Unsolicited book review: The past and future of work

The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, by Matthew B. Crawford

Makers, by Cory Doctorow

Years ago, when we lived in the middle of New Jersey, I managed to get myself elected to the local school board, mostly by accident. This wasn’t exactly the plan—it was the incumbents, and me, and I just did it so that there would be a contested election. To my surprise, I got elected. And one of the first things I got to do, after dealing with the budget that got voted down that year for the first time in living memory, and the proposal to get rid of the German teacher (which passed), was deal with the proposal to get rid of the shop program and replace it with something that had “technology” in whatever the rubric was, presumably because everyone in the shop classes was now going to become a “knowledge worker.” I spoke against the plan, but I think I lost the argument, which was not unusual. I voted to keep the German teacher, and that didn’t work out either.

It turns out that this was part of an emerging national trend that I was unaware of at the time. But Matthew Crawford points out in his stimulating but frustrating Shop Class as Soulcraft, you can trawl eBay and pick up all sorts of used shop equipment being sold off by school districts around the country. This may be a good thing for the hobbyist woodworker looking to upgrade his band saw, but as a national trend, it leaves much to be desired. Crawford has written an extended rant against this trend—one where not only does anyone know how to do anything anymore, but no one is bothering to teach anyone how to do anything either. To a large extent it’s a successful rant—he has some good thoughts on why this is a bad trend. Like all rants, it leaves something to be desired, but it successfully captures a certain truth as well.

Coincidentally, I had just finished Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman when I picked up the Crawford book, and I thought they might complement each other nicely. The fact that they don’t, really, has more to do with the aims of each book, which are somewhat different, as we’ll see. But both Sennett and Crawford have written important books that require our attention. Sennett’s volume is the first of a planned trilogy dealing with the whole notion of craft, and it use (and abuse) in the tapestry of human history and development. As such, it is a more philosophic and historical work than is Crawford’s, and is a volume of intellectual history in a way that Crawford’s book is not. On the other hand, Crawford’s book is likely to resonate more with current American and European readers, because his subject has an immediacy and obvious contemporary context that Sennett’s appears to not have.

Sennett is concerned with craftsmanship as an end itself, but it’s more than that. He is concerned with craftsmanship in its broadest context, that of mastery of a set of skills, and includes not only what we would expect him to include, but other areas as well, such as cooking and music-making. Because mastery of skills can cover a broad range of activities, Sennett does as well. And Sennett makes it clear early on that he is concerned not only with the impact of this mastery of skills on society (and we’ll get more of that in the next two volumes), but he is also concerned with what one needs to do in order to achieve this state of mastery. And what sort of community facilitates all of this, and what sort of community does not. And it turns out it’s a lot more complicated than we would think. Sennett takes us through the physiology of the level of hand/eye coordination that needs to be developed by someone operating something manually. Sennett also takes us through the history of crafting things, at least in the where the medieval guilds are generally used as an exemplar of the craft system, with its hierarchy of skills, its period of apprenticeship, its quest for perfection. Sennett also spends considerable time discussing the British—or, more precisely, English—Arts and Crafts movement, and in particular the influence of John Ruskin, for whom the medieval craftsman was the ideal for what work should be, and what was being lost in the mass industrialization of the Victorian era.

Sennett is so broad ranging—cooking, Ruskin, Diderot’s Encyclopedia, music-making, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s architectural adventures, the physiology and musculature of the hand, the role of community in the creation of the craftsman—that at times the going does get a bit heavy. As exhilarating as this journey is, it sometimes gives the feeling of being perhaps a bit too broad. But that is exactly Sennett’s point—the ability and willingness to simply do good work is indispensable to being human, and in order to understand what we’re losing as a culture and society when we make it impossible for a substantial number of fellow citizens to do just that, Sennett recognizes that we need to understand the complexity of what goes into creating craftsmen and craftswomen. It’s not just the creation and appreciation of good work—it’s having a society tat inculcates the processes that re necessary to learn to do good work, and to support the work once it’s done.

There is a philosophical theme running through here as well, which is Sennett’s response to his old teacher Hannah Arendt. Arendt made a distinction between activities that fulfilled what she referred to as animal needs, and other work that reflected “higher” activities of art and culture. Sennett finds this a false and dangerous distinction, one that ultimately betrays the goals of the Enlightenment. Sennett has a long discussion of Diderot’s Encyclopedia (the full title of which is actually “Encyclopedia, or Dictionary of Arts and Crafts.” As Sennett points out, this was essentially a 35-volume collection of Arts and Crafts instructions—how to blow glass, how to repair furniture and so on. And this was produced with painstaking attention to the skills of the craftsmen represented by the Arts and Crafts surveyed by Diderot. This was Diderot’s attempt to repair the bridge that had grown us as a result of the eclipse of he medieval guild system during the Renaissance, when work and craft began to be separated. For Sennett, the task of he craftsman is to integrate the hand and the mind so that each informs the other—and much of the book is a discussion of attempts to do just that by individuals in history, and of the explication of he need to do this by thinkers such as Diderot and Ruskin.

Sennett has written a book of history, philosophy and psychology, and his discussions only rarely touch on the fact that so few people in modern America of Britain (where Sennett lives much of the year) actually have this sort of work to do these days—work that actually engages the mind and the hand, work that is the type of work where one can strive to a certain form of perfection. But this is in there anyway through Sennett’s ongoing consideration of the role of community in the creation and sustenance of craftsmanship—one does not become skilled at anything, really, without a social support system of some kind. Which is one reason why getting rid of shop classes is a really bad idea—learning anything, really, involves an apprenticeship, and if we remove the structured support group of the class, where else will these skills be developed? One reason why the conservative onslaught on the union movement over the past several decades has been baffling is the fact that most unions are premised on the apprenticeship system—and this is a deeply conservative method of not only passing skills on, but ensuring that those skills are used in the pursuit of good work. Of course, it may very well be that conservatives aren’t interested in good work, but I doubt it—the folks over at Front Porch Republic certainly are, and this is a strain of conservative thought that has not yet disappeared from cultural discourse.

Crawford, who refers to Sennett more than once, presents a similar argument ultimately, but we get there a different way. For what Crawford delights in telling us (endlessly, it seems at times) is how much he enjoys working with his hands, as opposed to sitting around thinking like he did when he was in graduate school at Chicago and in his subsequent think-tank employment. Crawford constantly seems to be a little too enthusiastic about presenting his academic credentials—really, he shouldn’t, because it does end up distracting from his central argument. And it’s a powerful argument, similar to Sennett’s—we risk devaluation as individuals by our lack of knowing how to do anything. And Crawford clearly does enjoy making things—in his case, motorcycles that run, since he runs his own motorcycle shop. And he is clearly upset by our devaluation of this sort of skillset in modern American culture. Crawford delights in a job well done in the shop—but he has broader concerns as well, mainly the fact that no one knows how to do anything, which means no has any appreciation of the work that people actually do.

This is exactly the sort of thing that is likely to appeal to the crunchycons over at Front Porch Republic, and sure enough it has—there have already been a number of posts on Crawford and his book (although these never gets as embarrassing as the fawning series Crooked Timber had on China Mievelle a few years back). And book reviews have generally been enthusiastic as well, as if Crawford wasn’t mining the same vein Wendell Berry has been mining for the past forty years or so. Clearly, it has to be said, Crawford’s academic background is a factor here. If some motorcycle shop owner in rural Tennessee without Crawford’s academic background (which is impressive, it should be pointed out) were to approach a publisher with a manuscript extolling the virtues of skilled physical labor, how far would he get? To ask the question is to already know the answer. So what we have is that old Eric Hoffer feeling—hey, look, a philosopher telling us that philosophy isn’t as fun as a valve job.

