How TSA Has Brought Security Theatre to a Boil

The US airlines did the one thing that should have been done before 9/11 only after 9/11. They installed hardened doors between the cockpit and the rest of the plane. Everything else in American aviation "security" is pure eyewash and a waste of money and a huge burden on people an a humiliation to many. It is simply security theatre.

Here is an example from Vance Gilbert's blog. This is a letter he wrote after a humilating and expensive "incident" with TSA:

To Whom It May Concern,

My name is Vance Gilbert.

I live in Arlington, MA.

I am a homeowner, having been here 10+ years, I have a partner, and we have two 52lb Standard Poodles.

I am a 6 foot tall, bespectacled, slightly greying, 52 year old, 230 lb African-American male with a close hair cut.

On August 14, 2011, I boarded United Airlines Flight UA #3483 from Boston to Dulles on time and was seated in an isle seat #9C on an Embraer 170. I was dressed in shorts, baseball hat, t-shirt, hiking boots, and unbuttoned Jimmy Buffett Hawaiian shirt (covered with airplanes). As the door was being closed, we were told it was a full flight, meaning 70 - 80 people. I had my backpack under the seat in front of me, and my fanny pack/wallet behind my heels.

After the doors were closed the flight attendant came down the isle checking security buckling, bag clearance etc., and asked if she could put my fanny pack above me in the overhead bin. I replied to her that I'd be fine just stuffing it next to my back-pack under seat in front of me as it contained my wallet etc and that I'd rather have it near. She seemed fine with that resolution. All that was done without consternation or belligerence, and I thought nothing of it.

Now, I am a musician by trade and an amateur aviation historian, studying mostly European transport aircraft between WW1 and WW2, and some after. I was on my way to two different music festivals. When I travel I delve into reading about this era of aviation. I had taken out and was reading a book of Polish Aircraft circa 1946 and I was also looking at views of an Italian aircraft from 1921.

I think you see where this is going...

The plane went all the way out to the take-off point, in the queue for take-off. All the while I noticed a lot of phone pinging back and forth between the flight attendants. The young woman flight attendant was also crouched next to and conversing seriously to a dead-heading pilot about 4 seats up on the other side. The plane then proceeded to turn around and head all the way back to the gate. Once at the gate, the jet bridge was positioned. The Captain announced, "We have a minor issue, and we will continue our departure once it's resolved." He left the aircraft.

After about 5 - 10 minutes, 2 Mass State Policemen, 1 or 2 TSA Agents, and the bursar for the flight come down the isle and motion me to get off of the plane. I do not remember if they called me by name. We stepped out into the breezeway where one of the State policemen asked how I was doing that day.

I replied, "Sir, I think you're going to tell me I could be doing much better..."

Policeman: "Did you have a problem with your bag earlier?"

Me: "No sir, not at all. The flight attendant wanted it secured elsewhere other than behind my feet, and I opted to put it under the seat in front of me. It's my wallet, even though there's only 30 bucks in it…And all that was done without belligerence, or words for that matter…it was all good.

A few beats...

Policeman: "Sir, were you looking at a book of airplanes?"

Me: "Yes sir I was. I am a musician for money, but for fun I study old aircraft and build models of them, and the book I was reading was of Polish Aircraft from 1946."

Policeman: "Would you please go get that book so that i can see it?"

I go back onto the plane - all eyes are on me like I was a common criminal. Total humiliation part 2.

After a couple of minutes he says, "Why, this is all Snoopy Red Baron stuff..."

Me: "Yes sir, actually the triplane you see is Italian, from 1921 a little after World War 1..."

Policeman: "No problem here then, you can go on back on to the plane, sorry to inconvenience you...and have a nice flight".

We were now at least, after re-queuing, over an hour late. No one looked me in the eye, flight attendants, passengers. I missed my next connection, and had to cancel that portion of the flight (fair $ value equaling ??) and rent a car ($270) plus fuel ($30) to my work (lost 1/2 wages = $100), and I was afraid to read for the next two flights.

I silently wept the whole flight to DC. I've never been so frightened or humiliated. I'm shaking even writing this.

How much money was lost between the airline, the other travelers? - I couldn't begin to calculate.

How damaged am I from this experience? I'm not feeling particularly American. I'm angry, dumbfounded, frightened.

Would this have happened to the 30-ish Caucasian woman sitting across the aisle from me (who left her seat, water bottle, and book, never to be seen for the rest of the "completely full" flight)? Is it now against the law to be dark and read a book about historic aircraft?

What's my take-away from this experience as a taxpayer, United Airlines patron, Black Man, teacher, mentor, American? I was broken hearted and speechless as I overheard my friend's wife try to explain to her kids what happened and what he and I were talking about over dinner. They never did get why.

What do I tell your children?

Enough.

What do I do now - please advise?

Please contact me at the email above

Thanks in advance,

Vance Gilbert
Arlington, MA

There was nothing in this "incident" that common sense would identify as a "threat". This was pure over-reaction and stupidity and it was fueled by racism. Not violent, aggresive, mean racism, just an "uneasiness" with "the other" that plays into the hands of security theatre. What a tragedy.

Update 2011aug27: Here is a post on the On Liberty blog at the Boston Globe newspaper.

The ACLU is always concerned about ways in which ordinary Americans get inconvenienced by "security" measures that actually make us no safer, and less free. TSA's unpopular and invasive scanners and "pat-down" searches, which began frustrating travelers at Logan and nationwide last year, are a perfect example.

Recent reports of what happened to Arlington-based musician Vance Gilbert, who was questioned after reading a book about vintage airplanes on a flight out of Boston, seems to bear out that concern. Mr. Gilbert made it past TSA scanners and screeners, but then found himself being questioned after boarding his flight. We are reposting here Mr. Gilbert's open letter to the ACLU about what he experienced. He titled it "Racial Profiling First Hand".

That this kind of petty harrassment is "invisible" reminds me of how "decent" Germans after WWII claimed they had seen nothing of the internment and massacre of Jews (and gypsies, and homosexuals, and socialists, and handicapped, etc.). Funny... millions were dispossessed and killed and nobody noticed. Americans are undergoing their own mini-"holocaust" and nobody is noticing. Amazing. (It is there to be seen, buy you have to be attentive and remember and connect the dots. Most people couldn't be bothered. Like pastor Martin Niemöller noted in WWII:

First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Update 2011sep03: Here is more material on reaction to the Vance Gilbert case. This comes from a James Fallows blog at The Atlantic and it includes his own recent run-in with obnoxious TSA heavy-handedness. Here is a bit:

In three previous installments -- first, second, and third -- readers have discussed the implications of a recent case in which a Boston-area musician, Vance Gilbert, caused an airline crew to panic and abort the departure of a plane. Gilbert is black. How much difference did that make?

This is newly on my mind because, when starting on the first leg of a long overseas trip today, I had the most unpleasant encounter in years with TSA officialdom, at Dulles Airport. (I am now at LAX, waiting for the connecting flight.TSA Officer Z*** of Dulles, I will remember you!) This encounter was a reminder that regardless of race, getting crosswise of security-officialdom can lead to a lot of trouble. It was also a reminder that asking "Why?" or "What is the reason for that?" to a uniformed official of the wrong temperament can be the first step down a path that is difficult to retrace.

