Review of Manufacturing Hysteria

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The following book review appeared in this past Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle. There are many faculty and students here at Wes interested in the problematic history of surveillance in our country. I’ll just mention here historian and American Studies professor Prof. Claire Potter’s original and important take on J. Edgar Hoover. You can find it on WesScholar:

http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/div2facpubs/21/

 

Manufacturing Hysteria

A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America

By Jay Feldman

Manufacturing Hysteria offers a chilling overview of how American political culture has generated domestic enemies to justify massive infringements of rights. Jay Feldman begins with the World War I era and charts how the federal government (and often the states) developed bureaucracies of surveillance that often spilled into mob violence of the worst sort. He shows how the government “protected” democracy by systematically attacking those whose beliefs departed from official positions, thereby undermining the very political culture it was supposedly protecting.

What it means to be a patriot has changed over time, but Feldman sees how the urge to define “untainted Americanism” has persisted from the hysteria around German immigrants during the First World War to fears of a fifth column – be it made up of Russian Bolsheviks, Japanese saboteurs or Islamic terrorists. In 1919 the Washington Post applauded “serious cleaning up” of “bewhiskered, ranting, howling, mentally warped, law-defying aliens” and “international misfits,” and in subsequent generations we find parallel support for official, well-muscled efforts to make us feel safe by finding an internal enemy that can be attacked.

Feldman emphasizes two salient dimensions of this curious process of generating security by feeding paranoia. The first is that these efforts themselves violated the Constitution they claimed to be defending. Again and again, our elected officials (and the bureaucracy that shores up their power) have used extralegal means to pursue enemies. And they did so knowing they were violating the law or exceeding their authority. They often conjured up a sense of crisis to justify their actions, but Feldman does a good job of showing how their elaborate security designs were developed well before any emergencies actually occurred. These were well-planned efforts to ensure that future crises wouldn’t go to waste – that the government would be in a position to use them to increase political homogeneity.

The second dimension that Feldman emphasizes is that the insecurity was illusory, that the hysteria was “manufactured.” He does indicate, very briefly, that in times of prosperity, such as the 1920s, the propensity to create ideological or ethnic purity through violence is much reduced. But he does not examine how threats – such as the existence of a real world war or the work of spies who are really gathering information on behalf of a well-armed foreign power – might change security issues. Feldman notes that after hundreds of thousands of investigations of private citizens, there were few prosecutions, but he mistakenly concludes that this means that there never were any real security threats.

The communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy period are for Feldman the paradigm for America’s “neurotic nightmare.” He doesn’t see the relevance of the communist tyranny in Asia and Europe, a form of oppression willing to murder millions, and he is silent about the tactics of the American Communist Party – from its embrace of the Soviet alliance with Nazi Germany to its willingness to accept the mother ship’s mass persecutions of dissidents. Instead, Feldman opines that it was communism’s “powerful critique of the social inequities of the capitalist system … that made the Communist Party so threatening to the established order.” But he gives no evidence at all that it was a “critique” J. Edgar Hoover was worried about.

And Hoover, longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is at the heart of “Manufacturing Hysteria.” Hoover’s obsession with dissidents of all kinds, his reckless abuse of the Constitution, his power over lawmakers turned feelings of suspicion into policies of surveillance and control. The internment camps for Japanese Americans were just the tip of the iceberg; given the right conditions, Hoover was ready to round up millions. The FBI’s thousands of informants were in the field to discredit civil rights organizations and antinuclear groups – anyone who might depart from the narrow band of mainstream American life.

Alas, Feldman does not explore Hoover’s motivations, or why this man so desperate to conceal his own private life from scrutiny became a master of intruding into the lives of his fellow citizens. The author rarely digs beneath the political surface, and his focus remains stubbornly on conventional, mainstream American history. Do other republics (or political organizations) also create political scapegoats? Of course they do. How does the American example compare to the French, or the British? What about socialist countries and their manufacture of hysteria to shore up those with power? Unfortunately, one learns nothing in this book about how modern political regimes of various kinds are prone to the hysteria that has also infected the United States.

