Welcome to the letters page. If you want to add your two cents, send me an e-mail, let me know if you want or are willing to have it published, whether you want your name on it (which I would prefer), and whether you want your e-mail address on there as well. I reserve the right to publish or not publish whatever the hell I want to, to make annoying headlines, etc. Thanks!

Have you read The 100 Days, by Alan Schom? It is rather clunkily written, but thrilling -- about Napoleon's comeback from Elba (his goosebump-raising ride from the southern coast to Paris, with crowds of infatuated ex-soldiers swelling his small band into a multitude) and road to Waterloo.

I don't know what to think about him, in the end. Maybe it was unlucky for him, or for Europe, that his particular genius was for generalship. To flourish, it needed war. And war is not a sustainable industry.

Re sentence diagramming. I, too, have always been grateful I was taught this -- though at my (convent) school it was called parsing. The study of Latin is valuable for similar reasons: it teaches you how language works, how to take apart (and piece together for yourself) the skeletons that give sentences their shape and strength and flexibility.

As for those who think grammar should "reveal itself naturally," mostly it doesn't. I know lots of people whose well-meaning teachers, fearful of bruising kids' self-esteem, stood back and waited for this to happen -- in vain. "If you can't talk like me, the teacher, then you can't be in the club." I guess this reader comment is meant to mock "elitists". But society cannot talk to itself with any verve or specificity without a lingua franca -- one that consists of more than "like, uh, duh" and cant-laden obfuscation. English is rich, but its richness depends on its users' skill. If we don't learn to deploy it with subtlety and confidence and cunning, we're the equivalent of savages who, finding a microscope, use it to whack their neighbors on the head.

In Australia, Aborigines in remote areas are taught in their own languages (some of which are spoken by fewer than 100 people) so they won't feel inferior, and so the authorities won't have to feel bad about "colonising" them into English. Result: they are rendered effectively powerless, excluded from the national conversation and dependent on fluent English speakers for all their dealings with the authorities, the law, corporations etc. But at least, say their "empowerers," they don't have low self-esteem!

Maybe diagramming is like the Napoleonic Code. Even when its advocates are all but wiped out, its principles will remain valid and useful. And when the alternatives have failed, and the assaults of nonsense become just too much to bear, people will clamor for it again.

2/10/2002 11:23:13 PM

Sheeesh! How long are we going to have to endure this?

After graduating college in my native land of the former Confederacy, I moved to San Francisco in 1991 and instantly fell in love with the city despite having to live, for financial reasons, in the Tenderloin. At the time, it was common habit for people to criticize L.A. for anything and everything possible. Natives said it was a requirement that to be a San Franciscan you had to HATE L.A.

The joke was that people in L.A. did not hate us back: They barely noticed we existed. We were irrelevant. That was the real reason for much of our hatred: Envy. When people thought of "California", they thought of L.A., and it drove us nuts. Even when it was well-meaning. Earthquakes and riots would happen in L.A. and friends on the East Coast would call us to make sure we were okay. Hollywood was the center of the center of the universe, and our little "paradise" was in its shadow.

Not long after the O.J. trial, I noticed people had stopped actively hating L.A. More specifically, they had stopped noticing or caring about L.A. The Internet was the future, and the Bay Area was now the center of the goddamn universe. Any day now, they would be breaking ground on Starfleet Headquarters.

Now we have crashed back to earth, and you people in L.A. are having great celebrations over the world (or at least California) being set right again. Maybe we deserve it for a while (and frankly, I hope we stay in this funk until that magical day in the far future when I have signed a mortgage), but the rhetoric has swung too far in the other direction.

For professional reasons, I will sidestep the homelessness issues. (I am an attorney with Bay Area Legal Aid, and my opinions could too easily be mistaken for the organization's, which could be a big problem as I am sure my opinions differ from many of my colleges.) But to tackle other part's of Nick's column:

Supposedly cosmopolitan, San Francisco is in fact a collection of separatist ghettos. Mexicans live in the Mission, Gays live in the Castro, Chinese out in Sunset, and transient yuppies in the Marina; and they avoid each other as much as possible.

Well, what about the alternative scene? The Yo-Yo man, a 300-pound mound of a man who dazzles with yo-yos. Where else, a San Francisco booster asked, would someone feel so free to express themselves? A typical San Francisco misconception. Personal discovery is rarely interesting and, in most normal cities, robustly ignored.

And conversation tends to the bland. What passes as witty in London or New York is more likely to meet the reaction: that guy was interesting. Only in San Francisco could interesting be a term of disparagement.

As for me, Silicon Valley remains the place to build a new business, but I won't pretend any more I love the place.

2/10/2002 11:08:26 PM

In your "why they hate us" comparison, Prof. Reynolds's comment about the nobility of his profession not necessarily ennobling its professors, while true, is only a part of it. He leaves out the all-important "Fighter Jock Syndrome."

In "The Right Stuff" Tom Wolfe writes about the passion that military fliers have for fast cars. Thinking that their mastery of speed in an aircraft naturally must extend to anything else that goes fast, they buy Corvettes and other hot cars, which they promptly crack up.

Knowledge workers often exhibit this same syndrome. Mastery in one area of thought leads them to believe their thoughts in any other area must be ipso facto masterly. Exhibit A for this delusion is Noam Chomsky: brilliant linguist and wacky ideologue. Another is (was?) William Shockley, one-third inventor of the transistor and wacky race theorist. Then there's Bobby Fisher, chess master and viciously wacky anti-semite. Numerous other wacky examples can be found among Nobel Prize winners and academics, to name two areas in which the syndrome is especially rife.