Go read the James Fallows post to get all of the material including the readers' comments he has brought into the post and the links he provides to relevant materia.

As a Canadian, I found this reader comment to have the greatest resonance:

From a reader in Canada:

>>After travelling through different airports in different countries, I must say that security screens in the US are the worst, but an incident in Canada demonstrated to me how their authority can be abused. On this occasion, during a plane change in Calgary, I saw that the security services everywhere hold an inordinate amount of power that is can be abused for any of the very personal reasons a screener may hold.

It was very early morning, before the coffee shops opened. Because there were a few hours between plane change I decided to leave the secure area and get some fresh air. As I was leaving the airport a nearby coffee shop was in the process of opening, so I rushed over, and waited by the counter, to get that much needed morning coffee.

As I waited for the server to serve me, a woman wearing a security uniform, came up to the counter, stood behind me, calling out to the server, "Elsie, can I have a black coffee". The server "Elsie" gave her the coffee and I started to give my order. Then, six more security people came up behind me and each called out their order. Elsie served all of them leaving me standing there. I was annoyed but let it go thinking that they were in a rush to get to their duty stations.

After Elsie served them, I gave her my order. Elsie picked up the cup and pot to pour my coffee, when a lone straggler wearing a security uniform appeared and called out her order to Elsie.

Elsie put down my cup and started to serve this lone person when I blurted out, "Do you mind giving me my coffee please". By this time I started to have visions of spending the entire time waiting in a line and never getting my coffee. Elsie served me before she served this security person.

I got my coffee, went outside and then returned to go through security.

When I went through security, every single person in that coffee line up was working the area. I was searched, scanned, patted down, had my carry-on torn apart, by 3 different security personnel, all in sequence. I swear I saw the last one smirk at someone behind me.

Could I prove I was singled out? No. Could I prove they were abusing their power? No. Do I believe that security personnel were abusing their power? Certainly Yes. Do I believe Gilbert? Absolutely Yes!

And BTW. I'm a white 66 year old, grey haired grandmother.

Update 2011sep12: Here is yet another example of "guilt by looking ethnic". Here is a bit from a post by another victim of security theatre, Shoshana Hebshi, in her blog Stories from the Heartland:

Someone shouted for us to place our hands on the seats in front of us, heads down. The cops ran down the aisle, stopped at my row and yelled at the three of us to get up. “Can I bring my phone?” I asked, of course. What a cliffhanger for my Twitter followers! No, one of the cops said, grabbing my arm a little harder than I would have liked. He slapped metal cuffs on my wrists and pushed me off the plane. The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained.

The cops brought us to a parked squad car next to the plane, had us spread our legs and arms. Mine asked me if I was wearing any explosives. “No,” I said, holding my tongue to not let out a snarky response. I wasn’t sure what I could and could not say, and all that came out was “What’s going on?”

No one would answer me. They put me in the back of the car. It’s a plastic seat, for all you out there who have never been tossed into the back of a police car. It’s hard, it’s hot, and it’s humiliating. The Indian man who had sat next to me on the plane was already in the backseat. I turned to him, shocked, and asked him if he knew what was going on. I asked him if he knew the other man that had been in our row, and he said he had just met him. I said, it’s because of what we look like. They’re doing this because of what we look like. And I couldn’t believe that I was being arrested and taken away.

When the Patriot Act was passed after 9/11 and Arabs and Arab-looking people were being harassed all over the country, my Saudi Arabian dad became nervous. A bit of a conspiracy theorist at heart, he knew the government was watching him and at any time could come and take him away. It was happening all over. Men were being taken on suspicion of terrorist activities and held and questioned–sometimes abused–for long periods of time. Our country had a civil rights issue on its hands. And, in the name of patriotism we lost a lot of our liberty, especially those who look like me.

I never had any run-ins with the law. Since 9/11, though I felt a heightened sense of how my appearance would affect my travel plans, I never had any concrete reason to think I would be targeted.

...

Eventually a female uniformed officer came in. She looked like a fat Jada Pinkett Smith, and in a kind but firm voice explained what was going to happen. I was to stand, face the wall in a position so the camera above the toilet couldn’t see, and take off my clothes. I complied. She commented on my tattoo, saying, “Oh you have one of those things–good and evil, right?”

“Yin and yang. Balance,” I said, grabbing my clothes to redress.

“You understand why we have to do this, right? It’s for our own protection,” she told me.

Because I am so violent. And pulling me off an airplane, handcuffing me and patting me down against a squad car didn’t offer enough protection. They also needed to make sure all my orifices were free and clear.

She apologized for having to do the strip search, and I asked her to tell me what was going on. She said she didn’t know but someone would come and talk to me. She put my handcuffs back on and left. The other officer stood guard outside. I told him I needed to call my husband. He said I could use the phone later.

...

In the aftermath of my events on Sept. 11, 2011, I feel violated, humiliated and sure that I was taken from the plane simply because of my appearance. Though I never left my seat, spoke to anyone on the flight or tinkered with any “suspicious” device, I was forced into a situation where I was stripped of my freedom and liberty that so many of my fellow Americans purport are the foundations of this country and should be protected at any cost.

I believe in national security, but I also believe in peace and justice. I believe in tolerance, acceptance and trying–as hard as it sometimes may be–not to judge a person by the color of their skin or the way they dress.

...

I feel fortunate to have friends and family members who are sick over what happened to me. I share their disgust. But there was someone on that plane who felt threatened enough to alert the authorities. This country has operated for the last 10 years through fear. We’ve been a country at war and going bankrupt for much of this time. What is the next step?

You can read more about the ordeal from this AP report: http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/sep/11/us-airline-passengers-detained/

When will Americans wake up and demand their country back from the fanatics who see a "terrorist" behind every tree. From the crazies who want to live in a police state because they are scared of their own shadow? The attack on 9/11 was by a tiny handful of fanatics. It was a police action. Not a 10 year war with nearly 7,000 Americans killed, two countries invaded, and half a dozen others subject to drone strikes. Somebody wanted the big show, costly war. Think about who had what to win from making a big deal about "getting Bin Laden dead or alive" but when it came to actually getting him in the Tora Bora mountains, just couldn't see committing many US troops and decided to use Afghani mercenaries instead. Surprise! Bin Laden outbid the Americans and got away. So much for "dead or alive". So much for a serious "war on terrorism". The whole thing is a big Hollywood production to cover up another agenda: getting access to oil, use of fear to win elections, settling accounts with a guy who tried to kill your Daddy, etc.

Is the American Civil War Finally Over After 150 Years?

Here is an interesting post by Ta-Nehisi Coates in an article in The Atlantic magazine:

Mississippi's governor offers his thoughts:

"Slavery was the primary, central, cause of secession," Barbour told me Friday. "The Civil War was necessary to bring about the abolition of slavery," he continued. "Abolishing slavery was morally imperative and necessary, and it's regrettable that it took the Civil War to do it. But it did."

