A fair bit has happened lately--third son finished undergraduate school, which makes three for three; a two-week first trip to Brazil, involving five cities; more, too. But all this pales next to the fact that a very dear friend, colleague and mentor passed away last night after a fairly brief illness. It has driven all other thoughts far away. So I want to devote this note to him, to Harvey Sicherman, from whose funeral I have just returned, driving three hours in the falling snow and wind, a natural gesture that seems altogether appropriate to the moment. Harvey would have to go out of this world in a flair or fanfare of one sort of another—the Holy One would have it no other way.
I barely know how to do this, however. I don't know how to do this. So I'll have to just tell a story or two that, unfortunately, are as much about me as about Harvey--because I only know how to tell this story in my own voice, out of my own memory.
It was on May 17, 1972--and I am pretty sure about the date--that I first met Harvey. I met him at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, which at the time was located at 3508 Market Street, in the new science center near Penn. I had been invited to come in about a research/writing job, and maybe a fellowship to continue graduate school (I was getting a BA and MA simultaneously in December 1972, but hoped maybe to do more), by one of my professors, William R. Kintner--a retired US Army colonel and unrepentant Cold Warrior.
Dr. Kintner liked my performance in class, and at the time I had a summer job, which had just started two weeks earlier, killing termites with Orkin out in retirement villages in New Jersey. This was no fun. I was paired with a total brick-brain, at least twenty years my elder, who had swastikas tattooed on his arm, and who was, I believed, incapable of uttering a single English sentence, or phrase even, without use of the word fuck or shit. Usually both. I was no innocent--my father was a Teamster, and I knew the language. But still......
My job with Orkin involved crawling on my belly underneath crappily built structures, with nails, broken glass and other indescribable sharp junk all over the place in the dark, dragging a 40-pound drill and a light along with me as I went. My job was to drill the concrete cinder blocks. My "associate's" job was to go in afterwards with the anti-termite chemical and shoot the holes I had drilled. While I worked, he drank beer. While he worked after me, house to house to house, I mixed, loaded and pumped the chemical. I never saw a single termite. So, naturally enough, I was interested in Dr. Kintner's invitation.
But when I got to FPRI, Dr. Kintner said a quick hello and sent me off to see his associate, Harvey Sicherman, in the smallest office I ever saw. It was really just a closet... with no windows. Heck, the walls were too small even to fit a window had there been an outside wall available for the purpose. It was piled high with books, papers and other stuff. But that closet seemed to me like a great mansion because of the man inhabiting it.
Harvey stood as I entered. He was wearing a three-piece cream suit, with a watch fob in his right vest pocket. He held a burning garbage dump, otherwise known as a cigar, in his left hand. He smiled and held out his right: "Harvey Sicherman.....(we shook hands).....Dr. Kintner has told me about you. Please have a seat." And so I first met Harvey who was--please don't take this wrong, because I am not that way and neither was he--tall, dark and handsome. Maybe 6'1" or 6'2"; dark hair and eyebrows, and sculpted very nicely indeed about the head and neck. I, at 5'8" at my maximum, noticed these things.
As it happened, Harvey had done his undergraduate work at the University of Scranton, in his hometown. He was from an Orthodox family, and had gone to yeshiva as a boy. I was from a non-nondescript, unaffiliated family, and had gone to public school in Arlington, Virginia. I knew close to nothing about Yiddishkeit until I was at least in my mid-teens, for reasons I'll not go into now. But by the time I met Harvey, all that had changed. I lived (more or less) as a modern Orthodox Jew--shabbas, yom tov, kashrut, kiddush, much study though most of it not formal, the whole works. Not only that, but I had spent from late April to early September 1971 in Israel, and had been thinking hard about going there to live.
So in that very first conversation closeted literally with Harvey, I not knowing at meeting's outset anything about him, some curious exchanges took place. I was an earnest young man at the time (fortunately or not, I still am earnest as a not young man now). So, before our conversation had proceeded very far, I told Harvey that I might not be as conservative a person as that of FPRI's reputation, it having been founded by the-then Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupe, and besides, I didn't know if I'd be a very good investment since I was thinking about leaving the country to return to Zion, though I think I did not use that phrase. I also told him I could not ever work on Jewish holidays or the sabbath, and that if he thought all this disqualified me from employment, so be it, because on these matters I was not willing to compromise.