Journalists are another matter. I was a small-city newspaper reporter briefly in the early '70s. That was the twilight of the Ben Hecht vision of journalism, hard bitten and vaguely disreputable, and my colleagues and I new it. We were reporters, dammit, not journalists. We hung out in bars near the courthouse when we weren't weaseling information out of cops and politicians. Then in the aftermath of Watergate, with its elevation of reporters from nosy Nellies to Defenders of the Republic, and the rise to prominence of the Masters Degree in Journalism (what's up with that shit?) reporters decided to go legit as it were and recast themselves as "professionals" instead of inkstained wretches. Appalled, I entered a less pretentious field, advertising, and ended up in the least pretentious place in our society, Wall Street.

The problem with most journalists is that unlike fighter pilots, Nobelists, and college professors, they haven't mastered anything to justify their intellectual hubris. To record accurately what one sees and hears and render it in the inverted pyramid style are not exactly top-drawer skills. The standard view when I was an undergraduate journalism student was that if one majored only in journalism, one was a dullard. To judge from the media today, quite a few did not pick up another major. Yet because they acquire information a bit earlier than the rest of us and are puffed up by their certification as masters of professional note taking and upside-down pyramid making, they think they must be brimming with profound insights. Watch a press briefing (or read one at http://www.defenselink.mil) by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a syndrome-free ex-fighter jock, incidentally. Marvel at the pompously posed yet inane questions. Masters degree in what, again?

Of course, everyone can and should put out their opinions. Nobelists, professors, journalists, and to judge from Rummy's answers to those inane questions, even fighter jocks can offer cogent, insightful opinions on the affairs of the day. So can the average Joe. Whether their opinions are any good depends on nothing more than their mastery of clear thinking. Prof. Reynolds's opinions would be no less sensible if he were, say a BMW mechanic. He has the faculties for the task. Note here that I do not mean right – that is a subjective judgment -- but clear, logical, and, in his case, well expressed, too.

Alas, too many of us exacerbate the problem by validating Fighter Jock Syndrome sufferers, when they are really crying out to be bitch slapped. "Gee, he's really smart. He's a professor! She's a journalist!" Even to the educated, Jefferson's idea of a natural aristocracy of mind still applies. Be wary of "expertise."

2/1/2002 02:18:22 PM

I thought you might be interested in a "war" story that relates to the gays-in-the-military controversy. It's a "war" story (as opposed to a war story without the double quotes) since it involves being in the service, rather than being in combat.

Back in the early-80's, I was just out basic training and being shipped off to Fort Lee, Virginia for advanced training. Part of the process of being settled into our new post involved being marched into an auditorium where a stern Sergeant-Major (one step below God) gave us a long list of What We Should Do and Not Do.

Some of what the Sergeant-Major had to say was common-sense ("Don't carry your entire paycheck around with you, use the company safe if you don't want to set up a bank account"), some was fatherly ("You haven't been around the opposite sex for a while -- and now they're all around you. Show some courtesy and common sense"), some was military ("Inspections on such-and-such day at such-and-such time") and some was...weird.

The weird one was what I've since called the "homosexuality lecture". You were not supposed to be gay. If you where gay, well, stop it, hide it, whatever, but you weren't supposed to be gay. In fact, if you were caught at it, you would be thrown out of the service. The Sergeant-Major then went on to say, "I could give you a long speech on why we don't want homosexuals in the Army. But it pretty much boils down to we don't want any goddamn faggots." The entire room erupted into cheers.

In fact, I was about the only one not cheering. Why? After all, I was then a member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy's youth group. Well, the thing that had struck me was that the Sergeant-Major was black. I couldn't help but wonder if forty years earlier another group of soldiers had been told by another senior NCO that "we don't want any niggers".

Like I said, weird.

2/1/2002 02:04:01 PM

Really enjoyed your recollections brought about by the anniversary of the Challenger disaster. It’s weird because I followed both the 1986 accident and the “controversy” about use of plutonium in Cassini and other spacecraft quite closely…

The plutonium ruckus was the first time in my young life that I began to realize that passion was no substitute for brains. I mean hey, I was young, just out of college, Left-sympathetic, etc etc, and was naturally alarmed to hear the protesters’ spiel about NASA cavalierly lobbing radioactive materials into space. But I was lucky. I could get my answers straight from the horse’s mouth – at the time, my dad was NASA’s Associate Administrator For Spaceflight (he was also an astronaut who flew Columbia in ‘81 and Challenger in ‘83, as well as NASA Administrator until he was fired in ’93 by Dan Quayle – something he regards as a badge of honor!)*

But nothing I learned from my dad wasn’t also made widely available to the public. But it quickly became obvious that the “one nuke can ruin your whole day” crowd didn’t care much for the facts. If anything, they seemed proud to be ignorant of such things. It didn’t matter that all their claims – Nader saying plutonium was “the most toxic substance in the universe,” that an accidental reentry or crash on flyby would contaminate all of Florida, that thousands could die from exposure to just a few specks, that “militant” NASA was hiding alternative energy sources blah blah blah – were patently wrong and easily disputed. Once the buzzwords “nuclear” and “government” had been shrieked, their oh-so-open minds had slammed shut. Oh well. At least mine had started to open…

The Challenger accident was personal to me in a different way. At the time, I was writing a children’s book with June Scobee, the wife of the commander (she had also been my English teacher in high school). The pilot, Mike Smith, was kind of my dad’s protege in the astronaut office and was always around our house. And Ron McNair was in my karate class at the Johnson Space Center where he used to kick my ass on a regular basis. As is typical of most astronaut-types, he had an extremely level-headed, hard-work, non-victimized attitude. The fact that someone would use his name to level charges of racism would have probably made him chuckle…and then turn his powers of ass-kicking their way.

Anyway, just a few thoughts about another great column of yours…

* even cooler, he now heads the National Reusable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, which allows him to have more positive, realistic green impact than most of the self-proclaimed greenies!

1/31/2002 02:16:29 PM

Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who single-handedly cracked the German Enigma code

Did Turing improve on their methods? Yes. He not only "stood on their shoulders"[1], he worked with some of them on Enigma[2], (other people also made significant contributions.) He also contributed greatly to the development of the "bombe" (now seen as a precursor to modern computers[3]), a largely automated tool for cracking those messages.