Matt smirks at this. I'm less inclined to do so.

I think this is an important admission. You can make the case that this is all politics, and not heartfelt. Given that Barbour is a politician, I don't find that particularly damning. George Wallace's racism wasn't heart-felt either, but it still did incredible damage to Alabama. By that same principal, a step away from the gleeful profession of Confederate creationism, no matter the motives, will always earn my praise.

Good on Haley Barbour. It's that simple.

Go read the original article to get the embedded links.

I think the US is close to turning the page on the Civil War, but I suspect it will take one more generation to truly bury the racism and viciousness of that secular divide in the country. The fact that blacks are now moving back into the deep South after the flight of the early 20th century is a sign of real change. But it will take another generation to truly get the "peculiar institution" buried in the history books and no longer a living thing among the minds of the population.

Obama and Black History

Obama completely misrepresented himself in his campaign in 2008. He sold himself as an advocate of the poor and promised to bring "change". But he is a centre-right politician. He is closer to Wall Street than Main Street.

Here's a post by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog that has my blood boiling. Obama purposefully misrepresents the history of Social Security in the US:

Social Insurance History

Hmm. Paul Rosenberg catches the president rewriting history — and, revealingly, doing so in a way that makes the case for timid, incremental action, while waving away the actual history of bold strokes.

Specifically, Obama said this:

This is why FDR, when he started Social Security, it only affected widows and orphans. You did not qualify. And yet now it is something that really helps a lot of people. When Medicare was started, it was a small program. It grew.

Under the criteria that you just set out, each of those were betrayals of some abstract ideal.

This is all wrong: both programs were huge from the start. From the beginning, Social Security applied to all private-sector workers, except those in agriculture, domestic service, or casual employment — and yes, those exceptions happened to exclude the majority of African-Americans. Still, it was by no means a small program that grew big. Medicare covered everyone 65 and older right from the beginning, although initially it only provided hospital insurance.

It is, as Rosenberg says, odd that Obama doesn’t know this history.

The stuff in bold is what I marked out. This is Paul Krugman, his wife is African-American and I'm sure she keeps him informed about how things were skewed against blacks in the US.

The shocking thing is that Obama doesn't know history, doesn't know progressive left wing history, doesn't know black history, and that his wife isn't filling him in on the details of black history!

The US's Troubled Race Relations History

Here's a bit from Tom Ricks' The Best Defense blog:

... I didn't know until last weekend that baseball great Jackie Robinson, in 1944 a lieutenant in the Army's 758th Tank Battalion, was court-martialed back then for refusing to move to the back of an Army bus at Fort Hood, Texas. He was acquitted on all charges and honorably discharged later in the year.

He also had been turned away when he tried to play for the baseball team at Ft. Riley, Kansas. He was told to report instead to "the colored team" -- which didn't exist. A big joke.

Ricks addresses the DADT (Don't Ask, Don't Tell) policy for "handling gays" in the military. Sadly, the US has a long history of bad decisions and a slowness in meeting the rest of the world's standards in human relations. England eliminated slavery long before the US. Most Western countries got rid of bans on gays in the military years ago, but it drags on in the US. Worse, hypocrites like John McCain, have the power to drag their feet and prevent change. It reminds me of the fillibusters and long harangues by politicians in the late 1950s and 1960s over racial integration. There is something in the water in the US that encourages digging in heels over social issues. (Actually, it isn't the water, it is the fundamentalist Christian religion spread amongst a number of denominations that creates the problem.)

You would think a people would look at themselves in the mirror, feel shame, and make a pledge to "never again" behave in such a unjust, socially backward way. Sadly, that never seems to happen. Instead, the give ground grudgingly and dig in their heels just a bit down the road on the next "issue" and refuse to give ground.

The Real Politics of the Republican Tea Party

From an article by Joshua Green in The Atlantic magazine:

Rich Iott, the Republican nominee for Congress from Ohio's 9th District, and a Tea Party favorite, who for years donned a German Waffen SS uniform and participated in Nazi re-enactments.

Rich Iott is second from the right in the photo.

There is no law that says you can play "dress up" but I would suggest that if you find it a thrill to parade around as a Nazi, you probably are not good material for being a legislator. A fascination with a murderous dictator is not a good sign for leadership to help the US get out of a perilous time when democracy has been weakened by corporate cronyism and lobbyist money.

While is is legal to strut around in a Nazi uniform and play Nazi war games pretending to belong to the Wiking division, this isn't so in Europe:

Sydnor added that re-enactments like the Wiking group's are illegal in Germany and Austria. "If you were to put on an SS uniform in Germany today, you'd be arrested."

So says Charles W. Sydnor, Jr., a retired history professor and author of "Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death's Head Division, 1933-45," which chronicles an SS division.

Here is a relevant comment from The Atlantic article:

Rabbi Moshe Saks, of the Congregation B'nai Israel in Sylvania, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo that sits in the 9th district, disagreed. "Any kind of reenactment or glorification of Nazi Germany, to us, would be something unacceptable and certainly in poor taste, if not offensive," he said. "I think the reaction here will be very negative. And not just among the Jewish community, but the broader community."

And this:

The actual Wiking unit has a history as grisly as that of other Nazi divisions. In her book "The Death Marches of Hungarian Jews Through Austria in the Spring of 1945," Eleonore Lappin, the noted Austrian historian, writes that soldiers from the Wiking division were involved in the killing of Hungarian Jews in March and April 1945, before surrendering to American forces in Austria.

Go read the article in The Atlantic to get all the gory details and the pathetic justifications Rich Iott offers for his "hobby".

Social Change

It is funny. The academic theorists and the firebrand "revolutionaries" get all the press about "changing society". But in the real world, it is people. Individuals who sense a change in the air and act on it. And it spreads like wildfire. The academics and the radicals come and feast on it and claim it as their own, but the reality is that it is simply individuals acting in their own inscrutable way and in accordance with their own rhythm. It comes bottom up. It is symbolized by "leaders" but the reality is that ultimately it is individuals making individual choices that powers change.

Here's a wonderful article on the great American Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker:

At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.
“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.
“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.
The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.
By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.
By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

Go read the article to find out Gladwell's theories. He looks at this and other uprisings and considers the role of Twitter and social media. Fascinating stuff. But remember...

He's playing the role of an academic and theorizing. Ultimately change comes from below and utterly mysterious in its timing and its direction. The Green Revolution in Iran last year got me excited, but it fizzled. You simply don't know what will catch and burn and what will flare up and die out. The civil rights movement in the US was over 100 years old in 1960. Why it finally "took hold" in the early 1960s is a mystery. Don't let academics fool you. Their theories are rationalizations after the fact. Nobody was predicting the social change, at least not predicting it in detail, in timing, and in scope.

Malcolm Gladwell digs a little deeper and puzzles over the depth of determination of the activism in the 1960s in the face of brute violence:

GGreensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely met with violence. The four students who first sat down at the lunch counter were terrified. “I suppose if anyone had come up behind me and yelled ‘Boo,’ I think I would have fallen off my seat,” one of them said later. ...