It is very difficult for me to describe the look on Harvey's face after this little speech of mine, not because I don't remember it; I certainly do. But because some things are just hard to describe. Let me put it this way: A small, constrained smile began to trace across his mouth and climb his cheeks, he lifted his chin slightly, and seemed to very subtly roll his eyes. He told me curtly but gently that I shouldn't worry about any of that. He changed the subject, asking me whether I was interested in technology's impact on politics, and in truth I told him that yes, indeed, I was already fond of Penn's very fine History and Sociology of Science (HHS) department, and that the book sounded like something I would be happy to help with. I was hired. Bye, bye termites. I have not crawled on my belly with a 40-pound drill since. I have also never again worked side by side with anyone sporting swastika tattoos.
I soon set to work under Harvey’s able direction on the project about technology and international politics. I did OK, I guess, because as a result of my early work I was given several scholarships through FPRI, which William Kintner controlled, and, having been invited into the Ph.D. program without having to take GREs or even apply, I was able to pursue that degree. One of the scholarships I had was the Salvatori scholarship, which Harvey had earlier had when he was in graduate school. I think maybe William Kintner saw me as a six-years-younger version of Harvey, who had finished his Ph.D. at Penn in 1971. In some ways, I guess I was. I finished mine in 1979. I was 28. When I met Harvey in May 1972, he was, I think, 27.
I found out fairly soon after our first meeting, of course, that Harvey was an Orthodox Jew, and had been to yeshiva, and knew a great deal more than I ever would about Judaism's intellectual legacy. I soon found out, too, that with his new wife Barbara, he intended to set off for Israel himself. I then realized how hilarious my self-introduction must have seemed to him, and admired his discipline in not breaking out in uncontrollable laughter.
We worked together pretty closely on that book, he designing and drafting, me doing research fill-in and general critique. The book came out, under Dr. Kintner's name, of course. I learned quickly how real ghosts operate in this world, good training for my later days as a State Department speechwriter, an occupation in which Harvey preceded me, too, by some years.
As anyone could see, Harvey cut a notable figure. He had his passions and his own ways of doing things. He was very admirably stylish, endearing and memorable--yet never brash or anything but humble at the same time, which is no easy feat. Some who did not really know him may have thought he was merely displaying a series of affectations, trying to be a cross between Disraeli, Churchill and Don Isaac Abarbanel in the wrong century. But they would have been mistaken. Harvey was just Harvey, no matter where the pieces came from. On him, everything he chose fit naturally right.
He was certainly a mentor to me in many ways; but not in every way. He was indeed a mentor when it came to the English language. He always insisted that style mattered, and that you didn't have to write like an automaton to do social science and policy work well. He gave me early on a list he had compiled of "Most Wanting Words", which was instructive as well as very funny. I already had a knack for writing, but Harvey helped me refine it. He encouraged me along the right directions to refine it, and in the drafting process he showed me very specifically how to take mediocre writing and make it sing.
He also influenced my sartorial style, at least to some degree. Coming from a proletariat home, I had no idea how to dress for a profession. My father appeared often enough in his Sealtest Dairy overalls. I still have a fondness for overalls. Harvey liked tailored suits cut out of the 1920s and 1930s. He knew an Italian guy on Bancroft Street in South Philly named Letieri, and that's where he had his suits made. If you picked out the fabric at certain stores near 4th & Bainbridge, you could take the material over to Mr. Letieri's workship and he'd make you a three-piece suit for less money than you could buy a two-piece in a retail store. Little old Italian ladies sewed all his buttons. You get the picture.
I went with Harvey one afternoon for a fitting on a new suit he was having made. I liked Mr. Letieri; it was a case of tailor at first sight. For all I knew, too, he could have carved Pinocchio in his spare time. I had no suits, and realized that I needed at least one. So I said what the heck, and ordered up a three-piece black pinstripe, with waistcoat instead of mere vest--similar to the style Harvey liked best, but adjusted somewhat to take into account my different shape. Harvey bought me a shimmery red tie to go with the suit when it was done.
Now, I did wear a pocket-watch, with fob, with that suit. And here Harvey, too, was something of an inspiration. But it is more accurate, I think, to say that he was an enabler. I already owned and occasionally used a pocket-watch. It had belonged to my Uncle Willie, and I had obtained it via my father. I never wore a wristwatch; I don't like rings either, or anything else fixing to strangle any part of my body. And all the photos of both my grandfathers, neither of whom I was born soon enough to meet, showed the watch-fob style and, more often that not, the bowler hat as well. So I was ready for all that. What Harvey did was make it permissible. He did it, slightly outlandish as it was, so that meant I could do it, too. I realized from the start, however, that I could never cut a figure like Harvey did. Me at a maximum 5'8"--somewhat less than that today--could never look like someone at 6"2".