I'm writing because I think that it does great men/women no honor to disparage or to attribute to them the work of others. Not only is it dishonest, but it makes for a story so bad that not even a tragedy can save it. I think that such stories are a dishonor, because they make the great seem dull.

To me, what makes Turing impressive is that he was head and shoulders above at a time when others were also doing amazing things. In other words, he stands out because he stood out in an impressive group. It's no big deal to stand out in a group of do-nothings.

[1] - "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" - Newton. Other variations are also quoted on the web. All with shoulders and giants, some with "ye", some without "others". "Ye", like most "pirate words", should be used more often.

[2] So he may have stood on their toes as well....

[3] - They did not use/build a "Turing Machine". A TM is an abstract model of computation invented by Turing. This model is an essential tool for reasoning about computation and some of its properties that Turing discovered are among the most significant discoveries of mathematics.

1/31/2002 01:41:10 PM

In response to your questioning of Afghan civilian casualties versus American ones on Sept. 11, while fully agreeing that we want to keep Afghan civilian casualties as low as possible, I think it reflects a misunderstanding of the purpose of the war to think that somehow the number of casualties we suffered on Sept. 11 should be some sort of benchmark to compare Afghan casualties to in order to determine if the war was justified or not. This might have some relevance if the main purpose of our attack was retaliation, but it was not. It was to disrupt and destroy an organization that was, and no doubt is, planning future attacks on America, and to eliminate the government that supported that organization.

In other words, the important figure is not how many Afghan casualties there were versus Sept. 11, but how many there were versus how many more Americans would die in future al-Qaida attacks if we responded with the ineffectual half measures we had used in response to al-Qaida's attacks up until Sept. 11. Can anyone doubt that a less than all out and effective response by us, one that left al-Qaida in full operation would have lead to more effective terrorist attacks in the future? Maybe each one would have killed fewer Americans that Afghan casualties in this war, but by the end of the 20th one, we might have wished we responded as we did this time at this time, even if severe Afghan casualties were the case. I have seen the argument before that this war is unjustified if there were more war casualties than died on Sept. 11. I have yet to see the a person making this argument apparently even consider future American casualties in their thinking. They seem to think that somehow Sept. 11 was an isolated event and that now that it was over, al-Qaida was going to just close up shop and stop killing mass numbers of people.

No one ever argues that our response in World War II against Japan was unjustified if we killed more Japanese civilians than Americans that died at Pearl Harbor (as we did many times over). Some pacifists have argued of course that the U.S. entering that war was wrong because any killing is wrong, but I have never heard any one say that as long as we killed less Japanese civilians than Americans killed in the attack it would have been all right. I strongly suspect many more Germans died in the British bombing of Germany than Poles were killed in the initial German invasion of Poland that caused Britain to declare war. Why does this not make those wars unjustified? Because we now understand that falling to act would have had even worse consequences for the future.

We do not have that advantage of hindsight now, but surely the fact even the people who have been most anxious to push the argument that Afghan casualties make this war unjustified have not been able to make themselves believe that al-Qaida was just going to go away if left alone (at least they have not said this is what they believe), and since no strategy that attempts to deal with al-Qaida while leaving a protective and supportive government in place to give them a permanent safe base seems to have a prayer of a chance of working, I suggest that the murky morality of death that war always contains strongly supports the idea that these Afghan casualties now, even if the high estimates are right, are the price that moral people have to pay now if we are to prevent much higher death and destruction to everybody, including the Afghans, in the future.

1/30/2002 10:38:37 PM

Your recent reference to Patrick Phillips' November letter brought to mind the story of Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who single-handedly cracked the German Enigma code, thus enabling the Allied victory in World War II which quite possibly would not have been achieved without the work of this genius. Turing was, quite literally, one of the handful of people who saved humanity.

After the war, Turing, who was quietly gay, continued his work, and lived a very private life. But because of a bizarre coincidence, he was discovered in his own home with another man, and admitted, quite casually, that they were intimately involved. Fifty years ago homosexuality was still taboo, and the resulting exposure destroyed Turing. In l954 he committed suicide. This was the reward inflicted upon a great and modest genius by the society whose freedom he helped preserve. And we can only wonder at what other contributions he would have made.

So Mr. Phillips' conversion to reality is welcome, and his willingness to speak candidly about it demonstrates that he is a good guy. And sure, we have made a lot of progress in the past fifty years, though real progress didn't commence until about fifteen years after Turing died. The courage of gay men who died on 9/11 has not gone unnoticed, and we should all be grateful for this. There is a lot more to be accomplished here, and part of that momentum will roll over the petty tyrants of religious conservatism. The sooner we stop paying them any attention, the faster we will move in the right direction.

1/30/2002 09:34:17 PM

I tried to display a billboard i bought. the billboard can be seen at www.yvettehirth.com. (like your wife, i'm bilingual, mais mon anglais, c'est mieux que ma français.)

ClearChannel Media, who owns Eller Media, refused to allow me to display the billboard, citing "decency standards". It was being displayed in London by VanWagner Media when i first saw it. Sadly, VanWagner does not have billboards in the Chicago market. Eller pretty much owns the town (my guess is around 80% of the boards here are Eller boards) and they (Eller & ClearChannel) won't allow it to be displayed.

But MarkieMark and the other male models in their underwear are ok.

Woe! Censorship! Misogyny raises its ugly head!

And this from a Texas Christian-based firm. Who knew?

1/30/2002 09:19:01 PM

Two thoughts:

You are right that the European complaints about Camp X-Ray are a relief valve going off. This is to what these people are reduced after they have been proven fools on all of their other complaints and predictions. The prisoners and our need to do something with them won't go away, so, blessed with a willful disregard of the facts, they have the advantage of being able to just keep pounding on something that won't show a dramatic change to prove them wrong as happened with military events in Afghanistan.