What detracts from the book is that Crawford seems a bit too mindful of this—he just knows how cute this all is, and it gets a bit wearying. As do the throwaway comments that not only don’t seem to fit, they don’t even seem to make sense. For example, we get this (as a number of other reviewers have noted as well):

Wood was for hippies. The wood whisperer with his hand planes, his curly maple, and his workshop on Walden Pond is a stock alter ego of gentlefolk everywhere, and I wanted none of it.

This sounds an awful lot like my own kids used to sound when they talked about hippies—as if it was someone else who rediscovered William Morris, Art Nouveau, and living off the land. This does not sound like someone who has exactly absorbed Sennett’s message, frankly. My kids grew out of it, and maybe Crawford will too, at some point, and hopefully then we’ll no longer get pointless but snide comments on “the 1968 generation,” whoever they are, and multiculturalism. I had a similar response to Crawford’s vaguely anti-feminist comments in the context of the joys of male camaraderie in the shop. Crawford is too smart to really take this seriously—there are joys to be had in male companionship, just as there are joys to be had in female companionship. How any of this relates to Crawford’s main theme, particularly the devaluation of work n modern America, is a little vague, and eventually seems like little more than an attempt to establish some sort of street cred.

Which is a shame, actually, since there is a very important book buried in here busting to get out if only Crawford would let it. Because what Crawford is really concerned about, like Sennett, is what kind of society we get when we no longer take the notion of craftsmanship seriously. In fact, a society that looks pretty much like the society we’re getting, with permanently high unemployment, little appreciation of craftsmanship, and the inability to properly write an instruction manual. Crawford’s description of the current state of writing instruction manuals is one of the funniest in the book, a book actually chock full of funny and instructive anecdotes. Who will not appreciate Crawford’s discussion of those ridiculous little screws that hold modern gadgets together for which no known screwdriver actually exists in one’s own workshop? Or his discussion of what we all find under the hood of a car, pretty much any car, these days. (Ironically, one of the ideals of the hippies that Crawford is so dismissive of was to be able to fix your own car.) For Crawford, it’s all of one piece, though—our collective disregard as a society for actual work, and the consequences we reap as a society for our inattention to the joys of work properly done. It’s the artificial distinction between ”knowing” and ”doing” that has brought us so much grief. And Crawford makes an elegant argument that this whole approach is specious—and in this regard comes close to Sennett’s principal argument as well. And, of course, Berry. Like Berry and Sennett, Crawford is deeply appreciative of the kind of knowledge that manual and physical workers need to develop, and deeply distrustful of a culture that does not perceive the value of work.

Here Crawford and Sennett converge, and at times Crawford the bike shop owner often sounds a bit more radical that that old lefty Sennett. Crawford spends quite a lot of time laying out how work actually reflects our engagement in the world, and gives a good discussion of Heidegger to boot, specifically Heidegger’s attempts to get at the whole notion of engagement with the world. For Crawford, as for Aristotle and Heidegger, it’s through what we do. And at its best Shop Craft as Soulcraft is a plea to appreciate the work that people do, to move past the sort of divide that has emerged the past several decades. Both Crawford and Sennett want us to have the tools to live well—and this means a certain self-reliance that comes from knowing how to do things well. For Crawfod, like Sennett, believes that everyone is capable of good work, and deserves the opportunity to do good work. And he is as unhappy as Sennett that society continues its surge away from the sustaining of communities where people can do just that.

And that is exactly the kind of society that we’ve got now, particularly in the Anglosphere—the US, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and, to a lesser extent, Canada. Because the economic model we’ve been living with the past three decades has in fact been attacking this sort of work. But for all his rants at ”managerialism,” Crawford has little interest in discussing the wider economic and political system that has allowed this estrangement between work and the rest of society to develop, other than to note that that’s the way it is. In Europe, with which I am vaguely familiar, living right next door, it is different to a considerable extent—Germany has extensively build on its apprenticeship system, as has France. Which may in part explain why Germany, until very recently, was the world’s largest exporter in spite of the high value of the Euro relative to other currencies (China has recently caught up). France, which as everyone in the US knows is deeply “socialist,” (and we know this because Republican senators from southern states keep telling us), has managed to maintain an agricultural system where it is still possible for small farmers to make a living, and for the kind of local knowledge underlying Sennett's notion of craftsmanship is still surviving, if not actually thriving.

In fact, one of the disappointments of both books is their non-attention to the political and economic trends that dominate modern American life to the detriment of the kind of self-reliance and craftsmanship that both authors discuss. Now, I’ll admit that this is a bit unfair, since certainly in Sennett’s case this is clearly beyond the scope of the current book (although not necessarily of his project.) But it is a bit of a surprise that Crawford doesn’t take the next step—a discussion of the social, economic and institutional impediments to doing good work, other than that there are a lot of crappy jobs out there. For all his exhortations that we should, if not become motorcycle mechanics, at least give due respect to the kind of work he (and millions of others) actually do, it is a surprise that he doesn’t give a more thorough discussion to the impediments that not only exist, but which keep growing. These have certainly been dealt with successfully in the past—David Noble’s Forces of Production, and George Anders’ Merchants of Debt, both have discussed extensively the gutting of the kinds of institutional knowledge in machine tool manufacturers for the sake of corporatism and profitability that Crawford and Sennett want to place at the center of our notion of work. There was a time in the history of the American machine tool industry when good work meant a certain kind of interaction between designer and machine—that went by the wayside a long time ago. In both Noble’s and Anders’ books, we see the kind of craftsmanship sought by Sennett and Crawford deliberately undermined and abandoned by management, for a variety of reasons—in these cases, union busting and margins, respectively.

In fact, it’s not hard to envision the remains of economies in which good work is abandoned. We see the detritus all around us, in the Midwest manufacturing corridor in the US, in the abandoned industrial cities of Northern England, and the constant movement of manufacturing around the world as capital relentlessly seeks out cheaper labor—today it’s China, tomorrow it’s Cambodia, all so that Wal-Mart can undercut local merchants. For all of Sennett’s diligence to the evolution of craftsmanship, and Crawford’s impassioned defense of the value of skilled physical work, we still inhabit a society where such work continues to be devalued, and where the institutional barriers to doing real work continue to get higher. The consequences are all around us, and there’s no reason to think this situation will get any better any time soon. We live in an economy where, according economist Samuel Bowles, about one in four jobs exists to protect the riches of the wealthy. Localism is partly the answer, as Wendell Berry and the Front Porch Republic crew keep telling us, but true localism requires the maintenance, development and sharing of a variety of knowledge and skillsets that are rapidly disappearing.

But one can always hope. One who does is Cory Doctorow, speculative fiction writer and erstwhile proprietor of Boing Boing, one of the more interesting blogs out there. Doctorow has a particular interest in technology, about which he is deeply knowledgeable and deeply concerned. His new novel, Makers, is a hoot, a serious romp, if such a thing were possible. The title—Makers—tells it all. It’s about the human compulsion for making things, even that even when denied the opportunity to do so, people will still try. A whole bunch of attractive geeks make interesting things, and then other people do as well, and so on until crises emerge, etc. This is the really hard kind of speculative fiction to write—the kind that’s about the world in 20 years. And America is a deeply unhappy place at this point—millions living in abandoned malls, eating crap food, and then suddenly getting the opportunity to do something in a culture that is, if anything, more corporatist than the one Americans inhabit now. Thank heaven for small, stupid robots. I won’t bother telling you what the New Work is all about—you’ll just have to read it for yourself, but Sennett and Crawford would approve. Highly recommended.