Feldman’s focus on American political elites is meant as a cautionary tale, and his epilogue describes how much worse things have become in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. “Manufacturing Hysteria” is a political book, aimed at reminding those dedicated to civil liberties (especially the right to dissent) how fragile our freedoms are and how “close to a police state” we have come over the last century.

In his preface, Feldman writes: “Now, as ever, vigilance is required if liberty is to survive.” He does not seem to recognize that many of those whose “hysterical” actions he deplores could have written this very same sentence. We can be grateful for his account, while still being disappointed that he did not explore what drives officials here and in other countries to believe that in periods of great insecurity the rights of some should be sacrificed to protect their own particular version of freedom.

Commemoration Without Agenda

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At Wesleyan this afternoon (Friday, September 9) from 2:30-3:30 there will be a prayer vigil in Memorial Chapel to mark the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001.

The following is cross-posted from the HuffingtonPost.

As the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon approaches, hundreds of journalists, commentators, writers and artists are telling us how to mark this occasion. On my left, Noam Chomsky is there to remind us of what he always knows before any events have to happen: that U.S. imperialism is responsible for everything evil that happens in the world. On my right, John Yoo is there to remind us that the terrorist attacks are evidence that the United States is justified in doing anything whatsoever to destroy those who might possibly be its enemies – even if we destroy our political values in the process. The commemoration of the awful killings is being used by those with political agendas to advance their various causes. That’s what happens with public memory.

There are others who will argue that we still must get the facts straight about the factors that led up to the events of September 11, 2001. They want more research about the causes of the rage that fueled the Al Qaeda operatives, and a deeper understanding of the intelligence failures that made Americans vulnerable to suicidal terrorists. On this 9/11 anniversary, they want to make sure what really happened before and after the planes pierced those crystal clear skies on that awful morning.

As I argue in Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living With the Past (coming out this fall), these are two of the important ways that we connect to the past – how we try to turn memory into history. The first is pragmatic: let’s use the events in the past (even awful, traumatic ones) to learn lessons for the future. We can make sense of the painful past by making it a useable past. The second connection to the past is empirical: let’s make sure we have an accurate representation of what really happened. The first attitude gives us agendas; the second gives us research task forces.

There is a third way of relating to the past that makes no particular claims for the future. I’ve called this “piety,” an acknowledgement of the existence of the painful past, and of the capacity of what-has-been to make a claim on us. By using the word “piety” I do not mean to evoke some necessarily transcendent or religious aspect to one’s connection to the past. I do mean to evoke recognition that we sometimes strive to relate to our memories and histories in ways that are not reducible to a quest for using them well or getting them right. We connect to our memories just because they deserve our caring attention. Piety doesn’t have to do anything; it is an attitude of respect and care, even of reverence.

As the anniversary of the attacks of 9/11 nears, I think back to my shock and horror as I watched the television news. I feel my way back to the concerns that I had for my family, my students, my country. I wanted to gather with my community to simply be together as we absorbed the shocking loss of life and the experience of horrific vulnerability. Yet, even moments after the planes hit, some began making political speeches about how to confront or support our public officials. It was time, they said, to engage in political or military battle. And even in those moments some were calling for research into what really happened. Conspiracy theorists were off and running.

As we commemorate the trauma of those days, as we remember the loss of life, the heroism of so many on the scene, and the solidarity of sorrow and anger that welled up across the country, let us remember — but not only in the register of the pragmatic and the empirical. Sure, there are political and military issues that still demand our attention and struggle. Sure, there are still open historical questions about the facts and their interrelationship. We will continue to engage in those pragmatic and empirical dimensions.

But on this 10th anniversary of 9/11 let us also simply acknowledge the claim that our painful memories still have on us. Let us recognize with piety that we still carry the traces of those traumatic events with us, and that we acknowledge their importance to us without trying to use them.