Moving on. I heard a story about civilian deaths on NPR as I was driving home tonight. A reporter visited several bombing sites in Afghanistan and checked into civilian deaths. He claimed to have found evidence of, as I recall the figures, 163 deaths at 5 sites. He wrapped up by wondering how many deaths there may have been nationwide, if these sites were any guide. He speculated possibly thousands. What was interesting were his concessions that all the sites were legitimate military targets and all were hit with precision. Credit has to be given for actually going to the scene and investigating to get facts. Certainly beats some other methods we're aware of. But left by itself, what was the point of this report? That even with precise hits on legitimate targets civilians can die, and possibly in great numbers? Did anybody really not know that before we started? I'm certain that this story needed no deeper exploration for a large part of the NPR audience. But an agenda-serving pretended lack of curiosity about the larger implications of a collection of facts advances no understanding of what we are doing. Ammunition for the support of preconceptions may be created, but true knowledge escapes us. Lost is the opportunity to confront one of the real costs of war, and to fully inquire into what we are doing, and what we should do. I want to put the question this way: "We have been attacked and grievously hurt by people who hate us and have vowed to inflict worse. My assessment is that to preserve ourselves we must destroy our attackers. I am certain that despite our best efforts not to hurt the innocent, we will undoubtedly kill some who are blameless for our injury. Does the inevitability of those deaths foreclose us from destroying those who threaten us? What then should we do?" NPR didn't ask, largely, I am convinced, because they understood the answers for themselves and many of their listeners. But I do want their answer to "What then?"

1/30/2002 09:13:17 PM

I wasn't impressed by Tony Adragna's attack on John Pilger. The humanitarian justification for the US intervention in Somalia was grossly exaggerated: News reports said that 80% of food aid was being looted, but private relief agencies were actually losing only about 10-20% of their cargo, which was much larger than the UN's; and local relief agencies like the Somali Red Crescent Society were responsible for more successful relief than all the external efforts put together. Furthermore, much of the diversion was accomplished not by armed bandits but by corruption within the agencies and contractors. Meanwhile, the famine had already peaked (indeed, the food aid was starting to undercut Somali farmers), and more people were being killed by disease than by starvation (a problem exacerbated when the rescuers started herding refugees into germ-trap camps).

The human rights abuses were also very real -- I direct you to the reports prepared by the human rights group African Rights. Pilger does seem to have exaggerated the numbers, and he deserves to be called on that.

Michael Maren, Alex de Waal, and others have written some excellent critical work about the disastrous Somali intervention. I can also point (ahem) to my own work, especially "Every Man a Sultan: Indigenous Responses to the Somalia Crisis," published in the Spring 1995 issue of Telos. Unfortunately, that piece was edited by someone for whom English was not his first language, and I didn't get a chance to approve his edits before the article went to press, resulting not just in some odd diction but in a couple of embarrassing errors in the citations -- if you ever get your hands on the piece, I'll let you know where the fuckups are.

Beyond that, I really dislike the Usenet style of writing that has been seeping into blogdom, which sometimes reads more like heckling than incisive critique. Adragna is scarcely the worst offender here, but it still made his attack kind of unpleasant to read.

1/30/2002 08:57:51 PM

As a born and bred democrat who agrees wholeheartedly with the sentiments of the born and bred democrat quoted on your site, I must say that I take exception to the implication that there's something odd about a born and bred democrat opposing these protestors. The protests began, you will recall, long before Bush's inauguration and were, as such, directed against a born and bred democrat.

1/30/2002 07:11:01 PM

Joanne Jacobs reports that Barbara Kingsolver is thinking of suing people who criticized her SF Chronicle piece. Here's the URL. You have to scroll down a bit to get to the Kingsolver part.

If you can't get rich by crying censorship, you can sue people for criticizing you; that might lead to self-censorship, you know!

[Apparently, one of Kingsolver's sentences caused much comment. This sentence originally ended in a question mark, but it somehow got changed to a period, which led people to believe it was a statement, and therefore Kingsolver's own belief. As for me, I think the change turns it from a sophomoric labored rhetorical question into a senioresque jaded ironic statement, without really changing its clear intent. But maybe that's just me.]

Man, I just re-read that column for the nth time, and I still want to strangle her.

I wrote you a while back about another Kingsolver column, in which she implies that WWII was won with Good Thoughts rather than guns. I wanted to keep it short, else I would have sent you my treatment for "The Kingsolvers", a weekly drama based on the lives of a deadly-earnest Right Thinking couple and their 2.3 officially cute children. Every week the Kingsolvers, with many thoughtful looks and lingering glances and grave smiles, use good will and non-violence and reason to decide how the world should be. And every week a cop or a sensible neighbor or an accident saves them from the consequences of their rose-colored contacts. This keeps them from ever having to alter their world view.

And maybe you would've put it on the letters page, and we would've both gotten sued. This might have gained notoriety for you, and lead to a Real Job, you bum. I can't see what it would have done for me, though. Notoriety for being sued by drippy novelists doesn't help astronomers much. Maybe she would've dragged the good name of the Orion Nebula through the mud, and then I'd have had her!

I might send you more email later today, about Gitmo and the dastardly Europeans and whether or not the US should just give up and become the Evil Empire and grind the face of humanity under our iron heels until the rest of the world rises up in revolt and plunges the planet into chaos for hundreds of years. Or I might do some real work.

1/30/2002 03:59:06 PM

As per Geov Parrish's comments, one cannot help but wonder if the lack of outrage he notes might not be due, at least in part, to people like himself?

In a November 5th piece published at Working for Change, Parrish made the following assertions:

Seven and a half million people at risk of dying in a matter of months. That's three times the number of people Pol Pot took years to kill. Thirty-five times the number that died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, combined. If 5,000 died on September 11, we're talking the equivalent number of deaths to ten World Trade Centers, every day, for 150 days. Slow, painful deaths. Entirely avoidable deaths. Deaths whose sole cause is not the United States, but most of which can still be prevented -- except that the United States is refusing to allow them to be prevented.