Blogging Blair, redux

Well, sadly, I couldn't take my laptop into the auditorium, so it's all written notes. You might as well head over to the Guardian Iraq Inquiry website for the live blog there. It's the best one out there. So before I start watching the talking heads give their analysis, or, even worse, that of other Labour Party hacks (Margaret Beckett is droning on right now on Sky--anyone who lives in the UK will know what a dreaded prospect that is) here are some observations.

It was a bit surreal, in fact--the Alternative Viewing Facility turns out to be the large auditorium in the Queen Elizabeth II Center where the inquiry is being held. There must have been 800 people in there, not many of them likely to have been on Blair's side. All very well behaved, I must say--and a really broad age range, Clearly a lot of people had taken time off from work, as I had. This was important. It's like being in the Iraq marches in 2002 and 2003--there was a need to bear witness, and this was one of those occasions that required it. Chilcot, to his credit, understands this, I think. It goes without saying that neither Tony Blair nor the current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown (who testifies next month) wanted this inquiry. There were lots of demonstrators outside, of course, but there seemed to be even more police.

So what did we learn? Aside from the fact that Blair remains self-righteous and sanctimonius, supremely confident in the correctness of his own judgment, and incapable of learning from experience. So anyone expecting anything close to regrets or an apology was probably disappointed, but ultimately not surprised. It's actually quite scary how much Blair resembles Bush in temperament--they each have a very simple view of the world, and are not afraid to act upon it. And Blair does have a simple view of the world, although he does have the ability to present it with enough dross hanging off of it that people can be taken in--as many Labour voters and politicians will attest. So today, we got the simple story for why things went wrong--Al Quaida and Iran, both mentioned a dozen times at least.

So in terms of the committee, I thought that Lyne was actually the most impressive, although kudos to Baroness Prashar for not letting Blair interrupt her, and for shutting him up when it needed to be done. Much of the questioning over the legality of the war, and how that decision was reached, took place this morning, but Lyne did an admirable job of summarizing the state of play up to Lord Goldsmith's change of mind the week before the invasion. And he led Blair into a trap so elegant Blair didn't even see it coming, and even now may not realize how badly he has been compromised on this issue. For what Lyne made very clear was that the legal opinion that Goldsmith came up with was one that allowed Blair to make the decision to take Britain to war unilaterally--just when Blair needed it--in spite of Blair's throwaway comment that if the opinion had been the reverse, of course everything would have stopped, and there would have been no invasion. Right. Because what Goldsmith came up with was an opinion that stated that, contrary to the Foreign and Colonial Office's view that a decision that Saddam was in breech of Security Council Resolution 1441 could only be determined by the Security Council, meant rather that this decision could be taken by individual countries. Which, conveniently, was the view of the legal eagles in the Bush administration. Lyne also kept returning to the point that this was an opinion that was not then, nor is it now, accepted by practically anyone in the international law community. This, of course, does not bother Blair in the least. Pretty neat, actually--Goldsmith provided Blair with his own legal defense. That's what a good lawyer will do for you.

In spite of repeated assurances by the broadcast media this evening that Blair performed wonderfully, I don't think he did. He looked stressed, and while his answers were occasionally fluid and practiced, assured even, often he was groping. Like when Lyne, and Baroness Prashar, and even Chilcot, made it clear that they were not about to accept the notion that the post-invasion problems associated with the occupation were caused solely by Al Quaida and Iran. What no one could have expected, Blair kept stating, was that Iran would get involved in trying to screw up the reconstruction. No one could have possibly predicted, etc. This was greeted by skeptical questions about whether or not there had been a serious risk assessment of the whole process. Oh, there was, Blair assured us, many of them. Well, why didn't they anticipate this, commissioners wondered? Well, because Al Quaida and Iran etc. Nor were they impressed with Blair's occasional non-answers, such as to the question of wouldn't it have been a good idea if the US had notified Britain of Paul Bremner's decision to shut down the Baathist party and disband the army before the fact--a decision that created a whole boatload of problems for the occupying forces, and which placed Britain, which had a certain legal responsibility as joint occupier or Iraq, in a quandary. Or Abu Graibh. Or any of the other interesting developments of April 2004. Blair kept trying to take things to now, and how much better it all is these days, but the committee wasn't having much of this.

Blair was sort of useless on major stuff, not telling us anything he hasn't already said many times before. But there were moments when a larger truth emerged, such as his basic non-response to being ignored on major US Iraq policy decisions, like disbanding the Iraqi army, or Abu Graibh. And this leads to one of Blair's major flaws--his obsequiousness to the US. Because one of the things that has emerged forcefully in testimony the past several weeks has been Blair's concern about--indeed, devotion to--the alliance with the US. We've written about it before, and how this entanglement has meant considerable grief to the UK at times, without much in return. But this doesn't seem to bother Blair. Members of the committee, I suspect, were probably as surprised as the rest of this at Blair's blithe unconcern with not being informed about major US decision making. For example, it's pretty clear now--and has been for a number of years--that a considerable amount of the Iraq disaster can be laid squarely at the feet of the lack of interest in--in fact, complete unconcern with--planning for much of anything beyond the invasion by the Bush administration. This thought never appears to cross Blair's mind, for whom the problems with the occupation are purely the result of Al Quaida and Iran. But it's also indicative of another of Blair's major flaws--his cowardice. Blair undoubtedly sees himself engaged in some sort of heroic struggle with the forces of darkness. The reality is that he couldn't stand up to Bush--and will be dogged by this for the rest of his life, which perhaps explains his escape into the strange reality he inhabits.

I was a bit surprised at the lack of discussion of regime change, about which nothing was said during the afternoon session, presumably because Blair backed off his earlier comments on this issue. That was about the only thing he backed off on, though. He has no regrets, not one. He would do it all again. Because Blair's world is binary. Hence his repeated insistence that if he hadn't gone to war, Saddam would undoubtedly be pursuing WMD and competing with Iran on the nuclear front. Blair's worldview allows no other options--ether invade Iraq to remove Saddam, or face a future where our very fates are hostage to Saddam's madman whims. That there might be other alternatives does not even cross his mind. And this was the case in 2003, clearly--either invade Iraq, or Saddam would win and the US and UK would lose. That there might have been other alternatives is never given a second thought. Reality, for Blair, is never troubling, because it's always binary--the notion that there might be subtlety, nuance or complications is never tolerated. It's just not possible that the world is complicated--for every problem, there's a simple Blair solution. Too bad he hasn't figured out the mideast yet. But I'm sure the clients of JP Morgan and that hedge fund, and his students at Yale, are thrilled to receive this deeply informed wisdom from time to time. Because the world is actually a simple, uncomplicated place, and there's always a simple Blairite explanation for why things don't quite work out as planned.

Which is why, at the end when he gave his defense of his actions without a shadow of a doubt, you could tell that he believed every word of it. This is a man who genuinely believes that the world is a better place because he went to war. This is one genuinely scary guy.

Blogging Blair

OK, today is the big day. We’ve already had three hours of Tony Blair this morning, but they’re only letting the public in to either a morning or an afternoon session for Blair’s testimony, and I got the afternoon. I can’t believe I got one of these tickets—I never win anything. But here we are.

And I haven’t heard back on whether they have Wi-Fi in the room that I’ll be sitting in, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to post. If not, it will all come out in one large post later.