The old Mr. Letieri in time gave way to his son, Tommy, who was a uniform maker and did tailoring on the side. I did buy a three-piece suit from him some years later on, cream color. I was married in it on June 21, 1981, and Harvey is there in the pictures, in a red-maroon sport coat, holding one of the four poles of the huppah as we all gathered in our first house at 48th and Larchwood in West Philly. (He was also with me, right by my side, some two and a half years later when I buried my father.) But here is another difference between Harvey and me: Harvey's basic body shape seemed never to change, while over time mine did. Harvey seemed to never gain weight, never to develop a paunch, never to change his bolt upright royal posture. He remained forever handsome, even when his hair began to gray and thin a bit. For all I know, as of a few weeks ago he could still wear tailored suits he had had made in 1975. As for me, I have long since out-girthed my tailor-made items, including most certainly my wedding outfit.
Now, about cars. Harvey loved cars, old cars especially, Packards and Cadillacs particularly. Back in 1972, or soon thereafter, he had a two-toned green Packard, possibly two -- I can't remember exactly. But he liked Cadillacs, too. Now, as it happened, I bought a 1952 Fleetwood in 1978 0r 1979--`79 I believe it was--and it was through my friendship with Harvey that this occurred. He knew a guy named Gary Anderson who had a fix-in shop not too far from the office. He used Gary to work on his cars. I was momentarily carless, having gone through one `64 Impala and three `66 Impalas since leaving Arlington--that's another story, or set of stories, I will not relate here. Anyway, Gary had this `52 Fleetwood outside, midnight blue, in a kind of dilapidated but still running condition. $400. So I bought it, and handed it back over to Gary to get fixed into safe and reasonably reliable running condition. That he did in about ten days for about another $400, and I still have the car today, some 31 years later. Harvey later bought a red `55 Caddy; nice car. I wonder where that one is now...
The point, however, is that Harvey did not have to endear me to old GM cars; I was already there, long before I met him. I knew every car on the road by the time I was four, a real automotive idiot savant was I. I had from the time I was 8 years old always wanted a `58 Impala, and never have got one. But I certainly never had anything against Caddys, and my `52 has treated me well all these years. Every time I drive it I think of Harvey. I will continue to do so.
And now, let us discuss booze. Harvey had a very refined taste in good liquor, mainly single malts but also encompassing Slivovitz--one has to have something to wet the whistle on Pesach, after all. When I met him, in 1972, I was already well introduced to alcohol. I liked good Scotch, but couldn't afford it most of the time. Like a lot of younger people who appreciate whiskey, I was satisfied with a nice bourbon or a sour mash. In this my father had been my mentor, having once, in a succah, conned me as a 5 year old into drinking `ol Four Roses on the pretense that it was apple juice. I did him surprisingly proud then, but as I have gotten older, I have come to prefer the single malts and good Irish. So Harvey did not mentor me or introduce me to any of this, but, as with clothing, he functioned as a provider of excellent, reinforcing company and some well appreciated fine-point counsel. (Harvey also tried to turn me on to cigars, but that I just could not do, and do not for a moment regret it.)
Anyway, after mid-May 1972 Harvey and I saw each other every work day for a little while, and in shul as well, for I started walking down to the American Jewish Congress House downtown, on Locust Street, for shabbat. And then Harvey and Barbara disappeared......they went to Israel. My own intentions about aliyah had by then been muddled by graduate school, the needs of elderly parents and the presence of certain women. Harvey and Barbara didn't stay in Israel, however; it was a tough year for them, as I heard it.
When they came back, they rented a place downtown, and I remember once being called over to help them assemble a nice piece of old furniture--some kind of armoire, I think--they were trying to set up. My mechanical skills are just average, at best, but compared to Harvey I might have been a master carpenter. He was extraordinarily capable at many things, but things that involved machines and tools were not his forte, as reflected in the fact that he never really took to typing, did not like computers and pretty much disdained the Internet.
Instead, he liked fountain pens, and again, so always did I. I have one thing from Harvey, a gift from long ago, an old ink well device. It sits on my desk, as it has all these years, and I still use it. It replaced an inferior one I had from home. I still have a lifetime supply of Esterbrook nibs from my father's last store—three boxes of 100 each--which I had been using even before I ever met Harvey. Here, too, his tastes reinforced, ratified and shaped mine, but did not create them.
Maybe these similarities between us were founded in the stars. He and I are, were, both Geminis. His birthday was June 2, which I could never forget even if I wanted to, since mine is June 1. But, of course, six years apart, he having been born in 1945 (I think) and me in 1951.