1/29/2002 10:25:43 PM

I found, when I first came to the U.S., way back in 1968 before you were born, that I thought I wanted to get what I then thought of as a "university degree" -- growing up in an Anglo country, that's what we called college degrees. But I then found that most of what I had already learned as a matriculate from an old-fashioned Australian high school, was more or less precisely what was taught in American colleges, except that we learned about the "American Rebellion" whereas folks here learned about the "American Revolution." A difference in emphasis.

On the other hand, we were also required to learn the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the use of demagoguery by the Nazis, all of which appear to be absent from the U.S. curriculum, if subsequent experience holds. I made a bet, once, when working in a U.S. Senate office, that none of the interns and few of the permanent staff knew what the significance of December 7, 1941 was. We did a room to room survey. I won.

I was asked, in the same office, in what century the Russian revolution occurred and I found that there were folks really, really, fuzzy on the approximate timing of the Civil War (or the War Between the States, if you prefer).

This series of events tended to sap my interest in paying some school vast sums of money so they could certify that I knew what I know perfectly well that I know.

My major educational stepping-stone was to internalize the U.S. spelling protocols for things like "color" which I had learned to spell as "colour". So I got over the panting for a degree because I figured it was a bit of a scam, if they were going to teach me stuff I already knew.

I left the university in Australia back when I did because back then in the Bad Old Days, you could not be married and also be at the University if you had the bad taste to be a female. Much to my shame, I was and am a female. Not a whole lot I can do about that, as I think things over. And meantime, my 37-year marriage is still on track and holding, so I suppose I have that to comfort me.

Meanwhile, among assorted careers that panned or failed to pan, I managed to be the advisor to the U.S. Senate Majority leader on questions of Constitutional law, among other adventures. It is not clear to me that the Republic failed or that egregious egregiousnesses developed as a direct result of this turn of events.

My short version of this story is: You probably don't want to work for the kinds of idiots that demand a degree. You want to work for or with folks interested in outcomes, not process. It is always infuriating to get the "where did you go to college?" question, like this is some key to universal understanding. It's not. I spent my working years surrounded by the products of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford and points south, north, east and west of them. My favorite memory was being asked by one of our U.S. Senators after a bit of whoop-de-doodle on the Senate floor, "And where did you go to law school?" and explaining that I actually did not.

You need to just wait out the time and hold out for a place that cares what you can do rather than some wimp-ridden outfit, staffed by credentialled idiots, who judge people by the only credentials they've ever been able to earn. These folks are the people who get As from Cornel West. Don't sweat it, I say. Knowing that it is easier to say than to do. I spent many years doing, and I know I'm right. You will light upon the publisher, the editor, the personnel person who is an adult and is prepared to behave like one: i.e. give you a trial run and let your work speak for itself.

There are many out here like you; competent but uncredentialled. Remember, it has been the credentialled assholes at Enron and Anderson who created that mess. Could you have done it? Could I? No way. We respect realities too much. That's one of the signature facts about the uncredentialled -- we focus on what works and what's sort of right. Folks with fancy degrees buy into fancy accounting. I mean, you really need a degree to understand what some of these people were doing.

1/29/2002 09:03:13 PM

1/29/2002 08:37:09 PM

I don't know if it's me, them or something else that's changed since September 11, but I'm finding myself less and less tolerant of the America Last crowd. It's not that I think they're 'helping the terrorists,' I'm just disappointed that their discontent has become so calcified that they're unable to recognize a common enemy when he bites them on the nose.

This is not particularly related to anything, but you helped me refine an idea I'd been working on for a while, so I want to share it with you (I think you'll appreciate it).

My passion in life is the written word, but database design has proven to be a more lucrative skill, so that's what I do, and I find it to be a fairly interesting metaphor at times, and an interesting lens through which to view problems. One night, after some intensive work on datamining and reporting, I started thinking about politics, and how I've always felt the simple line-spectrum from liberal to conservative, left to right to be inadequate.

What we need, I though, is not a line, but a Cartesian graph, with an X and Y axis, two dimensions rather than one. For argument's sake, let's set the two axes as Social and Economic, each running from liberal at one end to conservative at the other. Then, instead of two choices, liberal and conservative, we have four: Economically Liberal, Socially Liberal (ELSL), Economically Conservative, Socially Conservative (ECSC), ECSL, and ELSC.

Based on the slightly aging hippie-freaks I hang out with, there seems to be a pretty big cluster of people who are Economically Conservative and Socially Liberal. But we don't have a party. Not that we necessarily want one, but I'm operating on the idea that, while the map is not the territory, a better map does help you to better understand where you're going and what you're doing.

Then I read your column on October 25th, and realized that there should be a third axis: Temperament, ranging from Optimistic to Pessimistic. I say this, because I have a friend with whom I seem to agree on almost every issue, but we still are so fundamentally different, and I realized that our only real difference in viewpoint is that he has almost exactly pinpointed the time when everything started going to hell, while as I'm fairly sure everything's going to work out pretty good. And when you come down to it, that's a pretty big difference.

So, there it is: a new model of political beliefs, mapped in three dimensions. There are probably more potential axes, but I've never been any good at visualizing in more than three dimensions (in fact, I don't really believe those who claim they can), so I'm drawing the line at three. I hope this gives you something amusing to think about for half an hour or so.

1/29/2002 08:23:43 PM

How can you possibly dismiss or deny the contentions of the idealistic young people you quote on your website?

I have watched my tv in horror and shame as innocent French citizens are corralled at gunpoint and forced to eat at McDonald's. After all, for all its drawbacks McDonald's can only offer clean restaurants, (usually) pleasant service, and reliable food. If the evil US government were not working hand in glove with the hamburger interests the French could resume going to overpriced restaurants with questionable sanitary standards and surly service.