So what happened this morning? Blair was asked about what happened at Crawford (nothing special, no secret deal), the relation of Iraq to the mid-east peace process (none, apparently, although he said he was “frustrated” at the lack of progress), his relationship with Bush (fine, and did not set conditions). So far, Blair’s main point is that 9/11 changed everything—specifically, the perception of risk. So even though he more or less conceded that the actual risk posed by Saddam Hussein did not change, the perceived risk did. And he was very fudgy on one point—he saw no real difference between regime change and disarming Iraq, an interesting non-distinction for someone who trained as a lawyer to make. Blair also said that his comments in his now-notorious interview with Fern Britton of the BBC last year was a mistake. We’ve also learned that Blair seems to worry a lot about threats—he’s mentioned Iran several times today. Is he secretly lamenting that he didn’t get an attack on Iran in while he still could?

And who is doing the asking? This is where it gets a bit interesting, because as we have noted before, not one of the five members of the committee is a trained lawyer. And certainly none of them has any prosecutorial experience. Three are senior and widely respected civil servants, and the other two distinguished historians. All are peers. They are not all completely without some entanglements, as we shall see. All were appointed by Gordon Brown.

Sir John Chilcot—Chair. Formerly a member of the Butler inquiry (which was great at amassing evidence about the massaging of intelligence leading up to the war, but not so good on drawing firm conclusions) and a number of other investigative committees. He has held a variety of senior civil service positions, including Permanent Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office, and is associated with a number of police groups.

Sir Lawrence Freedman—Historian, Professor War Studies at the Imperial War College, and writer on wars, including this one, which he generally supported in the run-up. More famously, he contributed to Tony Blair’s famous 1999 speech that justified “liberal interventionism.”

Sir Martin Gilbert—not the mystery writer, but rather an historian and the Official Biographer of Winston Churchill (six volumes worth, plus editing the 12 volumes of letters), who in 2004 wrote (ht to Andy Beckett of The Guardian) "George W Bush and Tony Blair . . . may well, with the passage of time . . . join the ranks of [Franklin] Roosevelt and Churchill [as war leaders] when Iraq has a stable democracy." He is the only committee member with military experience, as far as I can tell, having spent two years in the army for his National Service.

Sir Roderick Lyne—former British ambassador to the Russian Federation (2000-2004), and currently Deputy Chairman of Chatham House (the Royal Institute for International Affairs). Has held a number of diplomatic posts, including to the World Trade Association

Baroness Usha Prashar—First Civil Service Commissioner from 2000-2005, and on various quangos before and since.

A very good summary of the state of play, including the players and their styles, can be found in Andy Beckett’s piece in yesterday’s Guardian.

So far as I can tell, Lyne has been the most aggressive, if that’s the word, in his questioning of previous witnesses. But these are mostly civil servants, whose modus operandi, above all, is politeness. So reporters have been having fun translating, as it were—when one of them says “I’m puzzled by…” what is really meant is “I don’t believe a word of this,” that sort of thing.

And what lines of questioning should we be expecting this afternoon? Well, clearly the legal justification for the war issue has not gone away—in fact, it has been compounded, particularly by Lord Goldsmith’s admission on Wednesday that the main impetus for changing his view was a series of conversations he had in the US with members of the Bush administration. This is somehow not comforting at all, and committee members will likely pursue this issue. The other major issue will be the issue of whether the military was somewhat kept in the dark of the lead-up to the war, and was therefore unprepared for the occupation that followed the initial invasion. This was a clear message from a number of military and foreign Office officials who have previously testified.

More Chilcot

We learned a lot this past week in the Iraq Inquiry. Jack Straw, for example, told us that the almost thought the war was a bad idea, and was, well, awfully close to being illegal. But then he changed his mind, apparently, maybe. That's the way it went pretty much the whole week. Geoff Hoon agreeably admitted that he did what he was told to do. I suppose reading between the lines, we learned that everything that was done under Tony Blair was against the will and judgment of those who worked for him--and yet, somehow, they managed to do what he told them to do anyway.

And we have an exciting week coming up. First, we have a bunch of people from the Foreign Office, who will be telling us that in all likelihood the invasion of Iraq was illegal without a second UN resolution, which of course Tony was happy to ignore. The later in the week we'll have Lord Goldsmith, who will be quizzed on his change of mind about the legality of the war. Finally, on Friday, we get Tony Blair for the whole day, both morning and afternoon. We got Goldsmith for the whole day on Thursday, as well. So these two days will be packed with all sorts of squirming, evasiveness, vagueness, and bad memory, so we're looking forward to this immensely. All of this raises an interesting question, especially in light of the Dutch report last week that determined that the war was in fact illegal under international law--will this panel, none of whom is a lawyer, be able to come to a similar conclusion, even if it wanted to?

Against all our expectations, we managed to score a ticket to Blair's performance on Friday, in the afternoon session. So we get to witness history, and maybe to live blog Blair's testimony as well. Good times. Plus, Gordon Brown announced uninvited (at least by the commission) that he would graciously testify. Probably completely unrelated to the fact that there will be an election sometime in the next four months.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft had some interesting observations the other day in The Independent with regard to the Blair defenders, what few there still are, and the fact that so many of Blair's former associates have been turning against him:

There is nothing very dignified about the way they have been covering their backs and settling the score, with some of Blair's erstwhile cabinet ministers now doing the same. With all his "profoundly difficult moral and political dilemma", Jack Straw almost admitted to Chilcot that the war was a mistake, and suggested that he would have preferred to keep out of it.

But then there's a score to settle. What MacShane fails to acknowledge is that Blair bullied and browbeat Cabinet, Parliament and the whole civil and military elite into a war almost none of them really wanted – and that what he has said since, not least in his gruesome television interview with Fern Britton before Christmas, has horrified his former colleagues, or well nigh betrayed them.

He really is a very strange creature, with his exalted sense of destiny, his total lack of scruple when he thinks the ends are justified, his readiness to use fair means or foul to get his way, and in particular his quite remarkable capacity for selective amnesia. One consequence is that he often fails to see that he is completely contradicting himself, and in the process humiliating his faithful allies.

To borrow a hallowed phrase from Irish politics, those who trusted Blair have again and again been left with their arses hanging out of the window. He did that with Roy Jenkins over electoral reform, with Paddy Ashdown over an alliance between Labour and Lib Dems, with David Trimble over IRA violence, and with his credulous pro-European supporters over the European constitution.
....
And he has done it over Iraq, in a manner so flagrant as to raise doubts about his mental stability, or at least suggest that he has no grasp at all of objective truth and falsehood. In the Commons on 13 October 2004, he denounced the Liberal Democrats, saying that if they had their way, "Saddam Hussein and his sons would still be running Iraq. And that is why I took the stand I did. I take it now and I at least will stick by it". At that, the Labour MP Bob Wareing asked him how he could explain having told Parliament on 25 February 2003, "Even now, today, we are offering Saddam the prospect of voluntarily disarming through the United Nations. I detest his regime but even now he could save it by complying with the United Nations' demands".

Then in that interview before Christmas, Blair talked about how his Christian faith sustained him, before he was asked whether "If you had known then that there were no WMD", he would still have supported the invasion, and replied: "I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments."

It simply didn't occur to him that those words must produce howls of agony and rage from those who had served in his government seven years ago. Like Straw, they all thought that regime change as such was an "improper and unlawful" reason for war, but Blair effectively concedes that this was really the purpose, just as some said all along. Washington was going to invade in any case, and so-called WMD were, as Paul Wolfowitz memorably put it, a "bureaucratic" or cosmetic pretext.

Exactly. There is going to be an awful lot of bitterness if Blair comes out of this smelling like a rose, as he usually does. Why is he still "teaching" at Yale?