Back now to the calendar of years: Harvey and Barbara (with an odd little dog named Teddy) were back in Philadelphia in time for the October 1973 Middle East War. I was with him, and of course some several others, in shul on Yom Kippur on Locust Street, when we all heard the news. I worked with Harvey, and saw him pretty much every day back then, as I was working on my Ph.D., until after the 1980 election, after which, in the early spring of 1981, he went off with Alexander Haig to Washington and the State Department. Having finished my Ph.D. in 1979, I was then, in the first months of 1981, not yet 30 years of age. My hair was long, I had a beard, and I was not ready or suited for high or even low government position. So, I guess, it was thought, and probably correctly. So I went nowhere.
Besides, I wasn't a Republican, and never have been. I had, thanks to Dr. Kintner and the FPRI connection, earlier worked some as an adjunct to the staff of Sen. Henry Jackson, a Democrat. I was comfortable being a liberal hawk, not a conservative one--so long as we understand liberal to mean JFK, LBJ, HHH and HST liberalism, not the post-George McGovern kind. I did that work with Sen. Jackson's office for a time in 1977 and again in 1979. While down in Washington, one time sleeping on John Lehman's couch, another time staying in Scoop's house, working with Richard Perle and Dorothy Fosdick, I was always in contact with Harvey, who took in my briefs and dispensed wise and incisive advice back to me in return.
One time I remember in particular was when General Haig testified in July or August 1979 before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Harvey and I together sat just behind Haig in the Senate Caucus Room, he on Haig's direct behalf and me representing the condominium of Sen. Jackson and Sen. Tower that had been assembled to interrogate the SALT II treaty. It must have been late summer because I distinctly remember that one day of the hearings took place on Tisha B'Av. The lights were hot; we were dressed in very nice suits. Harvey and I both sat there all day, hungry, thirsty and did our jobs. During a break I napped on one of Scoop's office couches; Harvey gently woke me up when it was time to return to the caucus room. Harvey and I looked at each other, me prone on the couch, he standing over me, and we each knew what the other was experiencing, and needed to say not a single word to communicate it. A stereo chuckle was all it took. Now that’s friendship.
Harvey did not return to Philadelphia FPRI soon after having gone with Haig to Washington. He and Barbara stayed in Washington, I think for about 12 years, living in Silver Spring, while Harvey worked for George Shultz, Jim Baker and did other things as well. He and Barbara had their three children in those years; so did Scilla and I--theirs all boys, Max, Jonathan and Zack, ours with a girl in between, Gabriel, Hannah and Nate. I think Max and Gabe were both born in 1981, so Harvey did not become a father until a bit later in his life than I did in mine. I was 30; I guess he was 35 or 36 when Max was born.
I do know Max and Gabe both played baseball in the Jewish Y league, when they were around 14 or 15 years old. I vividly remember an incident in which Max was pitching for his team and Gabriel was at bat for his, and Gabe smashed a line drive right back at Max's head, knocking him apart--glasses, glove flying--like something you'd see in a cartoon. These were real baseballs. But Max is tough, and he was fine; everyone was soon chuckling and snorting, as boys on a baseball field will do. But I will never forget the sight of it. Harvey's three kids and my three still know each other, Nate and Zach much less well than the older others. But they still know each other, mainly from shul in Lower Merion and sojourns since.
So obviously, Harvey and Barbara and the boys did eventually return to the Philly area; I think it was in 1993. Harvey came to take over the reins at FPRI. The place had been through a lot of tumult, and was not in great financial shape. There was soon a split, too, occasioned by the former director's bad behavior. I had stayed at FPRI all this time, and had done some teaching on the side. I felt no Washington fire-in-the-belly. I liked FPRI; it let me read and think and write what I wanted. I did get antsy during those twelve years from time to time and did on occasion look for other work, but to no avail. I did, however, manage to spend 1992-93 in Israel with my family, partly to get away from the office, partly just to do it for its own sake.
But with Harvey's coming back to Philadelphia, I thought things would be much better--that I would enjoy FPRI more than ever. Shul, too: Harvey also used to come to Lower Merion synagogue in those years, before he found another minyan much closer to his house at the corner of City Line Avenue and Overbrook Avenue--a wonderful, sprawling old Victorian home that fit Harvey and Barbara perfectly in every way.
Things did get better; with Harvey around, work was fun again, and again I grew intellectually from his experience and counsel. I never met anyone who could get to the essence of problem as quickly or as elegantly as he could. Our reunion was not to last very long, however. FPRI fell on bad financial times. Harvey did herculean work keeping the place from collapsing altogether, but to do more than that took him longer to accomplish. By May 1995 things had gotten so bad that the place could no longer afford to keep me full time--not that I was all that expensive. Harvey offered me half-time work, but since I had a full-time mortgage and other full-time expenses, this could not be. Harvey later told me this was the hardest thing he had ever had to do in professional life, and I believed him.