Even in my own city such things can happen. I stopped by at a Starbuck's near the court building right in downtown Detroit recently, and I could barely choke down my latte for the sight of the other customers, sullen and defeated, who had been kidnapped from their quotidian activities and forced into the coffee shop.

No wonder the rest of the world hates us. In our arrogant and brutal manner we have inflicted such monstrosities on the rest of the world despite their valiant attempts to stop it. I am considering running down to the federal courts and handing in my U.S. citizenship so I can emigrate to a more enlightened country that lacks the rampant consumerism of our greedy American society.

I'm not sure where to go, though. So many choices. The very last thing anyone in North Korea worries about is obtaining consumer goods. Syria has rejected evil American capitalism. Well, that's out because I'm Jewish. The Sudan has in its own friendly manner condemned the U.S. for violations of human rights. I don't think Sudanese join in the mad rush for goods...except slaves, of course.

1/29/2002 05:44:08 PM

You say that "irregardless" means something a little different from "regardless," but you don't say what. I've always considered "irregardless" to be dead wrong, and I wonder if the fact that you don't is a generational thing - although there are plenty of people of my age who use it. Anyway, I've tried to figure out what this slightly different meaning that you claim, is.

As my upcoming Reason Magazine piece will show, her non-denial of Lesley Stahl's absurd claim about 500,000 dead children became the Rosetta Stone of the anti-sanctions movement, and the foundation of a half-decade worth of terrible activist math (irregardless of the heartlessness of her statement).

"Regardless" would mean that the non-denial or perhaps even the activists were disregarding the heartlessness of the non-denial. This is not what I mean, of course. I mean that I am disregarding the heartlessness, in order to talk about the error made by those who were incited by it and by assuming that Stahl had a clue. "Irregardless" denies that the disregard is where, grammatically, it would appear to be, and places it with me or my statement or my article, where it belongs. "Regardless" suggests that people, as opposed to the writer's argument, are doing some disregarding, while the ir- in "irregardless" notifies the reader that this is not intended; it shakes the disregard loose from subject matter (non-denial and activists) and allows it to lodge with the writer's statement.

2. Not only the word "regardless" would be to blame for giving the impression that people or subject matter were disregarding; its placement long after what is doing the disregarding (your article) must take the blame. But this would require you to write something like "My upcoming Reason article, disregarding the heartlessness of her non-denial, will show that it..." The trouble with this is that it refers to the non-denial before the non-denial is described, and it suggests that your article is notable for disregarding heartlessness. :-)

I've put thought into this, but not enough to come up with a great solution, so I'll leave you with what I've written.

1/29/2002 05:08:14 PM

In your MLK day post dated today you made the following quote:

But it struck me, then as now, that legitimate arguments should be able to survive the truth.

1/29/2002 04:50:19 PM

Late last week I realized that it was possible that the "not POW" status might be part of a plan with a political aim. The goal of this plan is to provoke "silly" complaints from the usual suspects. Of course, they don't see the complaints as silly, but "the street" does.

Look at it from inside the administration. If you wanted to discredit the euroweenies, could you have come up with a better own goal for them to score?

1/29/2002 03:52:14 PM

I've only glanced at your bit on the Houston Business Journal and Enron, but I want to say, good for you!

This goes to something that I've argued with people as far back as the '60s, when they say that the government and the wicked capitalist media pull the wool over people's eyes. I've always asked them how they imagine that the mainstream media or any media would be giving them a very good picture of many things, when the media show every day that they don't even know or understand some elementary things; and much less should they expect them to know lots of things that merely might signal trouble or importance, such as the buzz in Houston. It doesn't matter whether no media could deliver what these people accuse them of not delivering, or whether the media only fail because they're lazy arrogant slugs, but the question is why these people expect anything else and think there's a conspiracy when they don't receive it.

Don't they know that there are many things in the world, and that a group of writers who are both ignorant and driven by what's hot, by attitude, by prejudice, by their own chatter, and by sloth could not deliver a powerfully informative account of everything, if, indeed, any group of people could? Of course, they don't know it, and that's why I often think of certain political persuasions as just slightly better grades of conspiracy theory.

1/29/2002 02:45:12 PM

12/14/2001 02:50:28 PM

Have you ever had the experience of listening to a sermon about a biblical passage, on the same day, by two different kinds of pastors: a Teacher, and a Preacher? Both offer something to their congregants. We learn about context, and what it was like in bce 30, from the teacher - it adds some nuance. These "teachers" tend to be newer to the profession, recently out of seminary, and eager to share (prove?) their knowledge and context with their audience. It's nice. I learn something. It doesn't inspire. It does very little for my Faith Journey. If Mr. Sullivan has any ambition to teach history, or deconstruct Jefferson, it's absent from his c.v. He aspires to reach a wider audience. To inspire. And, on the eve of Thanksgiving, to remind us and his British audience of what we have to be thankful for, and where some of the roots of our American Tree were planted.

If one is inclined to stay solely within secular terms, think of an artist, with words as the medium, or a composer, with words, again, instead of notes. I don't know how useful it is to analyze the brushstrokes, or parse the composition, in order to appreciate the beauty or the harmony. The goal, still, is to inspire others, and bask in the wonderment, of how we got here, to this moment.

I, in addition to Matt, Ken Layne, and Daniel Jacobson, think he succeeded admirably.

11/26/2001 03:32:19 PM

I am only a recent reader of your site, but have found it most stimulating and interesting. This is also my first venture into the world of emailing columnists, so I hope you (and your readers if you should choose to publish this) will bear with me.