Massachusetts

As a former resident of, and still eligible voter in, the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I feel inclined to comment on yesterday's special election to fill out the unexpired term of the late and great Ted Kennedy. As the entire universe now knows, Martha Coakley, the State Attorney General and Democratic candidate, lost to Scott Brown, a state legislator and the Republican candidate. This will have consequences, such as reducing the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate from 60 to 59. There are also numerous press reports and blog posts about how this is the death of health care, of Obama's program, and of democracy as we know it. The circular firing squads are lining up even as I write.

So, two things. First, what happened? Simple. Democrats didn't show up. Brown got about the same number of votes as John McCain did, but Coakley only got about 60% of the votes that Obama got. There was no massive swing to the Republicans. It's just that the Democrats didn't bother.

Second, why? Well, for one thing, Coakley ran what is perhaps the worst political campaign in modern memory, with the possible exception of Rudy Guiliani's presidential campaign of 2008. Actually, both were premised on the same campaign philosophy--don't actually go out and campaign. Make the voters come to you. I could never stand Coakley, frankly, not after the Louise Woodward case on which she made her name. And I'm not alone, in fact. So the fact that she blew a 31 point poll lead I find strangely comforting--it cofirms my intuitions that she's a showboater of little brain. She won the primary against a couple of good candidates, particularly Congressman Mike Capuano (who would have clobbered Brown, I think) by running as the woman candidate. So this is the result of letting disgruntled Hilary supporters pick your nominee. And of picking a nominee who doesn't seem to know very much about the Red Sox.

So now what? Well, there's lots of discussion about Plan B on healthcare, which, as Roy Edroso points out, seems a bit odd since "they barely had a Plan A". More importantly, there's lots of anguished wailing about how the Democrats lost because they weren't conservative enough, or not liberal enough. Well, actually it was Coakley that lost, but still. I incline towards the latter. Those 800,000 people who voted for Obama and didn't vote for Coakley--they didn't vote Republican. They just didn't feel like voting for Coakley, and for a fair number of them, maybe it was because it's not clear at this point that the Democrats will actually fight for anything that voters think is worth fighting for--mainly jobs. I think Obama, if he's to do anything, should recognize that people are just really, really worried. The sooner he starts addressing that, the better off the Democrats will be. And he really, really needs to have a good talk with Rahm Emmanuel. This 60 vote majority thing is just crap. Bush was able to get a whole lot of godawful legislation passed with a bare majority of Congress. The Democrats should be able to get some half-decent legislation passed with what is still an even larger majority.

Stout denial!

This forthcoming week we expect some more outright lying to go on in the Chilcot inquiry. This is because those appearing—-particularly former Defence Minister Geoff Hoon and former foreign secretary Jack Straw-—have an occasional habit of doing this. Both are expected to provide some interesting testimony, especially in light of testimony this past week from Alistair Campbell, and testimony in December from a number of senior military figures.

Before getting to what we might expect, let’s look at what we learned this past week. P.G. Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth, whose motto was “Stout Denial!” would have been proud of Alistair Campbell. Campbell, Tony Blair’s Communications guy, can lie with the best of them, and we presume he did. In fact, what was unsurprising about Campbell’s testimony was the extent to which he stuck to the script, while at the same time the extent to which he tried to blame everyone else. Campbell’s testimony and answers to questions even included a reference to Psalm 56 on his whiny blog, “All day long they twist my words”, which, as Hugh O’Shaughnessy pointed out, would be funny if it came from someone else. Campbell defended his involvement in the intelligence dossier Blair used (and misused, to put it bluntly) to justify the invasion, and said he still stood by every word. Jeez, what a plonk. But some useful information did emerge, as it occasionally does, and it was clear that Campbell was holding this in reserve to deflect attention and, of course, any blame. And this information was the fact that Blair apparently gave Bush a secret pledge to support whatever the US intended to do—and Blair provided this pledge at a meeting in Crawford Texas in November, 2002. This was, of course, at a time when other stout denials were being issued all over theplace that there was no plan to invade Iraq.

What followed was fairly amusing. The media actually did its job with this piece of news, and broadcast it everywhere. For example, the headline in The Times the following day was Tony Blair gave secret promise to George Bush over Iraq invasion. Campbell thereupon got on his blog and denounced the media for doing so (I’m not going to link to anything associated with Campbell, so you’ll just have to take my word for it, or go find it yourself). And while Campbell quibbled, it was nonetheless clear that this was indeed new-—no one before, including Campbell, had divulged that Blair had given a promise to support military action. This contradicts much of what is in the public record, of course, and certainly contradicts what Blair has said repeatedly. So we expect this point will become one on which Blair can expect questions when he appears (which will be 29 January, it was announced today).

Campbell’s testimony in general did not surprise—-he defended, and postured, and was his usual aggressive self. So he didn’t give much away aside from the above. But there was one other point, when he tried to basically lay any claim for damages on the “45 minute “ business off on John Scarlett, who headed up the intelligence services at the time. Scarlett’s testimony from December was unenlightening as well. Lots of posturing, little information. Which again should not come as a surprise.

This week’s testimony will likely be a mixed bag. On the stand right now, even as I write, is Jonathan Powell, formerly Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff. Powell, who kept a low profile during Blair’s tenure and continues to do so, will probably not shed much light on anything in particular. More interesting will be Geoff Hoon and Jack Straw. Hoon’s testimony will be particularly interesting in light of multiple complaints made by senior military officers in December that they were prevented from full preparation for military action because the government did not want anyone to realize that it was in fact preparing for war. Considering the number of fatalities that occurred because of lack of equipment, one might expect Hoon to get a good solid drillilng on this point—-althgough whether the members of the Chilcot commission can give anyone a good solid drilling is still open to question.

This complaint was made by members of the Foreign Office as well, but more against the US than against the Foreign ministry—-that the British government was not allowed to prepare for a military occupation, again because the Blair and Bush governments did not want anyone to know they was actually prepared for war. A number of foreign office and military leaders testified directly that thre was entirely too much reliance on the US government for leadership in this area—-we now know that the US government was being pretty delusional in 2002 and 2003. What came out of the testimony in December is that the Foreign Office and senior military knew that the US wasn’t prepared for an occupation, and told the government, but were ignored.

Jack Straw’s testimony was always going to be interesting, given his role as Foreign Minister at the time, but has become even more so since the leak this past weekend of the letter he sent Tony Blair on 25 March 2002. The full text of the letter can be found here, but it’s worth extracting a couple of highlights:

1. The rewards from your visit to Crawford will be few. The risks are high, both for you and for the government. I judge that there is at present no majority inside the PLP for any military action against Iraq, (alongside a greater readiness in the PLP to surface their concerns). Colleagues know that Saddam and the Iraqi regime are bad. Making that case is easy. But we have a long way to go to convince them as to:
(a) the scale of the threat from Iraq and why this has got worse recently;
(b) what distinguishes the Iraqi threat from that of eg Iran and North Korea so as to justify military action;
(c) the justification for any military action in terms of international law; and
(d) whether the consequence of military action really would be a compliant, law-abiding replacement government.
….