Let us commemorate, if only for a few moments, without agenda.

 

Starting on Labor Day

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Many people ask me why Wesleyan begins classes again this year on Labor Day, a holiday that celebrates the American worker and marks the unofficial end of summer. When the faculty approved the calendar a few years ago, we discussed the tradeoffs of either starting earlier (most were against that), or backing up too close to Christmas and winter holidays (a big problem for our students wanting to return home for break). We were also juggling the length of orientation and reading week. In the end, we decided that Labor Day would remain a holiday for most of the staff, but that faculty and students would begin their classes on the first Monday of September.

Labor is much on the mind for our students as they begin the term. Some of that is in the nature of choosing classes. A few students want to know “how hard is this class?” “How much work will I have to do?” This is almost always an impossible question to answer just by looking at the syllabus. Some professors assign ten books or more to read during the term, while others focus on one or two. That doesn’t mean that the class with the shorter reading list requires any less work. Just check out Brian Fay’s course reading Spinoza’s Ethics — no walk in the park, but a deep dive into a major philosophical work. The truth is that every class offers increased intellectual rewards the more work you give to it.

But labor is on the mind of our students and their families in a more general sense this year.The job situation in the United States is just awful, and it has been depressingly bad for far too long. At the end of last week we learned that the US economy created no new jobs in August, and in a few days President Obama is scheduled to give what is billed as a major address on jobs. The real wages of working men and women in America have been declining for several years now, as the gap between the rich and the rest grows impossibly wide. The most pressing question facing the American economy for the next decade is how we will create and sustain decent jobs. Everything else is a distraction.

It’s no wonder that already parents have begun asking me how I think our Wesleyan education is going to equip our students as they head off into the job market in the spring. One can certainly understand their anxiety. Although a college degree is clearly an advantage, the job market is just awful even for grads with an impressive diploma. After four years of a liberal arts education, what kind of labor will open to our new alumni?

The answer isn’t simple, but it is clear that employers are often looking for workers who can think creatively, solve problems, seek opportunities and be self-motivating. Employers, when they are able to hire for good jobs, are looking for people who can learn while they are working — folks who aren’t just wed to some single skill they learned in the classroom to deal with a challenge that may no longer be relevant. At Wesleyan we believe deeply in the translational liberal arts — a broad, pragmatic education through which one learns how to apply modes of thinking and innovation in a variety of contexts. Even as the contexts change (whether that be through technology, politics or the economy), we believe our students will be well equipped to make their way in the world. We believe our alumni will be at the forefront of those creating and sustaining the jobs of the future.

But this isn’t just an article of faith. Wesleyan also offers practical advice, internship information and personal connections through our Career Resource Center. The CRC is currently located in the Butterfield residence hall complex, and in January it will be moving into the center of campus (in the old Squash Building currently be renovated). Even as students start their classroom labors today, they should remember to pay a visit to the CRC sometime this semester.

Happy First Day of Classes! Happy Labor Day!!

Welcome to Wesleyan!

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It’s been so much fun this week to watch the campus beginning to fill up. Last night I greeted the new international students, many of whom had endured very long trips made even more arduous by Hurricane Irene. Still, they were in fine spirits, eager to begin their Wes careers, whether they were coming from Mumbai, Beijing, Paris or Toronto. I recalled how for me in 1975 Wesleyan seemed like a foreign country  — or another planet! I told them of my confusion when I didn’t get all the classes I wanted and that I was more than a little at sea as I tried to figure out what I was doing here. But after a few weeks, I began to realize that lots of other people were having similar feelings, and that the key was to be open to learning from the extraordinary students, faculty and staff with whom I had opportunities to interact. Lucky me, I still have these opportunities!

Like many faculty, I’m still putting finishing touches on my syllabus for the fall. I am teaching The Modern and the Postmodern, a course that examines how the idea of the modern has been put together (and pulled apart) in the West. We read philosophy, poetry, fiction and critical theory (and sometimes we look at art and listen to music) in an attempt to understand how some core ideas of progress, truth, memory and identity have emerged in Europe and America. Many courses for first year students at Wes are small seminars. My class is a large survey, with a mixture of students from frosh to seniors. Even though I’ve taught for many years, I still get butterflies as the first day of class approaches.