The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, another of the sentinel campaigns of the civil-rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters, and raise civil-rights awareness in the Deep South. “No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not at night,” they were instructed. Within days of arriving in Mississippi, three volunteers—Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and killed, and, during the rest of the summer, thirty-seven black churches were set on fire and dozens of safe houses were bombed; volunteers were beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men. A quarter of those in the program dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo—that attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint of heart.

Gladwell's assessment of "Twitter-led revolutions" is that they are a fizzle. He argues that history shows you need personal contacts, real contacts, with other committed people. In other words, a social revolution requires real sociability, real social relations, deeply committed social connections:

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.

Gladwell goes on to argue that successful social change is the result of carefully organized, mounted with precision and discipline. I disagree. Planning may make leaders feel effective, but ultimately it is what happens on the ground at the individual level. I agree with him that previous activism creates a matrix in which a spark can catch fire, but ultimately the spark was a unique event planned by four students but the contagion and imitation wasn't "planned". I disagree with this claim:

In the late nineteen-fifties, there had been sixteen sit-ins in various cities throughout the South, fifteen of which were formally organized by civil-rights organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. and CORE. Possible locations for activism were scouted. Plans were drawn up. Movement activists held training sessions and retreats for would-be protesters. The Greensboro Four were a product of this groundwork: all were members of the N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council. They had close ties with the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. They had been briefed on the earlier wave of sit-ins in Durham, and had been part of a series of movement meetings in activist churches. When the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro throughout the South, it did not spread indiscriminately. It spread to those cities which had preëxisting “movement centers”—a core of dedicated and trained activists ready to turn the “fever” into action.

I don't disagree on facts. I disagree on interpretation. Planning went on. But the contagion was only hoped for. There was no explicit "plan" for it and no central directorate who were saying "here now, then here, then here". There was a lot of spontaneous communication in prepared social networks and it suddenly "caught fire".

I agree with his point that Twitter revolutions don't have the level of commitment and social connections to succeed. But I don't agree that groups like the NAACP "planned" the Greensboro contagion. They hoped for it, but had no real control over it. It just happened because the time was right and the individuals threw themselves into it.

I guess nobody wants to hear about history as "spontaneous events" lacking a cohesive "story" behind it. But in fact that is the world we live in. Just like nobody likes to hear that the quantum world is random and not fathomable by any deterministic models. Science as simple models is now long gone. We are in the age of complexity and disordered aggregations whose "story" only makes sense after the fact. The stories are still useful, but they don't predict and they don't really explain, but they help us find comfort in a very cold, very dark, very large, very indifferent universe.

The Malcolm Gladwell article, like all of his work, is thoughtful and interesting. He has pulled it from researchers and presented it as a "story" with meaning and direction. It is to be enjoyed.

America, Land of the Free (Minded Bigot)

I ran across this in a blog by Matt Zeitlin and find it interesting for what it says about "post-racism" America (you know, they did elect a black President, so they are surely post-racist, right?):

Really? Really?

Can anyone explain why Nathan Bedford Forrest has *anything* named after him? Being a Confederate general is bad enough — like, really, really, History Greatest’s Monster bad — but being a Confederate general who was one of the most important members of the early Ku Klux Klan, perhaps the most pernicious, anti-American organization in our country’s history. Oh yeah, and the Fort Pillow Massacre.

This is just basic stuff. I would even trade all the stuff named after Sherman if the South got rid of everything named after Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Forrest, Stuart and so on. Why can’t more stuff be named after Faulkner or Thomas Jefferson or George Mason or anyone who didn’t commit treason in defense of slavery?

UPDATE:

Oh God, this really is terrible. It’s from 2008, but I hadn’t heard about it until today, so it can be blogged in good-faith:

More than half the students at Nathan Bedford Forrest High School in Jacksonville, Fla., are black, and some members of the community object that they are forced to attend a school that was named in honor of a racist.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was a slave trader before the Civil War, a top-notch Confederate cavalry leader during the war, and the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee when it was over, according to University of North Carolina-Greensboro emeritus professor Allen Trelease, a Civil War scholar.

Forrest High got its name in 1959, when the Daughters of the Confederacy, angry about the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision forcing school integration, pushed for the name.

All 2,300 of the school’s students were white at the time. Now, 54 percent are black, and some feel it’s time to change the school’s name.

On Nov. 3, the Duval County School Board voted 5 to 2 against changing the name. The five members who voted to keep the name were white. The two who voted against it were the board’s only black members.

I like to think that there has been great progress in the US in ridding itself of racism. But stuff like the post above makes me shake my head in disbelief. This isn't one red-neck fool. This is a school board elected by a community!

Go read more about Nathan Bedford Forrest at Wikipedia. It is a little hard to accept naming a school after someone who did this:

Achilles Clark, a soldier with the 20th Tennessee cavalry, wrote to his sister immediately after the battle: "The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor, deluded, negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. I, with several others, tried to stop the butchery, and at one time had partially succeeded, but General Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs and the carnage continued. Finally our men became sick of blood and the firing ceased."

Using the exemplary standard of the Duval County School Board, you would expect to see a fairly large number of Adolf Hitler High Schools in Germany.

"Colour Blind" America

News Flash! An American Federal Appeals Court has decided that when a Nazi group calls a Jew "vermin" there is no "racial overtone". As the Court decision states "This is just the customary term used by members of the Nazi party in referring to Jews, so there is no malicious intent that can be construed from the use of this term. This is purely 'conversational usage'."

Thank God for justice in America!

Here's a bit about a related NY Times story of US Federal Appeal Court "justice"...

But when two better jobs as shift supervisors opened up, Mr. Hithon was passed over by the plant manager, who was white, in favor of two white candidates from other Tyson plants. Mr. Hithon thought his skin color had something to do with it, and he sued for racial discrimination.

As evidence, he testified about the manager’s habit of calling black employees “boy.”

Last month, for the third time and in the face of a 2006 rebuke from the United States Supreme Court, the federal appeals court in Atlanta said there were no racial overtones when a white supervisor called an adult black man “boy.”

Last month, for the third time and in the face of a 2006 rebuke from the United States Supreme Court, the federal appeals court in Atlanta said there were no racial overtones when a white supervisor called an adult black man “boy.”

“The usages were conversational,” the majority explained, repeating what it had told the trial court after the Supreme Court ruled, and “nonracial in context.” Even if “somehow construed as racial,” the unsigned 2-to-1 decision went on, “the comments were ambiguous stray remarks” that were not proof of employment discrimination.

I suppose some of you will insist that this just can't be true. Well, go read the gory details. The article provides more than enough evidence that "justice" in the US is colour-blind as well as brain-dead.

The Raw Political Facts

In his blog, Brad DeLong reduces all the rhetoric over "does he/doesn't he" debate over Rand Paul and the 1964 Civil Rights Act to the raw racist politics:

They [Rand Paul and his father Ron Paul] believe that, if America were a good society, our tax dollars would be spent to pay police officers to taser and evict peacefully-shopping African-Americans from stores just because the shopkeeper doesn't like their faces. That's what Rand Paul thinks a good society looks like. Deal with it.