So I headed off to Washington, first as a 4-day-a-week commuter, later in earnest, having gone back to where I was born and raised in the Washington area. I still saw Harvey fairly often over these past 15 years, when he would come to Washington, or on some occasions when I would return to Philly to do FPRI-sponsored programs. We did some work together, as well, when he wrote brilliantly for magazines I edited, first The National Interest and later The American Interest. (Harvey's last publication was in the November/December 2010 issue of the latter.) We also shared some seminar work at WINEP (Washington Institute for Near East Policy), and did some work in common for MESH (Middle East Strategy at Harvard).
Even when we had no specific project to work on together, we talked on the phone from time to time just for the heck of it. And when we did we always talked Torah and interpretation as well as politics and policy. When I was writing speeches for Colin Powell and Condi Rice in 2003, 2004 and 2005, we spoke fairly often, sharing our experiences on such matters--and with navigating S/P and the State Department generally. When I drafted my book on Jewcentricity in 2008, Harvey was the only colleague I asked to read the entire manuscript, because he was the only person I knew who understood as much and probably more about the subject than I did. Around the same time Harvey asked me to read and comment on his fine manuscript on the history of cheap hawkery, which I gladly did. I think I can say, then, without exaggeration, that we were true colleagues for more than 38 years.
Harvey packed more learning, wit, style, grace, panache and love into his 65+ years than most people could hope to do in 130 years. He was brilliant, creative, almost impossibly personable and, I would not hesitate to say, wise. He perhaps did not publish as much as he might have and maybe as much as he wanted to, but I think I know why: He understood the rabbinical command to be very careful in teaching. Harvey was something of a perfectionist as an intellectual; he would not let fly in writing until he was sure he understood the material, had mastered its meaning, and took the necessary pains to express himself as perfectly as possible. He maintained excruciatingly high standards of excellence. He cared about quality, not quantity, and besides, he had administrative and fund-raising responsibilities that proved very time-consuming. It’s too bad for the rest of us that he didn’t write some of the big-sweep books he had talked about; they would have been extraordinary, like everything he did. Alas, he was the antithesis of the shoot-from-the-hip, naked opinion-to-spite-learning style of the blogosphere.
In his insistence on doing things right Harvey constantly elevated my understanding of what diligence in thought and writing is all about. He established a target for me--and others, if they know what's good for them--to aspire to. He knew what was worth taking seriously, and he did. He knew how to have some fun, too, and he did that as well. I never have known anyone who enjoyed a good story more than Harvey, and who could tell them with the very best. Above all, however, he understood how to balance what was serious and what was fun because he also knew the difference between right and wrong, and never wavered from it.
It has been one of the greatest of honors in my life to have had Harvey as a friend and colleague, someone enough my elder to give me unfailingly good counsel over many years, but not so much so that he was unable to speak with me as an equal on matters of substance as we both grew older. He could talk and teach with the very best, that's for sure; but he could also listen and learn from others--and to find someone capable of doing both is a great rarity in this world, in these days as in any.
The funeral in Philadelphia earlier today was very hard for me. Avraham Levene helped make it a little easier, for his eulogy was in perfect pitch, as his words nearly always are. But it was almost too much for me to bear watching Barbara walk out of the chapel behind the casket. She was trying so hard to be cordial and polite, but she obviously fought a total meltdown all the way out the door.
I can't know what she felt. I can't know what Harvey's elderly mother felt. I can't know what the three boys and other family members felt. But I know what I felt at that precise moment, even if only for a moment--that what I was experiencing wasn't really happening, that it was just some horrid, cruel dream that would soon go away. I felt a vaporous hand reaching down deep within me and taking hold of my very spirit, trying to choke off my air, making my soul stutter and stumble. I closed my eyes for a second and instantly became disoriented, spinning forward, falling over myself, slightly nauseous. When I opened them again; my temples throbbed, and the casket was gone.
I am better now, physically. As Scilla and I drove home in the snowfall, mostly in quiet, I composed myself. As they say, I will get over it. But as we know, all the experiences we have become integrated into our being in one way or another, to one degree or another. One never gets over moments like this; and it seems to me now that we should not want or hope to "get over" them; that would be giving up part of life that we have earned. We process them, we layer them, we come to adapt ourselves to them by learning from them, if we're lucky. I don't want to "get over" Harvey's death, anymore than I would want to get over knowing him during his life. I want to find a way to learn and grow from his passing, using the model of his life as my guide. That is the burden from this day that I choose.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
The Jewish State
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he latest Israeli-Palestinian attempt at negotiating a solution to their conflict got derailed by U.S. diplomatic malpractice before it had an honest chance to fail of its own accord. But fail it would have, not least because over the past eighteen months a major new issue has been added to the agenda of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations (as if that agenda needed more challenge). Beyond the hearty perennials of borders, Jerusalem, refugees, water and security arrangements, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu asserted in a June 2009 speech that Palestinian recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state” was now an Israeli requirement for agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
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| T |
he reaction to Netanyahu’s assertion was take-it-to-the-bank scale predictable. Most Israeli Jews and supporters of Israel worldwide applauded the innovation. Indeed, some claimed that its importance was so obviously crucial to any genuine settlement of the conflict that it was amazing that no previous Israeli government had ever raised it. Both Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, however, immediately rejected the new requirement, and most Palestinians, Arabs and their supporters cheered their so doing.