Tomorrow as the frosh move in, older students and staff will lend a hand with the trunks, musical instruments and refrigerators. It’s just one of many ways for us to say  “Welcome to Wesleyan!”

Broadening Your Aural Experience at Wesleyan

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I bumped into a Wesleyan student recently who told me about a wonderful website about music at Wes: auralwes.org. It is a terrific compendium of some of the great music being performed on campus. As far as I know, the site is completely independent of the official Wesleyan powers. Hats off to the students who have put this together!

Over the last couple of years, when high school juniors and seniors ask me about the various options among high quality liberal arts colleges, I tell them about a potential litmus test for the schools they are visiting. All the highly selective schools have great faculty devoted to teaching and research, and all of them attract interesting and talented students. One way to tell them apart, to determine the personalities of the schools, is to look into the musical subcultures of the colleges and universities. If a prospective student doesn’t care about musical culture at all, obviously this isn’t an appropriate “test”. But such a student might not be all that happy at Wes in any case. The vibrancy and dynamism of the student musical culture combined with the dedication to diversity and experimentation in the music department are essential ingredients of the Wesleyan experience. Whether you sing, play or just listen, music is something not to be missed at Wes.

So, check out the music department’s website, and check out auralwes.org. It’s unlikely that you will be attracted to everything that you hear. You may even be offended by some of the language. But if you open your ears, mind and heart, it is likely that you will expand your horizons and broaden  your aesthetic and musical experience. And that’s why auralwes is essential Wes!

 

Reviewing a book on Contemporary Art from Los Angeles

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I reviewed “Rebels in Paradise” in yesterday’s Washington Post. I had taken the assignment with real pleasure, having great respect for the vibrancy of the Los Angeles art scene that developed in the 1960s and that continues to generate interesting work today. I spent more than fifteen years in Southern California, the last five of which running the Scholars Program at the Getty Research Institute for Art History and the Humanities (they have since dropped “and the Humanities — but that’s another story). The Getty is embarked on a multi-year project that examines contemporary art in California, and I look forward to seeing the results.

“Rebels in Paradise” recounts the story of how adventurous contemporary art developed in Los Angeles in the late 1950s, and how an “art scene” took off in the city during the ’60s. Hunter Drohojowska-Philp is especially interested in the “scene” part — of how little-known artists joined together to form a cool cohort, ultimately achieving L.A.’s grand prize: celebrity. She tells us just a little about their work: how Ed Moses busted the borders of the gallery format, how Ed Ruscha integrated words into his paintings, how Robert Irwin  and James Turrell discovered light as their medium, and how Judy Chicago explored sexuality and gender in this macho atmosphere. But we learn more about who was sleeping with whom, about prices for art when it was cheap, and about how these West Coast artists came to understand their careers in relation to the entrenched interests in the other art scene they sought to supplant: New York’s.

Drohojowska-Philp’s breezy story begins with the liberating gestures of Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, both of whom found a receptive audience among the young, artsy guys who started the Ferus Gallery in 1957. The founders of the gallery, curator Walter Hopps and artist Ed Kienholz, had a knack for finding like-minded souls whose camaraderie was based on their contempt for convention, their affection for surfboards, motorcycles and popular culture, all combined with their deep commitment to visual experimentation. During the inaugural summer show, Beat artist Wallace Berman was arrested for obscenity. The Ferus Gallery was going to make a name for itself.

“Rebels In Paradise” has some interesting things to say about the development of a distinctive Los Angeles gallery world, with its connections to the entertainment industry and the burgeoning museum culture. It’s the 1960s, and genres aren’t the only things that are blurring. Rock and roll, art and movies often intersect, with the actor-photographer Dennis Hopper being the poster boy for what in hindsight might look like irrational exuberance. These were times when many Angelenos thought they might be in the center of the universe — unless they ventured off for too long to London or New York.

