to 4.3 percent. But then solid growth gave way to a housing boom and bubble whose collapse left Irish banks awash in bad loans.

Unfortunately, "ironic" doesn't begin to cover what happened in Ireland, which might more properly be described as naked colllusion between a network of flagrantly fraud-perpetrating Irish banksters and a criminally complaisant government.

"O'Toole," Jack writes, "divides Ireland's recent economic history into two periods: a period of controlled (some might say rational) growth between 1988 and 1997 and then the madcap Celtic Tiger years that ended in collapse." Even the dolt Robert Samuelson is sort of aware of this. He just chooses to draw a discreet curtain over his awareness regarding what happened in these two periods, and what it says about the experience of the Celtic Tiger.

The tremendous economic turnaround of that first period was real. Of course it's worlds removed from the miraculous Celtic Tiger image evangelized by dimwits and ideological hooligans whose number included American presidential candidate Young Johnny McCranky. Of the 1988-97 period of growth that would almost certainly have been sustainable, Jack writes:

Until the 1980s, Ireland had a miserable record of economic underperformance, unparalleled by any other country in Europe, which made it the despair of its people; no other European country, wrote the Irish historian John Joseph Lee, recorded so slow a rate of growth of national income in the twentieth century. It was the more prosperous parts of Europe, however, that provided Ireland's first way forward. The European Union classified the entire country as a disadvantaged area and poured in money from its regional and structural funds -- nearly €11 billion between 1987 and 1998 -- which O'Toole describes, rightly, as the kind of "classic big government interventionism" that the Celtic Tiger era affected to despise.

The Irish, meanwhile, were intervening themselves. Their government brokered a social partnership between bosses and trade unions and invested heavily in higher education, so that today more than 40 percent of the population aged twenty-five to thirty-four has completed "third-level" (university or equivalent) education, the second-highest rate in the EU. At a time of a prolonged global growth and American investment overseas, Ireland found itself lucky in other ways. Decades of emigration had left it with a preponderance of young people. It had no inheritance of heavy industry -- no steel works or mines to close or subsidize. Feminism arrived, with effects on both the birth rate and the workplace.

The peace process was meanwhile gathering strength in Northern Ireland -- the Provisional IRA declared its cease-fire in 1994 -- and the Catholic Church was losing its grip on morals and behavior. Society grew more secular, open, and tolerant. Gradually, Ireland appeared to the outside investor as a small, hospitable Anglophone country with an educated workforce and relatively low wages. Gross domestic product per capita, which had been two thirds of the EU average in 1986, achieved parity with the rest of Europe in 1997 and rose above Britain's in 1999. By the end of the century, every Viagra tablet made by Pfizer came out of County Cork and Ireland exported more computer software than any other country. O'Toole looks back fondly on this time: "The pall of failure that had hung over the Irish state for most of its independent existence seemed to have been blown away for ever."

But, Jack writes, O'Toole also sees the 1988-97 economic awakening as "a lost opportunity."

When [new Prime Minister Brian] Ahern's Fianna Fáil government came to power in 1997 [Ahern is seen at right resigning in not nearly enough disgrace in April 2008], Ireland had an "optimistic, confident" population facing "incredibly favorable global conditions."

The new government, however, believed it had discovered a quicker-acting formula for wealth creation: tax cuts to stimulate consumption, property to replace manufacturing as the source of wealth, Dublin to become a tax haven for businesses seeking to avoid the more rigorous regimes of London and New York. Ireland turned away from making and exporting goods as the source of its new well-being toward the evanescent world of money and debt. On the one hand, Dublin became the single largest location outside the US for the declared pre-tax profits of American firms. On the other, Ireland's balance of payment figures slid into the red. "Being prosperous would be replaced by feeling rich" is how O'Toole memorably captures the hidden agenda -- hidden, perhaps, even from its initiators. Ireland was far from the only country to embrace it, but by O'Toole's argument the other countries that did (including the UK) had longer and more robust traditions of relatively clean governance and civic behavior.

Thus the ground was laid for what O'Toole calls "a lethal cocktail of global ideology and Irish habits" --

habits or attitudes, that is, born during the unhappiest years of Irish history. These "nineteenth-century revenants" included a primitive land hunger, a political system inspired by the Irish-Americans of Tammany Hall, subversive attitudes to authority born under British rule, and heroic powers of denial ("the unknown knowns"). Revelations of cruelty and hypocrisy had ended the authority of the Catholic Church, but no civic morality had been put in its place and memories of its old instructions, or lack of them, remained. As O'Toole puts it, "Masturbation was a much more serious sin than tax evasion."

Naturally the assumption by people like the dolt Robert Samuelson is that Ireland's economic collapse was caused by the inevitable collapse from a shockingly irresponsible orgy of borrowing. And so, I guess, it was, but not in the way that the usual right-wing apostles of fiscal "austerity" would have us believe. It was, in fact, an out-and-out collusion between a crooked government and crooked banksters, with crooked developers and builders doing the dirty work for them.

But before we come back to how this colossal ripoff was managed, it's important to remember that many of those people who now preach fiscal "austerity" were once the most fervid evangelists of Celtic Tigerism. Ian Jack recalls:

Until the crash, Ireland was an economy to be admired rather than examined, to be emulated rather than avoided. It took a long time for the truth to come out. In February 2008 -- shortly before Scotland's own banks went belly up -- the leader of the Scottish National Party, Alex Salmond, was promising that an independent Scotland would create "a Celtic Lion economy to rival the Celtic Tiger across the Irish Sea." Later in the same year Phil Gramm, economics adviser to presidential candidate John McCain, described Ireland as the "perfect example" of a country that had prospered through tax rates that were among the lowest in the world: "Senator McCain's people immigrated from Ireland along with millions of others because they were hungry. Today…they [the Irish] have overtaken Americans in per capita income."