Palestinian Authority officials raised three explicit objections to Netanyahu’s demand: that it is not for Palestinians to determine the nature of the Israeli state; that Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state would jeopardize the position of the Israeli Arabs; and that if Israel did not demand recognition as a “Jewish state” in its peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, why do so now, unless the purpose was to erect artificial barriers to serious negotiations. Later, in October 2010, when Netanyahu tried to link a Palestinian declaration acknowledging Israel as a Jewish state with a continuation of the settlements construction freeze, it only confirmed to many Palestinians that his demand was not as high-minded as he and his supporters claimed.
Of what does that putative high-mindedness consist? Many observers, particularly those sympathetic to Israel, cite a fourth, unstated Palestinian objection to Netanyahu’s demand: It shines a bright light on the real reason for the conflict in the first place; namely, Arab and Palestinian rejection of the right of Jews to self-determination, which presupposes the right to self-definition. According to this view, it’s not Israel that is raising a new demand in order to avoid serious negotiations; it’s doing so to make serious negotiations with the Palestinians possible really for the first time. Specifically, it addresses directly Palestinian rejection of the legitimacy of Jewish nationalism (Zionism), achieved through an insistence that a Jew is defined by religion, not nationality or ethnicity. (Never mind for now that sometimes the same people insist instead, when it suits the purposes of the moment, that Jews are an ethnic group, hence supposedly rendering Zionism by definition racist; and also never mind that this view also contravenes that of Muslim prelates in the early centuries of Islam.)
The supposed religious as opposed to ethnic or national character of the Jews has led some Palestinians—some prominent ones, at that—to insist further that no Jewish historical connection to the land in question exists, for that is another way of denying anything remotely resembling national Jewish interests or rights there. Hence the bizarre claim by Yasir Arafat and others, contradicted by earlier centuries of Muslim historiography, that no Jewish Temple ever stood on what the Arabs call the Haram al-Sharaf, and the Jews call the Temple Mount.
It is precisely because of the Arab and Palestinian denial of the Jewish right to self-definition, many reason, that Netanyahu’s demand makes sense. If the Arabs accept Israel as a Jewish state, and acknowledge that state’s Jewish citizens’ historical ties to the Land of Israel, then it means they have finally made the psychological breakthrough that makes a genuine peace possible. And if they do not, then best to know about it now, so that there will be no illusions about what the peace process, so-called, can and cannot achieve. This same basic logic, in different form given the different context, underlies proposals that Israeli Arab citizens (and, in some versions, all immigrants, too) should be subjected to a loyalty oath.
By this reasoning, then, Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish State becomes not only necessary, but central to ending the conflict. As was not the case in negotiations with Egypt or Jordan, Israelis and Palestinians have been locked in an existential conflict in which the assertion of one people’s national aspirations seemed ipso facto to negate those of the other people. Only when both sides recognize the legitimacy of the other’s national aspirations can there be peace. Israeli leaders long ago accepted the existence of a distinct Palestinian people and its right to a state—formally so as part of the September 1993 Oslo Accords. Now, goes the argument, it’s the turn of the Palestinians to reciprocate. Said Netanyahu to a conference on the future of the Jewish people on October 22, 2010, “Only when our peace partners are willing to recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state will they truly be prepared to end the conflict and make a lasting peace with Israel.”
| S |
ome Israelis and supporters of Israel at large, however, hold another view of Netanyahu’s demand. It’s not that anyone who wishes Israel well disputes the desirability of a Palestinian declaration of the kind Netanyahu demands. Palestinian acceptance of Israel’s Jewishness, even if only declaratory and less than wholly sincere, would be a good thing according the maxim that hypocrisy is often the advanced wave of a new truth. But from a strategic perspective, some reason, Israel would gain little and possibly lose much by giving this demand a high priority, a danger further magnified should Israeli make it a sine qua non of a successful negotiation.