It was a glorious place to be young and rootless — or at least to act as if one were young and rootless. In addition to the beautiful, complacent movie stars, and the cool, aggressive artists, there was Jim Morrison trying out his chops and his look at clubs on Sunset Boulevard and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention beginning to baffle their audience. We don’t learn very much about how this energy infused specific works of art, but we are told that when the Velvet Underground played on the Strip in 1966, “Sonny liked it but Cher left.”

“Rebels in Paradise” tells us about the drawing in Berman’s show that drew the obscenity charge and about some of his other “dustups with the authorities,” but the author says almost nothing of interest about Berman’s art. This is the rule in the book. We are told that the owner of Barney’s Beanery (the Ferus gang’s favorite watering hole) bought Larry Bell a drink after his first artistic triumph, but we never learn much about what in the work was triumphant. It’s amusing to read the tale of Kienholz’s revenge on a TWA worker’s desk after the airline broke a lamp the artist valued, but it would have been so much more interesting if the author managed to relate the rampage to the work. Kienholz wasn’t just an irate passenger, he was also an artist, and we want to know how rage fueled his installations and how the violence of his public gestures was related to his private struggles and his artistic practice. We are introduced to the young Frank Gehry as he begins to discover his aesthetic itinerary, but we learn more about his psychoanalyst and Gehry’s gangster uncle Willy’s trip to a brothel than we do about his architectural breakthrough.

Throughout the book we get good stories, the kind that artists often tell one another over drinks, and that they or their friends shared with Drohojowska-Philp. But in the author’s artless hands these seem more gossip than journalism — to say nothing of art history. Irwin and David Hockney are discussed at some length in the book, but the author does not do justice to either the ambitions of their work or to its critical reception. She does tell us that Irwin was “practicing phenomenology” and “questioning the purpose of painting,” but there is no extended discussion of what this meant to him or to others. We get gossip about Hockney’s portraits and are treated to his views of the clubs and of sex, but almost nothing about his understanding of composition and visual experience. Hockney is quoted as saying there were no ghosts in Los Angeles, which was true enough for him, since he was happily unaware of the city’s past. Unfortunately, Drohojowska-Philp embraces this naivete, doing little to show how her artists were actually part of the city’s ongoing history.

Drohojowska-Philp quotes the great critic Dave Hickey’s comment that Los Angeles developed a minimalism that “created a gracious social space. . . . It treated us amicably and made us even more beautiful by gathering us into the dance.” The promise of gathering us into beauty was and is part of Los Angeles’s persistent charm, part of its invitation and (sometimes) its disappointment. “Rebels in Paradise” tells us just enough to make the dance seem attractive, just enough to evoke reflections of its historical reality. As Dennis Hopper said: “This is our reality — the comic books and soup cans, man.”

Cross-posted from Washingtonpost.com

“Preach a Crusade Against Ignorance”

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On a slow Sunday morning browsing through the paper, I came across Nicholas Kristof’s column describing what he calls “our broken escalator.” He is referring to our education system, what has been for so many of us the moving stairway of social mobility. He details the ways that his own beloved high school is being slowly eviscerated by budget cuts. More than 80% of school districts across the US are going to cut their budgets this year, and three quarters of them made cuts last year. “The immediate losers are the students,” Kristof writes, “in the long run, the loser is our country.”

These thoughts echoed with what I’ve been reading lately about education programs at the very beginning of our country’s history. I am spending a good part of the summer doing research for a book about why liberal education matters. Recently I’ve been reading Thomas Jefferson, and also some of his contemporaries. The political importance of education has rarely found as powerful a proponent as Jefferson, one of whose proudest achievements was founding the University of Virginia on a model of liberal learning that is ultimately practical. His friend and political rival John Adams was also a stalwart proponent of the importance of an educated citizenry. At the dawn of the Republic Adams, too, knew that only through education could citizens ensure that their government would remain responsive to their needs. As he wrote to Jefferson: “Wherever a general knowledge and sensibility have prevailed among the people… arbitrary government and every kind of oppression have lessened and disappeared in proportion.”

Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, and for him this meant faith that the accumulation of knowledge would improve public and private life. His conception of “useful knowledge” was capacious — extending from an array of languages to mathematics, sciences and history. He wrote: “education generates habits of application, of order, and the love of virtue; and controls, by the force of habit, any innate obliquities in our moral organization.” The experience of undergraduates, as we all know, doesn’t at all points stimulate the habits of moral organization that the author of the Declaration of Independence had in mind. But don’t we still hope that our students acquire a love of virtue, even as they discover through hard work and sociability just what “love” and “virtue” might mean?

Of course, we have grown accustomed to criticizing problematic aspects of the Enlightenment worldview of our nation’s founders. Jefferson’s hypocrisy is legendary; his insight into structures of oppression didn’t disturb his own personal tyrannies. If our third president understood that education was inexorably linked to the possibility of freedom, his racism and sexism led him to think that women, Africans or native peoples should not enjoy that possibility.

But this summer, as I listen to the partisan haggling over the debt ceiling in Washington while the epidemic of unemployment rages on, and as I hear about school districts and university systems across the country slashing budgets and cutting back on educational programs, I read Jefferson with renewed energy and engagement. As representatives in 2011 labor to preserve the tax advantages of multi-millionaires, I admire how Jefferson recognized that a sure way to preserve the privileges of wealth is to curtail educational opportunity for those without them. In his proposal for public education in Virginia, he advocated a system for discovering youngsters with talent who would benefit from scholarships so that they could pursue their studies and serve the public at the highest level. His proposed that “Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts.” In our own time, with school districts shortening their academic calendars to save money and universities struggling to replace financial aid support once provided by government, we are undermining the hope for change and improvement that is so essential to both learning and democracy. What will become of this nation if it turns its back on the promise of education as a vehicle for social and economic mobility?

At many of the highly selective universities that have the benefit of alumni support and endowment funds, we aggressively look for “worth and genius” in all areas of the country so as to create a diverse cohort of students who will stimulate learning for and from one another. Through programs like QuestBridge or Posse Posse, and with many community-based organizations as partners, we find young men and women who can thrive in and contribute to our campus communities. We do this not out of some imagined commitment to “political correctness,” as critics of higher-ed like to complain, but so that every student (rich or poor, private, public or home-schooled) has the opportunity to expand his or her horizons. And we do this, to paraphrase Jefferson, because education should be the keystone of the arch of our nation.

As the morning wore on, I left the newspaper in the kitchen and headed out to our town’s local Sunday softball game. It’s a great community event, with kids, parents and grandparents joining in our version of the American pastime. Waiting our turn at bat, two neighbors talked with me about how the local towns had balanced their budgets this year. Guess what had to be cut in order to balance the books? Education turned out to be the easiest target. My neighbors shook their heads in sadness because, as they said, the towns balanced the books at the expense of the future. Students lose now; in the long run our region will suffer.

As we wrestle with notions of “shared sacrifice” and “living within our means,” let us not ignore our responsibility to invest in the future by supporting education. We must not allow our representatives to protect tax breaks for the most advantaged while ignoring our responsibility to give the next generation the education they need. Only education will allow the youngsters on that baseball diamond and at others across the country to protect their freedoms while competing in the world. Only by supporting their right to learn, will we have the chance to strengthen our country’s economic, political and cultural future. As Jefferson said: “Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people.” “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness.”

Cross-posted with Huffingtonpost.com

Our Desperate Need for Honest Leadership

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This past weekend I posted the following on the HuffingtonPost, and it provoked a fair amount of comments. I cross-post it here, though it is somewhat more directly political than what I usually write for this blog. I won’t use this blog to support specific candidates, but from time to time political issues are so relevant to educational ones, and I do write on a variety of topics...