I find libertarians to be a joke. They claim to love liberty, but it is always their liberty and not the other guy's. They are all too willing to sacrifice somebody else for their benefit. They don't believe in "share the pain" or even the Golden Rule. Their motto is "he who has the gold, rules".

That isn't a world I want to live in. And it would not be a world they would want to live in if they had the "wrong" skin colour, wrong religion, wrong ethnicity, wrong sex, etc. These are simply unempathic simulacrums of human beings organizing a political party to change the rules so that they don't have to pay taxes or have any responsibilities to other humans. They want to live in a hypothetical world of "contracts" where you negotiate everything by contract, but at the same time they don't want government, so there is no enforcement agency for the contract (other than "he who has the biggest army automatically has the "best" contracts).

Racism in the Deep South

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an interesting article on "the limits of Southern liberalism" for the New Yorker in 2009. Here are a few bits. This is a wonderful essay with a real education for those who have forgotten the past. Partly this article is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird:

In 1954, when James (Big Jim) Folsom was running for a second term as governor of Alabama, he drove to Clayton, in Barbour County, to meet a powerful local probate judge. This was in the heart of the Deep South, at a time when Jim Crow was in full effect. In Barbour County, the races did not mix, and white men were expected to uphold the privileges of their gender and color. But when his car pulled up to the curb, where the judge was waiting, Folsom spotted two black men on the sidewalk. He jumped out, shook their hands heartily, and only then turned to the stunned judge. "All men are just alike," Folsom liked to say.

...

"Big Jim did not seek a fundamental shift of political power or a revolution in social mores," Sims says. Folsom operated out of a sense of noblesse oblige: privileged whites, he believed, ought to "adopt a more humanitarian attitude" toward blacks. When the black Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., came to Montgomery, on a voter-registration drive, Folsom invited him to the Governor's Mansion for a Scotch-and-soda. That was simply good manners. Whenever he was accused of being too friendly to black people, Folsom shrugged. His assumption was that Negroes were citizens, just like anyone else. "I just never did get all excited about our colored brothers," he once said. "We have had them here for three hundred years and we will have them for another three hundred years."

Folsom was not a civil-rights activist. Activists were interested in using the full, impersonal force of the law to compel equality. In fact, the Supreme Court's landmark desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education ended Folsom's career, because the racial backlash that it created drove moderates off the political stage. The historian Michael Klarman writes, "Virtually no southern politician could survive in this political environment without toeing the massive resistance line, and in most states politicians competed to occupy the most extreme position on the racial spectrum." Folsom lost his job to the segregationist John Patterson, who then gave way to the radical George Wallace. In Birmingham, which was quietly liberalizing through the early nineteen-fifties, Bull Connor (who notoriously set police dogs on civil-rights marchers in the nineteen-sixties) had been in political exile. It was the Brown decision that brought him back. Old-style Southern liberalism—gradual and paternalistic—crumbled in the face of liberalism in the form of an urgent demand for formal equality. Activism proved incompatible with Folsomism.

On what side was Harper Lee's Atticus Finch? Finch defended Tom Robinson, the black man falsely accused of what in nineteen-thirties Alabama was the gravest of sins, the rape of a white woman. In the years since, he has become a role model for the legal profession. But he's much closer to Folsom's side of the race question than he is to the civil-rights activists who were arriving in the South as Lee wrote her novel.

Reading this essay is a good antidote to the soft racism of Rand Paul. This essay looks deeply into the history of racism in Alabama and specifically at the issues around the book To Kill a Mockingbird. Read Malcolm Gladwell's essay.

Racism, The New Improved Version

America excels at repackaging old stuff and selling it as a "new and improved!" brand.

The Tea Party and its fanatics are right wing crazies reformulated. Instead of Evangelical Christians gathering to chant and sing, you now have the "new and improved" Tea Party with their bizarre posters and their ranting. Same glop in the can, just a new label with "new and improved" slapped onto it.

Here's a video from Rachel Maddow and a bit from an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic:

I saw this over at Gawker, and thought that Rand Paul might come off better if I saw the whole video. I think the whole video made it worse. What's most troubling about this interview is not that Paul opposes a portion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it's that it's clear Paul hasn't thought much about his position. Lacking a rigorous intellectual framework for his opposition, Paul is wobbly on defense. So what you see, in the main, is Paul trying to change the subject--at one point, I think he actually asks (rhetorically), "Am I a bad person?"

But Paul never settles down and to make the argument. Rachel Maddow repeatedly raises lunch counters, and it would have really pleased me if Paul had just made the case for private sector discrimination. Frankly, I can see the outlines of the argument and am not totally unsympathetic to it. Indeed, I think there's a beautiful justice that's visited upon the random politician who, to this very day, is routinely exposed as belonging to a white country club. There's a kind of social sanction in that embarrassment that I don't think the law can bring. (That said, I trust the people who were actually there more than my own abstract theorizing.)

But what about red-lining? Does Paul know anything about blockbusting? Does he think banks should be able to have a policy of not lending to black businesses? Does he think real-estate agents should be able to discriminate? Does he think private homeowner groups should be able to band together and keep out blacks? Jews? Gays? Latinos?

The joke is that the Tea Party sells itself as a "new" political viewpoint that is going to be honest with people. But as you watch Rand Paul, you see the same old song and dance of a new, and inept, politician doing some fancy stepping to avoid answering direct queestions with an honest answer. Instead, he is a chip off the Bush II media "control" approach where he keeps repeating his talking points and refusing to actually answer simple questions with simple answers.

Rand Paul is a fanatic who thinks "private business" has all the answers. So why then, did this wonderful private business ignore the racist right wing laws of the Jim Crow years and just give people services in a race-blind way? They didn't. Private businesses are not tools for social change. They reflect the dominant culture. No businessman who wants to stay in business is going to be an agent for social change. No businessman in the Deep South would throw open his doors to black, white, red, yellow, and purple. The KKK would have burned his business down. Business needs the cover of public law to do the right thing. Rand Paul doesn't understand the simplest of points about racism and business and social change.

He is blinded by his ideology that says "trust private business to do the right thing". But there is no instance in history where private business has led social change or delivered social justice. I haven't seen any business that stepped forward during WWII to take a stand saying "don't intern these Japanese as dangerous enemy aliens". I didn't see any company stepping forward and leading the social revolution to give women equal pay for equal work. I can't think of any company that has a public policy of leading change to give gays social rights. Private business is in business to make money, not lead social change. Rand Paul is disingenuous to pretend that business delivers a just society.

Americans Imitating Frenchmen Who Imitate Americans

Here's a bit from a posting by James Fallows at The Atlantic site:

... a passage from a 1930s-era essay by James Thurber, called "Wild Bird Hickcock and His Friends." Thurber loved reading French pulp-novel versions of American Westerns, and he described one of them thus:

There were, in my lost and lamented collection, a hundred other fine things, which I have forgotten, but there is one that will forever remain with me. It occured in a book in which, as I remember it, Billy the Kid, alias Billy the Boy, was the central figure. At any rate, two strangers had turned up in a small Western town and their actions had aroused the suspicions of a group of respectable citizens, who forthwith called on the sheriff to complain about the newcomers. The sheriff listened gravely for a while, got up and buckled on his gun belt, and said, "Alors, je vais demander ses cartes d'identité!'' There are few things, in any literature, that have ever given me a greater thrill than coming across that line.