As Alan Dowty of Notre Dame University has insightfully explained, recognition of one state by another in traditional international diplomacy generally depends on the recognized state having effective authority within its borders and showing a willingness to abide by international commitments and rules. Sometimes the recognizing state can impose additional criteria regarding the internal arrangements of the state being recognized, as when the United States and some other countries recognized Kosovo as an independent state. But it is hard to think of any cases in which the state being recognized has imposed additional conditions on others, even as part of a peace agreement. In putting such an unprecedented condition at the top of its agenda, Israel should therefore expect to find little understanding or support in the international community.
More important, making a verbal formula so central to a negotiation does not really address Israel’s core security concerns. Hans Morgenthau used to advise giving up the shadow of worthless rights for the substance of real advantage; or, as Fiorello LaGuardia once summed up the matter, “Tickertape ain’t spaghetti.”
The logic here is manifest on other fronts that Israel has faced and still faces. Thus, the vulnerability of Sinai to Israeli reconquest reinforces Egypt’s observance of the March 1979 peace treaty; the terms of peace that have caused that vulnerability to persist are far more important to the maintenance of peace than anything any Egyptian official ever said in public. Subtler but no less real for the absence of as contractual peace, Syria renews the UNEF mandate on the Golan Heights like clockwork every six months because it stands to lose more from not doing so given Israel’s military superiority. In any imaginable Israeli-Palestinian settlement, too, the concrete arrangements on the ground—demilitarization provisions, in particular; the placement of early-warning technologies in the Jordan Valley; and more besides—will be much more important to implementing and keeping the peace than any words extracted from the lips of the Palestinian leaders.
Morgenthau’s counsel still makes sense. Governments often make verbal commitments they have every intention of ignoring; what counts in a peace agreement are the concrete arrangements that give both sides an incentive to do what they have promised. Since Israel would have to give up something to get the Palestinians to say the magic words in the way the Netanyahu government insists on their being said, one has to wonder whether some other more concrete concession would not prove more valuable in a world where negotiating assets, and hence trading capital, are finite.
Beyond that, it is for any practical purpose pointless to contend with what others may believe in their heart of hearts, but one can ensure that they lack the means or opportunity to act on those beliefs. The acid test comes down to this: If the Palestinian Authority should come one day to grant all of Israel’s terms for an end-of-conflict peace accord except explicit recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state”, should the Israeli government of that day walk away from the deal? I would hope not.
| T |
here are, alas, two additional problems with the Prime Minister’s approach, one mainly legal and one fairly abstract, but not inconsequential for so being.
First the legal. Asking the Palestinian Authority to accept Israel as a Jewish state borders on asking its permission for Jews to be who most of them say they are. Jews do not need permission from anyone to define themselves either as a people or as a nation, nor do they really need in so many words from the Palestinian Arabs what they already have from the (so-called) international community, namely, legal title to most, though not all, of Mandatory Palestine—final borders pending negotiations among the parties, of course, as stipulated by UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338.
What the current Israeli government, or any Israeli government, can and must demand is that Palestinians recognize the legal status of the State of Israel in international law. That status is clear: Let us remember that when the UN General Assembly voted on the question 63 years ago, it voted on “the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.” If the Palestinians recognize Israel, therefore, it subsumes Israel’s status as a Jewish state. This, presumably, is why earlier Israeli governments, including one led by Netanyahu himself, did not insist on a Palestinian declaration of the sort that Netanyahu now demands: It was understood that the legal framework that encompasses the conflict’s history and resolution glidepath presupposes such recognition.
To some extent, too, the Palestinians have already acknowledged that Israel is and will remain a Jewish state. Back in 1994 Yasir Arafat, during an interview with the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, was asked if he understood that Israel had to remain a Jewish state, and he answered “definitely.” Earlier, in its 1988 Declaration of Independence, the PLO somewhat grudgingly recognized, but recognized all the same, the applicability of UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947 which, its Declaration stated, “partitioned Palestine into two states, one Arab, one Jewish.”
This history of what we might call the sideswiping Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is what has led some Palestinian officials, like Mohammed Shtayyeh, to declare that “the issue of recognition is settled, it is done.” It has also led others to reason that Netanyahu’s demand that it now be explicitly repeated amounts to negotiating in bad faith, with the aim of either foiling the chances for agreement or of using the additional demand to get a deal more favorable to Israel. And, taken together with the aforementioned practical matter of what Israel might have to trade to get its wish, this is what is leading some Israeli officials, including Labor Party Defense Minister Ehud Barak, to distance himself from the Prime Minister’s position. “Of course we are a Jewish state,” Barak has said, “but we have to make sure we do not get on a slippery slope where our justifiable demands become prohibitive obstacles” to a deal.