What a week it has been! On Monday the New York Times‘ conservative columnist, David Brooks, was criticizing the Republican Party in the harshest terms. On Friday, the paper’s liberal economist, Paul Krugman, was attacking President Obama for adopting the conservative fiscal agenda and betraying his core progressive creed. What’s going on?

For Brooks, we are faced with what he called “the mother of all no-brainers.” We now have broad agreement in Congress that we must deal with the long-term deficit, and this itself is a victory for the Republicans. They control the political discourse, and they can achieve many of their economic goals. But in a move that recalls the Dems’ ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, the Republicans refuse to make a deal that would reduce the deficit by trillions.

Brooks is scathing:

But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

And he goes on:

Members of this tendency have taken a small piece of economic policy and turned it into a sacred fixation. They are willing to cut education and research to preserve tax expenditures. Manufacturing employment is cratering even as output rises, but members of this movement somehow believe such problems can be addressed so long as they continue to worship their idol.

He concludes that if the talks on the debt ceiling fail, it will be clear that the Republicans are not fit to govern.

Krugman is just as exercised by what he sees as Obama’s failure to apply either progressive values or sensible economic principles in his approach to dealing with the Republican deficit hawks:

But let’s be frank. It’s getting harder and harder to trust Mr. Obama’s motives in the budget fight, given the way his economic rhetoric has veered to the right. In fact, if all you did was listen to his speeches, you might conclude that he basically shares the G.O.P.’s diagnosis of what ails our economy and what should be done to fix it. And maybe that’s not a false impression; maybe it’s the simple truth.

For years, Krugman has viewed Obama’s compromises as an abdication of his responsibilities, and he speculates that the president is trying a Clintonesque maneuver that may have political sense but is an economic disaster. In a period of anemic job growth, Obama’s channeling of Herbert Hoover’s economic philosophies will only prolong the experience of dire recession for millions of Americans.

Brooks and Krugman both see that the Republican Party has been enormously successful in focusing attention on fiscal responsibility, which is resulting across the country in massive cuts to spending. These cuts will necessarily cause most pain to the most vulnerable — those who depend on government services. If the GOP were really serious about fiscal responsibility, its members would complement the cuts already won with increased revenue from those who have reaped the greatest rewards from our economic environment. This is what a political party ready to govern should do.

Meanwhile, we have an epidemic of unemployment, and nothing that the government is now doing is addressing this issue. Where is the enormous intellectual and political energy that Obama’s team displayed in preventing a banking system collapse, and that saved a large segment of the American automobile industry? Why has the president not had the courage of his convictions? Can he really believe that an imaginary bipartisan political pragmatism will trump economic realities?

Sensible government seems to have become a contradiction in terms. Democratic leaders have no ideas of their own, while Republican leaders are dedicated to protecting the rich — not to fiscal responsibility. Republican “non-starter” talk about additional revenue is an ideological fixation, not an economic theory. Democrats pandering to their base with calls to maintain the entitlement status quo won’t produce a sustainable health care system.

Protecting the least vulnerable remains the Republican’s highest priority, while protecting their political future seems to be what concerns Democrats. Where can we find honest leadership worthy of the name? We desperately need it.

Summer Reading: Review of Saramago’s SMALL MEMORIES

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This weekend the WASHINGTON POST ran my review of José Saramago’s posthumously published memoir. For me, summer is a time to catch up on reading that I can’t quite get to during the school year, although I also have to get a lot of writing done myself over the next couple of months. I enjoy reviewing books outside my scholarly field. I have to think about them more intensively than I would as a casual reader, and yet I do not have a scholarly investment in the reception of the work. I did not know Saramago’s work before I reviewed SMALL MEMORIES, but now I can understand  why his achievements as a writer have seemed so remarkable to so many — especially in Europe. Discovering writers that matter to you is an intensely personal process, a process that began for me as an undergraduate at Wesleyan. Reviewing is one way for me to share that process.