McCain himself returned to the example in his televised debates with Obama, comparing American and Irish business taxes to show why America needed to cut them. "One of history's weirdest reversals," writes O'Toole: for centuries the Irish had dreamed of becoming Americans, and now some Americans wanted to be more like the Irish -- not the charming, peasant Irish of John Ford's The Quiet Man but the new Irish, with a Mercedes in the carport, a vacation home in Marbella, and corporation tax set at 12.5 percent. Ireland, though it belonged to the European Union and had earlier benefited from EU largesse, began to see itself as an outpost of American (or Anglo-American) free-market values on the far edge of a continent where various brands of social democracy were still the political norm.

Did you get that? "An outpost of American (or Anglo-American) free-market values on the far edge of a continent where various brands of social democracy were still the political norm."

Low taxes, as suggested here, were a crucial part of the that second, phony-baloney period of Irish economic "growth." In reality, there wasn't any "growth." It was all a charade, in which government policies not only allowed but encouraged the banksters to pump up the economy with staggering quantities of loans for the building of buildings all over the country that never had any possibility of realizing any economic return. In the sense that there were actual buildings built, I suppose you could say that the Irish housing bubble was more "real" than the final fatal acceleration of ours, which was built on the spectacular creation of new "value" in the form of mortgages that had scarcely any value relative to the prices for which they were bought and sold in the form of bundled securities.

But again, that staggering inventory of new buildings, never had any real prospect of being occupied, and for that matter were never intended to be. They were just the way all that created money was pumped into the economy. Of course it was still a form of Ponzi scheme, since as all that money moved from party to party, eventually there had to be a party left holding the bag, in the form of all those empty buildings. O'Toole and Jack offer as an example, the explosion of construction, virtually all of it now unoccupied in the 613-square-mile hard-scrabble county of Leitrim, whose population declined from 155,000 in 1841 ("before the famine and the collapse of its handloom industry") to under 30,000 today, when, Jack writes:

Bright signs stick above the dark hedgerows: "Luxury development of highly distinctive homes" and "€100,000 off original price." Behind each of them lies a cluster of two-story houses with pitched roofs and carports that could just as easily belong in the suburbs of London or New York. Very few are occupied, some are unfinished, dandelions sprout on lawns that have run wild. Who was expected here? They look like houses built for junior executives with two children and two cars, but how many of them could the Leitrim economy possibly have supported even when the boom was at its height? They add another layer of human absence to the fields around them: first, the people who went away; now, the people who never came.

Did anyone really believe there was ever going to be real-world demand for all those houses? Wasn't the ending, as emblemized by the photo at the top of this post, always inevitable? Well, sure, but meanwhile a lot of people pocketed a lot of euros from that pumped-up economy. And as noted, a lot of right-wing economic preachers held it up as an example to be emulated. Eventually the finance minister, Brian Lenihan, offered the piquant explanation that Ireland is a small country "with too many incestuous relationships." Oh, do you think?

In 2006, at the height of the boom, construction accounted for almost a quarter of Ireland's GDP and occupied a fifth of the workforce. Thousands of workers came from the poorer regions of Europe to meet the demand; Ireland, one of the great historical sources of emigration, became a net importer of labor. The migrants rented houses built by an earlier wave of migrants, while they built more houses that their employers hoped would be occupied by the next wave. The increase in debt was terrifying, or should have been (the taoiseach or prime minister, Bertie Ahern, cheerfully remarked, "The boom is getting boomier"). Bank lending for construction and real estate rose from €5.5 billion in 1999 to €96.2 billion in 2007 -- an increase of 1,730 percent -- while house prices doubled in the six years to 2006. Estates for commuters now spread a long way out from Dublin. It cost more to service a mortgage on a house in a muddy field two hours' drive from the city's center, remote from shops and schools, than to pay rent for similar accommodation in a desirable part of the city. And on such mortgages the average Dublin couple spent a third of its income.

There had been warnings. As early as August 2000, well before the peak, a report from the IMF concluded that there hadn't been "a single experience of price inflation on the scale of Ireland's which did not end in prices falling." In 2006, Professor Morgan Kelly of University College Dublin said there could be no "soft landing" for property values that had risen so much more steeply than incomes. Nobody wanted to listen. Prime Minister Ahern mocked Kelly as a moaner, and the press tended to take Ahern's side. More remarkable, as O'Toole writes, was how few mainstream economists came to Kelly's defense:

Every historically literate economist knew for sure that the Irish property boom was going to crash…. Yet the overwhelming majority of Irish economists either contented themselves with timid and carefully couched murmurs of unease, or, in the case of most of those who worked for stockbrokers, banks, and building societies and who dominated media discussion of the issue, joined in the reassurances about soft landings.

There were reasons, O'Toole and Jack explain, why so many people with emotional or political stakes in the illusion of the boom were "so stubborn in their refusal to see the blindingly obvious." In the end O'Toole chalks up the phantasmagoric Celtic Tiger "miracle" to the aforementioned "lethal cocktail of global ideology and Irish habits."

The total cost of the bailouts so far authorized or envisaged as "somewhere between €45 and €50 billion," with Ireland's budget deficit rising "from 12 to 32 percent of GDP." According to the now-standard formula, the people who created the problem are to a large extent being paid off -- by Irish taxpayers, of course. And the chorus of Big Money sycophants like the dolt Robert Samuelson tell us that the answer to the Irish blunder is . . . you guessed it, austerity. Every country, it appears, has its Villagers, and they all seem to have learned the same patter, even as the rich get richer and the rest of us get screwed.

And the solution -- we're all told -- is austerity. Check.

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