Having spent more time than I care to remember in academic halls and elsewhere, I would predict that, in the wake of victory, there will in fact be several lines of dismissal, mostly from the American Left:

1. US victory was assured, so this is as much a victory as running over a puppy with a Mack truck. The inevitable line here will be that "of course" a major power with lots of weapons could defeat the Taliban. Indeed, it was nothing more than a mindless slaughter to begin with. Never mind, of course, that many of the folks making this line of argument were the same ones arguing that this would be Vietnam in 2001, it would all be a quagmire, yaddayaddayadda. If there are especially photogenic scenes, e.g., along the roads out of Mazar-i-Sharif or Kunduz, expect videoshots of burnt-out vehicles to elicit comparisons with the so-called "highway of death" between Kuwait City and Basra, and sniffing commentary about how US airpower had "slaughtered" retreating Taliban/al-Qaeda forces. Expect that, eventually, this will be raised (I'd guess a year or two) as another example of US inhumanity, not fighting fair, ignoring the laws of war, etc., etc.

2. We hit the wrong guys. This line will argue that we never "proved" that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda had anything to do with the Taliban. Some (especially among the Muslim communities here and abroad) will question whether we've ever proved that bin Laden and al-Qaeda had anything to do with 9-11. Of course, barring a smoking videotape, it is highly unlikely anything will persuade folks of the latter persuasion (and even then....), but they will, in turn, be cited by our own doubters and cynics. Thus, they will say, "And it is heard in the Arab/Muslim 'street' that the US has never provided evidence of bin Laden's involvement, increasing further the specter of anti-Americanism among the general population, here in blahblahblah." In any case, the suffering of the people of Afghanistan will be prominent, which will be the basis for:

3. The consequences "prove" that it was not worth it. Since we won so handily, we'll never "know" whether sanctions, the Hague, the UN, international tribunals, or my fairy godmother could or could not have resolved the issue more peaceably. But we will "know" that hundreds, thousands, nay billions of Afghans are/were starving, and it will all be our fault. Shoot, even now, there are arguments that the suffering of civilians in Kandahar and Kunduz raises questions about the viability and legitimacy of our war. Geov Parrish of "WorkingforChange.com" has written that 7.5 million Afghans are likely to starve. (That's pretty impressive, considering Afghanistan, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies has a population of only 24 million. So one-third are going to starve? Wow, shades of Pol Pot.) One could be churlish, and mention that there was a drought before the war began, that there were consequently population movements before the war began, that the Taliban had been confiscating food and aid even before the war began, and that all of these factors were almost certainly exacerbated by Taliban intransigence. Or one could just dismiss these carpers and ostriches for what they are, folks who would NEVER believe that anything other than American culpability was involved.

4. [British press special addition]. This war, with its display of American bellicosity and untrammeled power, shows (in no particular order, and in addition to the above):

A. The UK needs to follow its own path (which inevitably means joining the EU to help constrain American power).
B. The Americans are more heinous, bomb-happy, cowboy like than ever.
C. The United States is too dangerous to remain a monopolar power, there must be a counterbalance.

11/26/2001 03:17:42 PM

By weak coincidence, when I tuned in to your thing on Den Beste's challenge, I had just finished (maybe not yet finished) an exchange with a university professor old friend of mine on the question of lousy scholars, such as Chomsky, though perhaps Chomsky would be so extreme as not to be a topic. My friend wanted to know why people expect scholars to be objective ("objective" is what makes the connection with Den Beste's challenge), since scholars are only human, and an adversarial process will sort things out. I replied, in part, (1) that the question is not of some ordinary degree of failing but of egregious failing, and (2) that the reason why people expect it is that they need it, since they themselves are not scholars; so you have some segment of the public agreeing with scholarly baloney, while the rest of the public can only think up weak counterarguments on their own, along the lines of Jesus is the Son of God, we're nice people, Columbus couldn't have been a complete jerk, it's kind of hard to believe that Aristotle plagiarized black writers, etc.

11/26/2001 02:42:20 PM

Have been roaming through your site and some of the links at least once daily - stimulating for the intellect, although the time spent on the Web these days is taking a toll on my workload. Anyway, any day now my conscience will force me to the tip jar - I can't just keep using you like this, and not pay for it.

A few miscellaneous thoughts. First, concerning your challenge about re-engaging in political life - have you read Jedediah Purdy's book, For Common Things? It is undeniably earnest, but then, so am I, and so is meaningful civic engagement - I found this book to be satisfyingly thoughtful and very appealing.

Second, the current Atlantic Monthly has an article on differences between the "two Americas" - the red states and the blue states from presidential election. You had mentioned earlier that people living along the coastal corridors often don't understand the view from middle America - you might check out this short essay.

A thought arising from this article...Seems to me that the Heartlanders (wherever they may live, their values are middle America) emphasize their commonalities with others in their communities and dislike those who aspire to any kind of superiority (except athletic, which for some reason we all seem to see as admirable) - but the cultural Heartlanders are very proud of our superiority as Americans to other nations or cultures. Oppositely, the coastal intelligentsia usually feel superior to cultural middle America, but are often eager to disavow any national superiority to other nations or foreign cultures. What to make of these two oddly different manifestations of the same root-need to define identity and difference? Perhaps this factors in to the anti-war Left's view of current events - that they, being much less willing to claim cultural superiority to other nations than the Heartlanders, are accordingly also much less willing to make war on other nations and assert America's military superiority. (On the other hand, the Heartlanders are much less willing to recognize the flaws and inequalities in our own country, and to take action to correct these.)

Third, see article at this site. This captures an uneasy feeling that has been growing in me, that we are increasingly developing into a nation that compels conformity - I am sensing a 1950s kind of mood, getting stronger and stronger, and it's a bad déjà vu for me, having grown up during that relentlessly conformist period. I was fortunate enough to be in all the safe majorities - white, middle class, Protestant Christian, British Isles ancestry and a suitably long genealogy in America - but even so, I still remember my feeling of estrangement, and the shocks that came with realizing, for example, that many of my neighbors didn't believe in evolution, or in the right of workers to unionize, or the fact that divorce was sometimes a life-saving necessity. People were so vehemently opposed to non-mainstream ideas then, so frightened that those ideas would topple their security and prosperity in the economically golden years after WWII. The whole Communist hysteria thing, the nation at large falling prey to McCarthyism...