4. If 11 September had not happened, it is doubtful that the US would now be considering military action against Iraq. In addition, there has been no credible evidence to link Iraq with UBL and al-Qaida. Objectively, the threat from Iraq has not worsened as a result of 11 September. What has however changed is the tolerance of the international community (especially that of the US), the world having witnessed on September 11 just what determined evil people can these days perpetuate.
….
6. That Iraq is in flagrant breach of international legal obligations imposed on it by the UNSC provides us with the core of a strategy, and one which is based on international law. Indeed, if the argument is to be won, the whole case against Iraq and in favour (if necessary) of military action, needs to be narrated with reference to the international rule of law.
7. We also have better to sequence the explanation of what we are doing and why. Specifically, we need to concentrate in the early stages on:
• making operational the sanctions regime foreshadowed by UNSCR 1382;
• demanding the readmission of weapons inspectors, but this time to operate in a free and unfettered way (a similar formula to that which Cheney used at your joint press conference, as I recall).
8. I know there are those who say that an attack on Iraq would be justified whether or not weapons inspectors were readmitted. But I believe that a demand for the unfettered readmission of weapons inspectors in essential, in terms of public explanation, and in terms of legal sanction for any subsequent military action.
9. Legally there are two potential elephant traps: (i) regime change per se is no justification for military action; it could form part of the method of any strategy, but not a goal. Of course, we may want credibly to assert that regime change is an essential part of the strategy by which we have to achieve our ends – that of the elimination of Iraq's WMD capacity; but the latter has to be the goal; (ii) on whether any military action would require a fresh UNSC mandate (Desert Fox did not). The US are likely to oppose any idea of a fresh mandate. On the other side, the weight of legal advice here is that a fresh mandate may well be required. There is no doubt that a new UNSCR would transform the climate in the PLP. Whilst that (a new mandate) is very unlikely, given the US's position, a draft resolution against military action with 13 in favour (or handsitting) and two vetoes against could play very badly here.
….

10. A legal justification is a necessary but far from sufficient pre-condition for military action. We have also to answer the big question – what will this action achieve? There seems to be a larger hole in this than on anything. Most of the assessments from the US have assumed regime change as a means of eliminating Iraq's WMD threat. But none has satisfactorily answered how that regime change is to be secured, and how there can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be better.

(Highlighting mine)

Now, one would think that the receipt of such a letter, days before a vote for military action, would at least give the government some pause. There were resignations in the British government over this issue. But, still, somehow, Tony trundled ahead. So it seems reasonable to consider that Straw was basically giving Blair a final option out, but that Blair was either too blind or too stupid to take it. I suppose we might wonder why Straw did not resign at that point, as Robin Cook had done, and as the dithering Claire Short also eventually did. In fact, Straw went on to vote to support the British invasion, and defended it subsequently. So whether this elevates or deflates your opinion of Jack Straw depends on whether or not you’re wondering why he didn’t resign. Good question. The other being, did Straw leak the letter himself?

So this should be a lively week. Looking forward, we now know that Blair will be there all day on the 29th (I’ve applied for a spectator ticket, which are being drawn by lottery, so I suspect that receiving one will be a random event). We also will hear from Lord Godlsmith a couple of days before that (also for a whole day), as to why he changed his view on the legality of the war so forcefully within a span of ten days before the Parliamentary vote on the invasion. We’ll hear from others as well. What the committee will do with any or all of this remains to be seen. It should be mentioned that several members of the commission in fact supported the invasion, that most are drawn from the ranks of the senior civil service, and that none of them has any legal background, and certainly no prosecutorial experience. One of them, in fact, Lawrence Freedman, wrote portions of Tony Blair’s famous 1999 speech which justified “liberal” military intervention in states like Bosnia.

This lack of a legal background is probably by design, but it also now puts the commission in something a a bind. That’s because the most interesting news on Iraq last week didn’t come out of the Chilcot inquiry at all, but rather, out of the Netherlands. The Dutch government, don’t forget, supported the war, and sent troops. Well, guess what?

In a damning series of findings on the decision of the Dutch government to support Tony Blair and George Bush in the strategy of regime change in Iraq, the inquiry found the action had "no basis in international law".

The 551-page report, published today and chaired by former Dutch supreme court judge Willibrord Davids, said UN resolutions in the 1990s prior to the outbreak of war gave no authority to the invasion. "The Dutch government lent its political support to a war whose purpose was not consistent with Dutch government policy. The military action had no sound mandate in international law," it said.

The report came as the Chilcot inquiry in the UK heard evidence from Tony Blair's former press secretary, Alastair Campbell, about Britain's decision to enter the war.

Comparisons between the Davids report, which looked at the decision-making process surrounding the Dutch decision to back the war, and Chilcot's have led to criticism that the UK was not conducting a similar analysis of the legal implications in the run-up to the war.

The findings of the Davids report has serious implications for the UK, experts say, as it raises questions about the use of intelligence about weapons of mass destruction (WMD), an issue addressed by Campbell in his evidence before the Chilcot panel this morning.

"In its depiction of Iraq's WMD programme, the [Dutch] government was to a considerable extent led by public and other information from the US and the UK," the Davids report says.

It found that when the Dutch government decided in August 2002 to support the attack on Iraq it treated intelligence about WMD and the legality of an invasion as "subservient". The Dutch cabinet's policy was laid out in a 45-minute meeting, and came at a time when the newly elected prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, was preoccupied with domestic concerns, it said.

The Dutch intelligence agencies were "more reserved" in their assessments than the government when discussing the initiative in parliament, the report found.

And this is a bunch of lawyers and judges. Which, as I just noted, are notably absent from the current UK inquiry. Which may or may not tell us something. But it makes it awfully difficult for the Chilcot inquiry to operate as if the invasion had legal justification (especially when the UK is being fingered by the Dutch for helping to perpetuate misinformation on WMD).

This has, of course, created a bit of a scandal in The Netherlands, as The Times noted following the release of the report:

The Dutch Prime Minister insisted yesterday that he acted honourably in supporting the Iraq war despite the verdict of an independent inquiry that the invasion had no mandate under international law.

In a devastating rejection of the position of the Dutch Government, the inquiry, led by the former head of the Netherlands Supreme Court, decided that the UN resolutions did not provide a legal basis for the use of force.

Like the US and British governments, Jan Peter Balkenende relied on UN Resolution 1441 of November 2002 as the legal basis for supporting the Iraq war. This resolution threatened serious consequences if Saddam Hussein did not fully comply with his obligations to disarm.

However, the Davids commission in the Netherlands concluded in its 551-page report: “Despite the existence of certain ambiguities, the wording of Resolution 1441 cannot reasonably be interpreted as authorising individual member states to use military force to compel Iraq to comply with the Security Council’s resolutions without authorisation from the Security Council.”

Mr Balkenende rejected calls to resign last night and said that he disagreed with the commission. “The Cabinet’s view has always been that a new Security Council resolution [authorising the invasion] was desirable but not necessary,” he said.

Dutch ministers were further criticised by the commission, which sat for ten months, for using intelligence from Britain and the US that showed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, rather than the “more nuanced” assessment of its own secret services.

So, early days still, but there are several threads here that we’ll be watching over the next several weeks. For those interested in obsessing over this, here are links to the Iraq Inquiry, the Iraq inquiry blog, and the Guardian’s dedicated link to covering the inquiry. And here’s theDutch report consclusion. There is exactly one story in The New York Times website on this report (did it even make the print editions?), and exactly one in The Washington Post—and it’s the same story, a Reuters dispatch. The same Reuters story shows up on the ABC News website, and the CBS News website has a much shorter AP story, which kind of distorts the story in good AP fashion. So neither The NY Times or the Post, or any other major US news organization, could be bothered writing up their own story on this. And of course Fox doesn’t carry the story at all. Who saw that coming?

There’s more to go here, obviously.