Go read the whole post to get background, pictures, and more finger wagging about the ridiculous "Zee muss gibt uns zeine papers!" law from the newly born 48th fascist state. You know, the one that requires police to check your identity papers to make sure you have a right to be where you are when you are and how you are. The one that makes it illegal for the police to not be suspicious of everyone because you can never be too sure who is an illegal alien. Just ask those who demand papers from Obama to prove that he is a US citizen and is rightfully elected President of the US.

You don't have to be a James Thurber fan to appreciate the above. But I was raised on Thurber and enjoyed his downplayed homespun humour.

Oh, and I was raised in an era when a "Your papers!" was an order barked by a Nazi or an official of Fascist police state, you know, kinda like Arizona has become.

An Honest Man?

The "candid" comments by Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele has some asking if he isn't "too honest". Here's an example in a post by Faiz Shakir on the site Think Progress:

In candid remarks made before a group of students at DePaul University, RNC Chairman Michael Steele said African-Americans “don’t have a reason” to vote for Republicans because “we haven’t done a very good job of giving you one.” The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

Why should an African-American vote Republican?

“You really don’t have a reason to, to be honest — we haven’t done a very good job of really giving you one. True? True,” Republican National Chairman Michael Steele told 200 DePaul University students Tuesday night. […]

“For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, ‘Bubba’ went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.”

Of course, anytime Democrats make similar arguments, Steele is quick to accuse them of issuing “blind charges of racism, where none exist.” Steele himself claims not to “play the race card,” but in addition to his comments last night, he has said that he has a “slimmer margin for error” because of his race and that white Republicans are “scared” of him.

My comment would be that this remark isn't "candor" so much as a demonstration of political ineptitude. If he is trying to sell the idea that the Republicans are going to give up their "Southern Strategy", this isn't the way to do it. This just makes him look foolish. Why would the chairman of a major party admit that his party is corrupt and racist? It can't be candor. It can be stupidity.

A Union Viewpoint

Here is a bit from a posting by Mark Halperin at the Time magazine web site:

Remarks by Richard L. Trumka, President, AFL-CIO

“Why Working People Are Angry and Why Politicians Should Listen”

Institute of Politics, Harvard Kennedy School, April 7, 2010



I am going to talk tonight about anger—and specifically the anger of working people. I want to explain why working people are right to be mad about what has happened to our economy and our country, and then I want to talk about why there is a difference between anger and hatred. There are forces in our country that are working hard to convert justifiable anger about an economy that only seems to work for a few of us into racist and homophobic hate and violence directed at our President and heroes like Congressman John Lewis. Most of all, those forces of hate seek to divide working people – to turn our anger against each other.

So I also want to talk to you tonight about what I believe is the only way to fight the forces of hatred—with a strong progressive tradition that includes working people in action, organizing unions and organizing to elect public officials committed to bold action to address economic suffering.

...

Our republic must offer working people something other than the dead-end choice between the failed agenda of greed and the voices of hate and division and violence. Public intellectuals have a responsibility to offer a better way.
The stakes could not be higher. Mass unemployment and growing inequality threaten our democracy. We need to act—and act boldly—to strike at the roots of working people's anger and shut down the forces of hatred and racism.
We have to begin the conversation by talking about jobs—the 11 million missing jobs behind our unemployment rate of 9.7 percent.

...

I am a student of history, and now is the time to remember our history as a nation. Remember that when President Franklin Roosevelt said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” other voices were on the radio, voices saying that what we really needed to fear was each other – voices preaching anti-Semitism and Nazi-style racial hatred.

Remember that when President John F. Kennedy stepped off the plane in Dallas on November 22, 1963, radio voices were calling for violence against the President of the United States. And the violence came—and took John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers and so many others.

But in the United States, we chose to turn away from the voices of hatred at those critical moments in the twentieth century. In much of Europe, racial hatred and political violence prevailed in response to the mass unemployment of the Great Depression. And in the end, we had to rescue those countries from fascism-- from the horrible consequences of the failure of their societies to speak to the pain and anger bred by mass unemployment.

Why did our democracy endure through the Great Depression? Because working people discovered it was possible to elect leaders who would fight for them and not for the financial barons who had brought on the catastrophe. Because our politics offered a real choice besides greed and hatred. Because our leaders inspired the confidence to reject hate and charted a path to higher ground through broadly shared prosperity.

This is a similar moment. Our politics have been dominated by greed and the forces of money for a generation. Now, amid the wreckage that came from that experiment, we hear the voices of hatred, of racism and homophobia.

The talk is well worth reading. Go read the whole thing.

Raising the Rebel Yell

Here is a very short article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic commenting on Virginia's decision to "celebrate" its succession from the Union in order to keep slaves in chains. What a proud moment in modern America's history:

Proud Of Being Ignorant

A lot of you have e-mailed me to note that Virginia governor Bob McDonnell has decided to honor those who fought to preserve, and extend, white supremacy. I don't really have much to say. The GOP is, effectively, the party of willfully unlettered Utopians. It is the party of choice for those who believe global warming is a hoax, that humans roamed the earth with dinosaurs, and that homosexuals should work harder at not being gay.

That the party of unadulterated quackery also believes that Birth Of A Nation is more true to the Civil War than Battle Cry Of Freedom, is to be expected. Ignorance does not respect boundaries. It is, at times, qualified and those who know more, often struggle to say more. But people who believe that the Census is actually a covert attempt to put Americans in concentration camps, are also likely to believe that slavery was incidental to the Civil War.

This is who they are--the proud and ignorant. If you believe that if we still had segregation we wouldn't "have had all these problems," this is the movement for you. If you believe that your president is a Muslim sleeper agent, this is the movement for you. If you honor a flag raised explicitly to destroy this country then this is the movement for you. If you flirt with secession, even now, then this movement is for you. If you are a "Real American" with no demonstrable interest in "Real America" then, by God, this movement of alchemists and creationists, of anti-science and hair tonic, is for you.

Go to the original article to get the links embedded in this text.

John Keegan's "The American Civil War"

I really enjoyed this book. It is an excellent history of the Civil War. I've read many books on the Civil War and this is one of the best because it includes viewpoints other books didn't include. Most just focus on the politics and the battles (e.g. Bruce Catton, Shelby Foote, and James McPherson). This book includes topics that are normally ignored in writing about the Civil War, and the author's British/European perspective usefully adds commentary on the conflict not normally related in writing this history. It comments in broader terms on the history of the US by including sociological and economic themes. Funny, it takes an Englishman to write a good US history book.