I am sensing that same quality of furious vehemence now, in the reactions to the dissension about our political and military response to the 9-11 attacks. What bothers me isn't so much the insistence that we present a united front to the world - it's the inexplicable level of anger, of outrage, that's aroused against those questioning the consensus view. It's not as if the questioners are actively plotting the overthrow of the government, or smuggling crazed Arab fundamentalists into sensitive military installations, or contributing to pseudo-charities that actually fund terrorists...they're just expressing contrary ideas. But so many Americans, at all levels, are enraged by this.

It seems to me that now, as in the 1950s, the vehemence of the response to divergent views comes mostly from fear, with some common factors at play. In the 1950s, underlying all that prosperity, there were pervasive fears about nuclear war, and the knowledge gap between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and the fear that we were going to be bombed to smithereens or undermined by subversives or overrun by Communism or poisoned by nuclear fallout. Ordinary hard-working citizens could feel as if they had a great deal to do with their own prosperity, but the threats seemed far beyond their control or ability to influence. Perhaps the combination of insidious fears about outside threats and the perceived ineffectualness of personal action against those threats produced that fifties backlash of intolerance and conformity. The possibilities for terrifying, externally generated dangers that the average person couldn't control might have made people over-controlling in the internal arenas that they could influence - social norms, acceptable beliefs, personal proprieties.

Now, we have again been enjoying amazing prosperity, but our security has been shattered by pervasive fears about externally generated threats over which the average person has no control. We're aware again of our vulnerability to nuclear attack, to things falling from the skies, as well as to subversives unrecognized in our midst. Plus, we have the added horror of biological attacks. We again feel, correctly, that individually we are largely defenseless against these outside threats. So our fear is re-directed, vented internally against our own, in reactions that frequently seem disproportionate to the "offense."

I wonder how far all this will go - if we will regress again to black-lists, and patriotism hearings on Capitol Hill. I know, I'm a pessimist, you're an optimist...did you see the psychological study that came out a couple of years ago, comparing pessimists and optimists? No great shakes - a less than startling finding that optimists were much happier and felt that they were accomplishing more in their lives. But the interesting result to me was that the pessimists were much better at correctly perceiving the true state of affairs than the optimists.

Still, I'll hope that I'm going to be proved wrong in my Eeyore outlook...

11/26/2001 02:30:52 PM

I appreciate what little I have been able to read of your work. You have a very interesting objectivist stance and style which sometimes confuse and usually refresh one after dealing with purists (myself sometimes included) over these recent affairs.

However, I do disagree with your contention that the balance has been more good than bad over the last century and beyond. Barring a highly detailed balance sheet, we cannot know for sure -- or at least we have not found the best way to measure such a thing. My stoic side argues that many more people live more urgently contrasting lives, suffer greater disease, lose a greater share of basic rights, and die more brutal deaths, at the hands of laissez-faire conflict in the context of progressive development than in its relative absence. To be an apologist for Iran-Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Iran-Contra, Afghanistan, Hiroshima, arms to questionable emerging "republics," and other effects of our longtime progressive stance, simply because freedom has appeared to reign as a result when viewed from a distance, would be to make a major accounting assumption and possibly a grievous error.

In addition, to isolate such countries as the Soviet Union from the rest of the world in questions of democracy and dictatorship is problematic, because the Soviet Union was never in a vacuum. If it were on an island, cut off from world opinion and media (as it attempted but failed), and were not hounded by the Western powers (who were justifiably terrified at the prospect of being absorbed), things might have been different. One could argue that the Soviet Union's greatest error was its expansionist policies in preference to one of strict isolationism. No country exists in a vacuum. It is perpetually exposed to outside influences. Therefore, its policies are hardly the only ideas shaping its future. In fact, the contrast between its policies and those of its neighbors seems to be what causes much of the dialectical strife.

To the main point, if we don't have a balance sheet on hand, I contend it would be better to err on the side of caution and conservatism in terms of the overall laissez-faire argument, particularly as it applies to trade in this case.

I highly recommend a book which you may already have read, and which I am finishing now in context with Saudi Arabia and the current Middle East problems: Pierre Terzian, L'Etonnant Histoire de l'OPEP (OPEC: The Inside Story). It is from the mid-1980s, but it is an excellent book and much of it is topical today, as it explains many of our East-West conflicts in terms of the petroleum resource. It documented, perhaps for the first time in the open, certain strategic stances and methods of trickery practiced by the U.S. to control oil markets.

My thesis, which I litmus-tested on a gang of unusually impolite Texas-style bunker libertarians last week, has been that the princely Wahabite sons of Saudi Arabia and their confidants have been perhaps the world's greatest per-capita beneficiaries of our insatiable thirst for oil these past 30 to 40 years. It is with this thesis in mind that I am reading Terzian's book and coming to the prospect that -- setting the ecological problem aside for the moment -- our excessive consumption habits may have fueled the largest terrorist network since, say, Genghis Khan's Golden Horde, while the relative benefit may have been less than we are willing to acknowledge. I refer you to another article, “Economic fate again in Saudi hands,” by Chris Byron, which you may have read.

If, hypothetically speaking, we and our parents had been more frugal and settled for approximately half the gasoline consumption in our lifetimes, we might have been able to keep consumption within the bounds of "splendid isolation" rather than have to deal with the Middle East and suffer consequences of this modernist version of the Monroe Doctrine. Not that I believe we could have foreseen such a calamity, nor that nothing good has come out of this. But this is to say that extravagant consumption, given such an interdependent world picture, can result in our resources motivating things far beyond our control. Again, whether the sum total is good or bad is the great problem being debated, but I say that if we do not know for sure -- if one life in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Israel, China or anywhere else hangs in the balance -- we should proceed with utter caution as if that life were our own. I'm not speaking in terms of caution in foreign policy, but in terms of individual consumption, which is the only real thing we individually can control with precision.

11/26/2001 02:17:44 PM

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