Tony Judt, Hero

Tony Judt has been a leading historian of, and thinker about, the post-war world for a number of decades. Any regular reader of The New York Review of Books will be familiar with his output, in which he regularly embarrasses most of the rest of us with his understanding, judgement, and, perhaps equally important, his humanity. He has been a near-singular and powerful voice for reason on any number of issues, including the mid-east, where he has been actively involved in Israeli issues since before the six day war (during which he volunteered on a kibbutz to replace settlers off fighting), and post-war Europe. He has taught modern European history for a number of years at New York University, and of course has received his share of academic honors, all deserved. Born in London’s East End of Jewish immigrant parents, he received his Ph.D. from Cambridge before eventually settling in America, as the English are fond of doing. On any number of grounds, he is one of the positive contributors to the world.

He also has amytrophic lateral sclerosis, a form of motor neuron disease, and he is degenerating rapidly. The disease, which is invariably fatal, was diagnosed in September 2008, and by December he had lost the use of his hands, and a few months later was in a wheelchair. At this point Judt is confined to a wheelchair, where he is fitted with equipment to keep him breathing, and has no voluntary movement abilities aside from speech. In the most recent NYRB, Judt shares some of this experience:

In effect, ALS constitutes progressive imprisonment without parole. First you lose the use of a digit or two; then a limb; then and almost inevitably, all four. The muscles of the torso decline into near torpor, a practical problem from the digestive point of view but also life-threatening, in that breathing becomes at first difficult and eventually impossible without external assistance in the form of a tube-and-pump apparatus. In the more extreme variants of the disease, associated with dysfunction of the upper motor neurons (the rest of the body is driven by the so-called lower motor neurons), swallowing, speaking, and even controlling the jaw and head become impossible. I do not (yet) suffer from this aspect of the disease, or else I could not dictate this text.

By my present stage of decline, I am thus effectively quadriplegic. With extraordinary effort I can move my right hand a little and can adduct my left arm some six inches across my chest. My legs, although they will lock when upright long enough to allow a nurse to transfer me from one chair to another, cannot bear my weight and only one of them has any autonomous movement left in it. Thus when legs or arms are set in a given position, there they remain until someone moves them for me. The same is true of my torso, with the result that backache from inertia and pressure is a chronic irritation. Having no use of my arms, I cannot scratch an itch, adjust my spectacles, remove food particles from my teeth, or anything else that—as a moment's reflection will confirm—we all do dozens of times a day. To say the least, I am utterly and completely dependent upon the kindness of strangers (and anyone else).

Judt’s days are one thing—-he can at least get some help. Nights, however, are something else:

But then comes the night. I leave bedtime until the last possible moment compatible with my nurse's need for sleep. Once I have been "prepared" for bed I am rolled into the bedroom in the wheelchair where I have spent the past eighteen hours. With some difficulty (despite my reduced height, mass, and bulk I am still a substantial dead weight for even a strong man to shift) I am manoeuvred onto my cot. I am sat upright at an angle of some 110° and wedged into place with folded towels and pillows, my left leg in particular turned out ballet-like to compensate for its propensity to collapse inward. This process requires considerable concentration. If I allow a stray limb to be mis-placed, or fail to insist on having my midriff carefully aligned with legs and head, I shall suffer the agonies of the damned later in the night.

I am then covered, my hands placed outside the blanket to afford me the illusion of mobility but wrapped nonetheless since—like the rest of me—they now suffer from a permanent sensation of cold. I am offered a final scratch on any of a dozen itchy spots from hairline to toe; the Bi-Pap breathing device in my nose is adjusted to a necessarily uncomfortable level of tightness to ensure that it does not slip in the night; my glasses are removed...and there I lie: trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts.

Of course, I do have access to help if I need it. Since I can't move a muscle, save only my neck and head, my communication device is a baby's intercom at my bedside, left permanently on so that a mere call from me will bring assistance. In the early stages of my disease the temptation to call out for help was almost irresistible: every muscle felt in need of movement, every inch of skin itched, my bladder found mysterious ways to refill itself in the night and thus require relief, and in general I felt a desperate need for the reassurance of light, company, and the simple comforts of human intercourse. By now, however, I have learned to forgo this most nights, finding solace and recourse in my own thoughts.

The latter, though I say it myself, is no small undertaking. Ask yourself how often you move in the night. I don't mean change location altogether (e.g., to go to the bathroom, though that too): merely how often you shift a hand, a foot; how frequently you scratch assorted body parts before dropping off; how unselfconsciously you alter position very slightly to find the most comfortable one. Imagine for a moment that you had been obliged instead to lie absolutely motionless on your back—by no means the best sleeping position, but the only one I can tolerate—for seven unbroken hours and constrained to come up with ways to render this Calvary tolerable not just for one night but for the rest of your life.

My solution has been to scroll through my life, my thoughts, my fantasies, my memories, mis-memories, and the like until I have chanced upon events, people, or narratives that I can employ to divert my mind from the body in which it is encased. These mental exercises have to be interesting enough to hold my attention and see me through an intolerable itch in my inner ear or lower back; but they also have to be boring and predictable enough to serve as a reliable prelude and encouragement to sleep. It took me some time to identify this process as a workable alternative to insomnia and physical discomfort and it is by no means infallible. But I am occasionally astonished, when I reflect upon the matter, at how readily I seem to get through, night after night, week after week, month after month, what was once an almost insufferable nocturnal ordeal. I wake up in exactly the position, frame of mind, and state of suspended despair with which I went to bed—which in the circumstances might be thought a considerable achievement.
.…
I suppose I should be at least mildly satisfied to know that I have found within myself the sort of survival mechanism that most normal people only read about in accounts of natural disasters or isolation cells. And it is true that this disease has its enabling dimension: thanks to my inability to take notes or prepare them, my memory—already quite good—has improved considerably, with the help of techniques adapted from the "memory palace" so intriguingly depicted by Jonathan Spence. But the satisfactions of compensation are notoriously fleeting. There is no saving grace in being confined to an iron suit, cold and unforgiving. The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably—as it now appears to me—by those not exclusively dependent upon them. Much the same can be said of well-meaning encouragements to find nonphysical compensations for physical inadequacy. That way lies futility. Loss is loss, and nothing is gained by calling it by a nicer name. My nights are intriguing; but I could do without them.

But this is not Judt’s particular heroism—although his description of his days and nights (which will be explored further in a number of forthcoming essays in the NYRB) makes it clear that anyone with this disability has to be regarded as heroic at a certain level for simply getting through the day, or night. This existence sounds unendurable—and yet there are thousands and thousands of people worldwide who go through their days and nights in exactly this same fashion. But Judt, who has a mind and knows how to keep using it, is doing something heroic with it—-he is engaging, actively, with the world, with a specific goal.

Judt is not alone in being a member of a generation (he is two years younger than I am) that still regards collective action, including by the government, as a desirable goal, and a usable tool. And he is apparently so appalled by the fact that no one under thirty has ever heard anything positive about the government and its ability to act positively that he has resolved to act. As Ed Pilkington in The Guardian reports:

His current intellectual preoccupation is with the role of the state in western societies – the subject matter of his NYU lecture. His thesis is that over the past 40 years, western democracies have forgotten the positive virtues of collective action. "What has gone catastrophically wrong in England and the States is that for 30 years we've lost the ability to talk about the state in positive terms," he says. "We've raised a generation or two of young people who don't think to ask, what can the state do that is good?"

At the end of the lecture he was struck by how many young people came up to him expressing amazement at ideas they had never heard before. "This is the second generation of people who can't imagine change except in their own lives, who have no sense of social collective public goods or services, who are just isolated individuals desperately striving to better themselves above everybody else."

Judt now intends, in the time he has left, to devote himself to writing a book to help young people think collectively again. "It could really have an impact if I get it right. Something that will get the next generation to see there is a way to think about politics that is not just the way we've been habituated to do it. I care about that and I think I can do it."