There are a number of things in this book that gave me pause. Here are a few:

Keegan looks at more than battles and politics. Here he looks at a socio-historical reason for the war:

Virginia was socially the most distinct of the colonies and later of the states, because it was deliberately set up in imitation of the English landed counties by its mid-seventeenth-century governor, Sir William Berkeley. Berkeley recruited the younger and therefore landless sons of English landowning families, wich bequeathed all to the eldest, with the promise that in the New World they would be able to set up as landed gentelmen themselves. He succeeded perhaps better than he hope. As early as 1660 every seat on the ruling Council of Virginia was held by members of five interrelated families, and as late as 1775 every council member was descended from one of the 1660 councillors. As Berkeley had endowed many of the settlers he attracted with large grants of land, the families were not only politically powerful but rich. They remained so and their names were to become celebrated in American history, the Madisons, the Washingtons, the Lees. They supplied the young United States with many of its Founding Fathers and the Confederacy also with many of its leaders.

Keegan remarks on America's ability to compromise over slavery for 50+ years, but in the short run-up to the outbreak of the war that ability to compromise failed spectacularly:

The political leaders of the South correctly recognized that the tide of opinion in a country in which they represented a minority was running against them. They might have moderated their position and sought common ground. It would have been difficult to find. Not only was the South indeed different from the North, with the difference founded on an institution that could not be disguised or easily altered; as the dispute with the North dragged on, Southerners had begun to make a virtue of the difference, by inventing a creed of Southern nationalism which eventually committed them to confrontation. Mid-century Southerners proclaimed themselves to be a superior breed to Northerners, preserving the agrarian way of life on which the republic had been founded at the Revolution and led by a breed of cultivated gentlemen who better resembled the Founding Fathers than the money-grubbing capitalists who dominated public life in the North. The South's poorer classes, too, sons of the soil and outdoorsmen, were held to be superior to their equivalents in the North, whose lives were confined by factory walls and who were often not native-born but immigrants, sometimes not English-speaking, and Catholic rather than Protestant. Southern nationalism had impressive ideologues as its own founding fathers, John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay, and it even had its own lyceum, the University of the South, founded at Sewanee, Tennessee, to train Southern scholars who could debate on equal terms with men from Harvard. The North took it seriously enough to destroy its buildings, down to the foundation stone, soon after the Civil War began.

Sadly most wars happen because people fail to recognize just how costly war will be. For Americans this is was demonstrated to a degree that is hard to conceive. The war devastated the South for a century. A very heavy price to pay for the inability to recognize the "winds of change".

Keegan points out the numbers in terms of just casualties. There were a million casualties out of a population of 31 million. For the North 1 out of 65 soldiers was killed in action and 1 out of 13 died of disease and 1 out of 10 was wounded. These are horrible numbers:

The war inflicted more than a million total casualties, of whom 200,000 had been killed in battle. The total exceeeds that of the American fatalities of the Second World War and bears comparison only with the European losses of the Great War and Russia's in the Second World War. In many respects the Civil War was and remains America's Great War, in the way it is commemorated nationally in so many towns and battlefield cemeteries and subjectively and collectively in the American consciouslness.

Unlike most books about battles, this one unflinchingly looks at the horrors of war:

After the second Battle of Bull Run, 3,000 wounded still lay where they had fallen three days after the fighting ceased; 600 were found still alive five days after the battle. It was a week before the last survivors were got to hospital in Washington. It was often preferable to remain in a barn or private house, as many did, than to be taken to hospital, which frequently stinks of infection, dirty, untidy, and overrun with parasites. Most soldiers were infected with lice but, while fit, were able to make some effort to rid themselves of the creepy-crawlies. In hospital they were dependent on others to delouse them, a duty not often undertaken. Many soldiers were brought in with their wounds crawling with maggots, stinking, and all too often gangrenous. Because of the prevalence of gangrene, amputation was the preferred surgical procedure.

Keegan talks of the role Blacks played in the fighting. Initially they were refused participation. But in the end between 180,000 and 200,000 served in the Union armies. And even the South decided to try and use slaves to fight and defend slavery:

By March 1965, The Confederate Congress officially called on slave owners to make up to a quarter of the slaves in any one state available for military service. Eventually only two companies of black soldiers were enrolled, and they had taken no part in fighting before the Union army arrived in Richmond to impose surrender.

Treatment of Blacks by the North improved until the war ended, but:

Twenty-three solidiers of U.S> Colored Troops won the Congressional Medal of Honor before Appomattox. Thereafter the U.S. Army reverted to unequal treatment of its black soldiers, a policy not to be reversed until the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower after the Second World War.

The above attribution of desegregation to Eisenhower is false. It was Harry Truman who started desegregating the military in 1948.

This comment in the closing chapter of the book was insightful:

Antebellum America was a country, not a state. Political America impinged too little upon its citizens to confer a sense of common purpose or of belonging. As is often remarked, the only contact with the state experienced by most antebellum Americans was a visit to the post office. The Civil War changed that. There was no more graphic means of apprehending the power of the state than to stand in the line of battle, a voluntary act with unintended consequences. Men who performed the act and ssurvived the consequences were transformed as citizens. Their understanding of "duty" and "sacrifice" were thereby revolutionised. Men who had stood shoulder to shoulder to brave the volleys of the enemy could not thenceforth be tepid or passive citizens.

The book may have a few flaws, but it is an excellent read with a unique perspective on the Civil War that makes it well worth reading.

Revelations about Ahmadinejad

Here is an interesting article by Damien McElroy and Ahmad Vahdat in the Telegraph:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.
A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.

The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.

The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad's birthplace, and the name derives from "weaver of the Sabour", the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran's Ministry of the Interior.

Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad's track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past.

Ali Nourizadeh, of the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies, said: "This aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad's background explains a lot about him.

"Every family that converts into a different religion takes a new identity by condemning their old faith.

"By making anti-Israeli statements he is trying to shed any suspicions about his Jewish connections. He feels vulnerable in a radical Shia society."

... Mehdi Khazali, an internet blogger, who called for an investigation of Mr Ahmadinejad's roots was arrested this summer.

Mr Ahmadinejad has regularly levelled bitter criticism at Israel, questioned its right to exist and denied the Holocaust.

From Wikipedia, here is another famous Jew-hater with a Jewish past:

Hitler's father, Alois Hitler, was an illegitimate child and, for the first 39 years of his life, bore his mother's surname, Schicklgruber. Alois’ paternity was not listed on his birth certificate, and has been the subject of much controversy. After receiving a "blackmail letter" from Hitler's nephew William Patrick Hitler threatening to reveal embarrassing information about Hitler's family tree, Nazi Party lawyer Hans Frank investigated, and, in his memoirs, claimed to have uncovered letters that revealed Ms. Schicklgruber was employed as a housekeeper for a Jewish family in Graz and that the family’s nineteen year old son, Leopold Frankenberger, fathered Alois.

It is tragic that people become rabid in trying to eradicate their past in order to "satisfy" some part of society that they join. It is especially tragic when these people have power, are megalomaniacal, and are willing to act on their hatreds.