What are the chances? That a child surrounded by illiteracy, shuffling between his family’s new life in Lisbon and their roots in the countryside, will have such an intense appetite for words that he relishes pages from discarded newspapers, seizes on fragments of Molière in a guidebook, and will one day create parallel worlds in which an entire nation goes blind, in which Jesus apologizes for God’s sins, in which death suddenly stops occurring. These worlds, fantastic as they are, turn out to be uncomfortably like our own.

What are the chances? That a writer whose early efforts were greeted with harsh criticism (or mere silence) leaves the literary world behind to concentrate on journalism, returns in his 50s to pen novels that capture the imagination of European writers and critics, is celebrated for political bravery and artistic originality and crowned with the Nobel Prize for literature.

José Saramago (1922-2010) was this child, this writer, and in “Small Memories” he has provided us with a collection of memories of his childhood and adolescence. The recollections don’t follow a linear path but instead touch lightly on lives framed by poverty and frequent brutality. But in Saramago’s retrospective imagination, these are also lives infused with dignity, affection and deep connection. The author knows the tricks that memory can play, and on some matters he has taken great pains to test his recollections against recorded facts. Saramago is fascinated by the vagaries of remembrance, at one point wondering if certain memories he had were really his.

Although his parents moved to Lisbon when he was just 18 months old (his father was to be a policeman), Jose continued to shuffle between Portugal’s capital and Azinhaga, his native village. The village was the “cradle in which my gestation was completed, the pouch into which the small marsupial withdrew to make what he alone could make, for good or possibly ill, of his silent, secret, solitary self.” The reader is introduced to various family members: a father consumed by jealous rage; grandparents who are hardened, stoic workers but who keep the weakest of their piglets warm by bringing them into their bed for a few nights. The author’s mother is long-suffering, but she is also the young woman who on passing through a doorway forgets she is carrying a jug of water on her head because she has just received a proposal from her future husband. “You might say that my life began there too,” Saramago writes, “with a broken water jug.”

After relating this incident of the broken jug, Saramago tells the reader that his older brother, Francisco, died at age 4 in the spring of 1924, some months after his mother brought them to Lisbon. The author wonders about his memory of his brother, the “happy, sturdy, perfect little boy, who, it would seem, cannot wait for his body to grow and for his arms to be long enough to reach something.” “It’s the summer or perhaps the autumn of the year Francisco is going to die,” Saramago writes, adding it’s “my earliest memory. And it may well be false.”

I was unprepared for the piercing sadness of this hazy recollection, steeped in sorrow but told in the same calm, matter-of-fact style as Saramago’s other childhood recollections. From the loss of his older brother we are led to a memory with a “fierce and violent truth”: Saramago’s brutal encounter with a pack of older boys who, holding him down, thrust a metal wire into his urethra. The horror and sadness of the wounded little boy, blood streaming from his penis, is startling in the context of the quiet charms of the volume as a whole. Francisco is dead; little José has no one to protect him. The physical wounds will heal, but the longing for the missing brother — and a concern for those who are vulnerable to all sorts of brutality — will always remain.

Shortly after relating this incident, Saramago recalls his older friend the “prodigious shoemaker,” also named Francisco, who asked the young author-to-be if he believed there were other worlds, where other possibilities were realized. When Saramago first decided to write a memoir, he tells us that he knew he would want to write of his brother. Bringing the forgotten back through words is the writer’s alchemy, his power to create when faced with the harshness of the world.

Saramago, a poet, journalist and diarist in addition to being an acclaimed novelist, knew that words mattered a great deal — that they can even point to one’s destiny. The writer’s paternal family name, for example, was de Sousa, and the author tells us it was a town clerk’s joke to register his surname as Saramago — the name for a wild radish eaten by the poor in harsh times. The boy grew into his name, taming his wildness but always remaining faithful to his roots in poverty. “Small Memories” is an expression of that fidelity, a small but nourishing last gift from a great writer.

Cross-posted from washingtonpost.com