Judt is already working on the book, using the same memory technique that he deployed for his NYRB essays. During the night he builds in his mind a Chinese memory palace – or in his case a modest Swiss house – and into each of its rooms he imagines placing a paragraph or theme of the piece he is composing. The next day he recalls each room in sequence, unloading its contents by dictating it to his assistant.

This is grueling, as Pilkington disccusses elsewhere in the article. Judt’s disease continues to progress, and it’s not clear that he will finish the project. But to undertake it in the first place—to reach out to a generation or two of people who for the past thrity years have heard nothing but scorn about government, and to try to tell them that that’s the wrong story, is as noble a goal as I can think of. Judt is helped by the fact that he already has a built-in platform, throught his NYU position. And it’s work that desperately needs to be done.

Because Judt is correct-—unless we can somehow cure the malaise that has been deliberately engendered in American society over the past three decades, we’re doomed. I blame this all on Reagan, of course, because it’s so easy to blame Reagan for so many things. But to an extent it’s true—-Reagan was the guy who got laugh lines in his sttump speeches by saying “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Whatever Richard Nixon’s faults, and there were many, an innate philosphical hostility to the concept of government action was not one of them. Few remember that Nixon proposed one of the most ambitious health reform measures ever, one which was ultimately derailed by Watergate. Nixon also brought us the ability to actually aggressively enforce enviromental laws—many of which were passed under his administration. No, the change occurred under Reagan—the same era when it became ok to openly worship mammon again (and, yes, the two phonomena—the government is the enemy meme, and the markets rule meme, are not unconnected). And it was under Reagan the the independent media buckled and got co-opted by the Republican party, as Mark Hertsgaard chronicled so vividly in On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency. Perhaps Reagan's greatest sin, one which is still being perpetuated by the Republican party, is the trivialization of the concept of public service.

And the press is still enthralled with Reagan, even now that he’s long dead. Or not so long. Remember the media breathlessness during Reagan’s funeral? No one else in the country really cared, but the media was relentless in trying to make sure that we mourned him as much as the media did. Ah, that train journey, with Brian Williams of NBC palpitating madly and tearing up about Reagan's greatness and whatever. Which brought out all of maybe 100,000 mourners in Washington. When Lincoln died, his funeral train was viewed by one million people, in a country of 32 million at the time. Roosevelt’s coffin was viewed by 500,000 in Washington alone, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands en route. The atttempted equivalence leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

It’s broader than just Reagan, of course. Remember how vaguely embarrassed papa Bush used to look about the whole thing? That certainly passed quickly. And Bill Clinton, who clearly did believe in government activism, was treated as a minority figure, if not a visitor from Mars, by the media for this view during the entire period of his presidency. And then, of course, the past ten years. And anyone growing up in America during this period, as my own children did, with exposure to the media (and who hasn’t had this?) has been treated to a relentless barrage of opinion, innendo and belief systems clearly designed to prove to us that the government is not our friend. It can’t do anything. It’s full of crooks (that we elected). And you can’t do anything about it except reduce it. It’s a joke-—a laugh line in a Reagan speech.

Judt is clearly of my generation, and regards this as not only abhorrent, but dangerous. The fact that the response at NYU was so positive is encouraging—-but, of course, this is a major east coast elite establishment. (For more on the speech, and on Judt, see here). But it’s the place to start. It was the capitulation of the major east coast elite establishments in the first place that brought us George W. Bush, a failed businessman with a Harvard MBA and two failed wars that threaten to poison us all for at least a generation with their resulting resentments, and Dick Cheney (an arguement against geographic representation if there ever was one) at Yale (before he dropped out), a man with an empty space where most of us have a moral compass.

So Judt will do what he can. The fact that he can barely do anything except speak, and that this will be lost soon, is in incentive, clearly. And I wish him well in what time he has left—-he will certainly inspire more people during this brief period he has left than most of us will during our entire lifetimes. And if the end result is more young voters, and more young activists, and more young persons without an innate hostility to “government”—-in other words, people who understand that government, since the mid-19th century, has been used as an engine of economic and social progress—-then that would indeed be heroic.

One big happy family

The New York Times ran an interesting article about Roger Ailes a couple of days ago. Ailes is the head of Fox News at News Corporation, owned and run, of course, by Rupert Murdoch and various offspring Murdochs. Ailes is one of the most important people in the United States, by virtue of his re-creation of the concept of television news, morphing from something that vaguely resembled news into something that is indistinguishable from right-wing propaganda. And it has had enormous impact on television news in general, and on US political, and broader, culture, as anyone who has seen Outfoxed knows.

It turns out that not everyone in the Murdoch family is happy with Mr Ailes. There are a number of possible reasons. First, he’s really, really important to News Corporation:

Mr. Ailes is certainly making money. At a time when the broadcast networks are struggling with diminishing audiences and profits in news, he has built Fox News into the profit engine of the News Corporation. Fox News is believed to make more money than CNN, MSNBC and the evening newscasts of NBC, ABC and CBS combined. The division is on track to achieve $700 million in operating profit this year, according to analyst estimates that Mr. Ailes does not dispute.

This outsize success has placed Mr. Ailes, an aggressive former Republican political strategist, at the pinnacle of power in three corridors of American life: business, media and politics. In addition to being the best-paid person in the News Corporation last year, he is the most successful news executive of the last 10 years, and his network exerts a strong influence on the fractured conservative movement.

And it’s that second paragraph that really conveys Ailes’ seminal importance to modern American politics over the past two decades. For Ailes basically created the modern media mindset that made conservative talking points the de facto standard for television reality. This would include the misrepresentations, sleazy innuendo, and outright lying that now defines modern broadcast news. It was always there, of course, but never in the abundance it is now, and to for that we owe Mr. Ailes a bow.

The Times' piece is basically a puff piece on Ailes’ importance to News Corporation and modern conservatism, which may be more or less the same thing, and how he seems to have old Rupert pretty much completely cowed. But not everyone seems to be happy with that. The Times has some negative comments from Matthew Freud, Murdoch’s son-in-law, which get elaborated on in Roy Greenslade’s blog:over at The Guardian:

Matthew Freud has launched a withering attack on the head of Fox News, a controversial US TV channel owned by his father-in-law, Rupert Murdoch.
Freud told the New York Times he was "ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes's horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to".

Freud, who is married to Elisabeth, Murdoch's second daughter, was speaking to the paper for a profile of Ailes and prefaced his coment by saying he was "by no means alone within the family or the company" in holding such hostile views of Fox News.

According to the Financial Times, Murdoch's News Corporation later issued a statement saying: "Matthew Freud's opinions are his own and in no way reflect the views of Rupert Murdoch, who is proud of Roger Ailes and Fox News."

Freud, head of his eponymous public relations company, is not the kind of man to speak carelessly to a journalist, so he clearly wanted to put his views on the record.

Murdoch’s family, and its various entanglements with each other and with Murdoch himself, are pretty much a matter of public record, given Murdoch’s prominence and the extent to which has has attempted to drag his children into the running of his empire. For many of them, though, there has been greater appeal outside of their fathers’ orbit. Michael Wolf, who wrote a recent biography of Murdoch (The Man Who Owns the News), provided a nice summary of the family last November to The Guardian.

So what next? Is there a palace revolt brewing? Murdoch himself is 79, and his principal deputy, Peter Chernin, departed not too long ago—-which leaves Ailes as the most senior and powerful executive in the corporation after Murdoch. But if there is significant family opposition to Ailes, and they’re the ones who own the stock, one has to question how much longer Ailes would remain in his post on Rupert’s departure. Which would be no bad thing for the rest of us.