Update 2009oct05: There is a delightful posting by Spencer Ackerman that laughingly presents all the twists and turns of this story:

I Sure Hope The Iranians Overthrow That Jew President Of Theirs (And Other Tribal Conundrums)

YHWH, moonlighting as a subpar Borscht Belt comedian, has given Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Jewish origins, according to the Daily Telegraph's inauguration of a geopolitical psychodrama. We have now determined that identity politics has a dank and silted basement. From here on out, Ahmadinejad can say whatever he likes about the Holocaust or Israel and it'll just be performative and tasteless, not an international outrage. Israel, in the most mindfucky course of events in its history, might be obliged to grant him citizenship. (Knowing Benjamin Netanyahu, he might bulldoze some Palestinian farmer's olive garden to build Ahmadinejad an apartment complex or something.)

Ahmadinejad's detractors are now objectively antisemitic. His comment-thread defenders are caught in quite a thorny Hebraic trap of their own -- so diabolical that one wonders if the Jews planned this all along...

Ain't No Racists Here

Here's a bit from Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post on the latent racism behind the protests against Obama:

This whole discussion was kicked off by Rep. Joe Wilson's "You lie!" outburst during Obama's address to a joint session of Congress. As the House members who voted to rebuke Wilson -- including seven fellow Republicans -- understand, calling the head of state a liar in such an official setting is way out of bounds. Grumbling and even booing come with the territory, but a flat accusation of mendacity is an impermissible sign of disrespect. Nobody ever called Bush a liar when he was speaking in the House chamber.

Why would Wilson think he was entitled to insult the president this way? Why would he refuse to offer a formal apology on the House floor, which would have ended the matter? I have no idea. Friends and colleagues say he is no racist, and they know the man a lot better than I do. But he does have a history.

Before he was elected to Congress, Wilson was one of a handful of South Carolina state senators to vote to keep the Confederate flag flying above the State House in Columbia. This was after a long, bitter battle over the flag had distilled the issue, at least in the minds of most South Carolinians, into a proxy fight over race: Was the state going to move forward, or would it cling to its shameful past? Most politicians in the state, including most conservatives, had decided it was time to move on. Wilson was one of the last diehards.

That, of course, was his right. But now that he has committed a singular act of disrespect toward the first African American president, it's my right to ask whether his motivation was racial.

I look forward to the day when we can look past race. But before we can do so, we need to look at race and see it clearly. Jimmy Carter did us a favor.

I think it is funny to watch all the talking heads on the Sunday morning political shows all gravely saying "well, there might be a touch of racism in America, but these angry protests are just part of the grand tradition of American populism". Yeah, like those famous "populists" of the Deep South, the KKK. They would gather the white folk to picnic beneath the tree that that had strung up some hapless back fellow from. These fine white folks would then mug for the camera. Sort of like the "tea party" folk jostling to get in front of the cameras to show off their "populism".

This pretense that the protests have only a touch of racism and are something very different is a disgusting joke. As the Robinson article points out. People like Joe Wilson have all the bona fides of a racist. But people want to pretend that his outburst was just an understandable "slip up" as if he might have done the same during a George Bush speech if the speech touched on a hot button topic. Oh yeah. That is really believable!

And here is some more thoughts from Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic:

I don't think anyone who's paid close attention to Bill Cosby over the years should be the least bit surprised by this:

I agree with President Carter that racism is playing a role in recent outbursts against President Obama.

Or this:

During President Obama's speech on the status of health care reform, some members of congress engaged in a public display of disrespect. While one Representative hurled the now infamous "you lie" insult at the President, others made their lack of interest known by exhibiting rude behavior such as deliberately yawning and sending text messages.

Various polls prior to the election indicated that between five and ten percent of Americans would never vote for an African American president. That number, of course, only includes those who actually admitted to their prejudice. How many others harbored such feelings but did not respond honestly when asked the question? And how many people oppose Obama's plan because the President is African American?

In "Birth of a Nation," D.W. Griffith used white actors in black face to portray black legislators as having low intelligence and acting like fools. Today, we have a band of real life congressional fools seemingly bent on blocking any meaningful reform of the health care system. But if we allow even one American to die simply because he or she cannot afford treatment, we are creating a shameful scenario that could aptly be called "Death of a Nation."

People like to forget that this is the dude that rolls with Randall Robinson, protested against apartheid, gave a gazillion dollars to Spelman, supported Jesse Jackson for president, and quotes the rhetoric of the Nation of Islam (to be fair, with caveats.) I think it goes too far to call Cosby a nationalist.--but he's much closer to the conservatism of black nationalism, than to the conservatism of Shelby Steele. But don't take my word for it. Actually, please take my word for it.

Racism in America

Maureen Dowd calls it like it is. She is one of the few journalist who give the truth unvarnished. Here is the key bit from her op-ed in the NY Times:

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.

But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.

“A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,” said Congressman Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the South Carolina delegation. Clyburn, the man who called out Bill Clinton on his racially tinged attacks on Obama in the primary, pushed Pelosi to pursue a formal resolution chastising Wilson.

“In South Carolina politics, I learned that the olive branch works very seldom,” he said. “You have to come at these things from a position of strength. My father used to say, ‘Son, always remember that silence gives consent.’”

...

For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.

The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War has now given us this: Senator Jim DeMint exhorted conservatives to “break” the president by upending his health care plan. Rusty DePass, a G.O.P. activist, said that a gorilla that escaped from a zoo was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors.” Lovelorn Mark Sanford tried to refuse the president’s stimulus money. And now Joe Wilson.

“A good many people in South Carolina really reject the notion that we’re part of the union,” said Don Fowler, the former Democratic Party chief who teaches politics at the University of South Carolina. He observed that when slavery was destroyed by outside forces and segregation was undone by civil rights leaders and Congress, it bred xenophobia.

“We have a lot of people who really think that the world’s against us,” Fowler said, “so when things don’t happen the way we like them to, we blame outsiders.” He said a state legislator not long ago tried to pass a bill to nullify any federal legislation with which South Carolinians didn’t agree. Shades of John C. Calhoun!

...

Clyburn had a warning for Obama advisers who want to forgive Wilson, ignore the ignorant outbursts and move on: “They’re going to have to develop ways in this White House to deal with things and not let them fester out there. Otherwise, they’ll see numbers moving in the wrong direction.”

When I was a kid, the Deep South was an automatic vote for Democrat going back to the roots of the Democratic party prior to the Civil War. But Goldwater's extremism, Lyndon Johnson's delivering the Civil Rights Act, and the very clear racism of Nixon turned the Deep South from an unthinking solid Democrat block to an unthinking solid Republican block. Anybody who doesn't think this has everything to do with racism is simply not honest.

Pollution and Creed

Here's an interesting story of a KKK man who met his match in a black preacher:



This is a video of Johnny Lee Clary. It is an interesting take on things in the American south. It is a wonderful tale of redemption. But I have a problem. Clary is still in the business of "selling". Seems to me if you make a monumental blunder like supporting the KKK and see the light, you would spend the rest of your life living quietly hoping to make amends. You don't go out and sell a new version of "the truth" all dressed up and ready to promote.

Clary seems like a nice enough guy and I wish him well. I just don't like guys trying to "sell" me some belief system. My personal take is that each of us is responsible for ourselves and we need to use reason, not some institution egging us on with "pre-packaged beliefs", to take responsibility for our own life and figure out how to live a truly good and useful life.