Second the more abstract problem. To ask for a Palestinian intellectual consensus on Israel as a “Jewish state” begs an esoteric point in the philosophy of Jewish history, and that is asking too much. It is asking too much because, even if they do not like to admit it in mixed company, Jews themselves do not agree fully on what the phrase “Jewish state” actually means.
There are at least three ways to mean the adjective “Jewish” as attached to the noun “state”: Jewish as an ethnic description, Jewish as a religious (in the narrow Western definition) description, and Jewish as a cultural description that includes part of both. These correspond to Jews as a nation, as a faith community, and as a people. These definitions can and do overlap in practice, which is to say that they are conveniently muddled to cover over their mutual incompatibility.
One can get a sense of this incompatibility by referring to the history of Zionism, which has never entirely come to terms with this definitional ambiguity. In its original essence, political Zionism—the Zionism of Theodore Herzl and especially that of the secular socialists who assumed the movement’s leadership after his death in 1904—is a form of nationalism. Jews are defined as a nation qua ethnic group, in perfectly acceptable late-19th century parlance. But that never quite worked for all purposes at hand, not least because conversion into Judaism as a faith community over the centuries had by then created a Jewish population that significantly transcended an ethnic group, or “nation”, as such. Hence the far more common use of the more expansive cultural term “Jewish people”, a rabbinically endorsed concept from a very long time ago meant to describe all those who throw in their lot together as Jews.
Broader than nation and less restrictive than faith community, peoplehood remains the most historically accurate and inclusive way to define Jews today, but it is a definition that does not satisfy all Jews. Some insist that faith has nothing to do with Jewishness; others insist that nationality has nothing to do with it. Both points of view are represented in Israel today by Israeli citizens. Outside of Israel, too, there are Jews who have Jewish ancestry but no interest in a faith community as well as those joined to the faith community who lack Jewish ancestry. There are both secular and religious Jews who are Zionist and secular and religious Jews who are not Zionist (if not to say anti-Zionist). Today one can thus affirm Jewish peoplehood “ni Moises, ni Herzl”, to paraphrase a well-known French locution by Jean-Francoise Revel that had originally to do with Jesus and Marx, and one can deny “peoplehood” by affirming exclusive reliance on ethnicity or religious belief.
One therefore shudders to think what might happen if the Palestinian leadership were shrewd enough to respond to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s request with a question: “What exactly do you mean by ‘Jewish state’?” One Arab citizen of Israel, at least, has come close to doing so: Mohammed Darwishe, the co-director of the Abraham Fund Initiatives, pointed to the loyalty oath proposal mooted by current Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman of the Israel Betaynu Party and asked, “The Jewish State is what? A Lieberman state?”
In due course, a more general formulation of that question could turn out to be far more trouble to answer than it’s worth. After all, disaster has befallen the Jewish people in the past, one could plausibly argue, not principally because of what its enemies were able to do, but because of radical dissension within its own ranks. Netanyahu’s innovation, for all of its well-intentioned purposes, could in due course unleash demons the Jewish people can well do without. Isn’t that just like politics, though—that domain of human affairs whose sole purpose for being, I sometimes think, is to prove the law of unintended consequences?
Friday, November 12, 2010
Birthdays
Today, November 12, 2010, is my father-in-law's 87th birthday. Yesterday, November 11 and also Veteran's Day, was mother's 103rd birthday. I did not call my father-in-law today, because I was busy early, and later he was en route with my youngest son Nate to Okemos, Michigan (don't ask), and out of teleph0nic contact. I did not visit my mother's grave because I hate it; no matter the situation, no matter the time of year, no matter anything, I break down and bawl like a raw-souled animal when I see it. I often vomit, too. So I just don't go there much.
Word to the wise: Try to avoid having your mother die on you when you're 9.
Word to the wise: Try to avoid having your mother die on you when you're 9.
A Time It Was and What a Time It Was
I have decided to put a somewhat old, quite personal letter on this blog. The reason I do it is so that if anyone should ever want to figure out what makes me tick, this will aid them. I will say no more about this for now.
Nope. Changed my mind.
Nope. Changed my mind.
Monday, November 1, 2010
bullshistory
One reaction to my coining of bullshitistry the other day was to pronounce it improvable. Benjamin Margolies suggested bullshistory instead.
I agree that bullshistory sounds better than bullshitistry, because it's shorter by a few letters and easier to pronounce. But it doesn't mean the same thing. While bullshitistry means skillful lying, bullshistory means distorted accounts of the past--not really the same thing at all, since the purveyors of the latter don't think they are telling mistruths, and hence in their own minds are not lying.
If a person cannot tell the difference between saying something mistaken by accident and doing so deliberately, then they are moral illiterates. Of course, this is remarkably common today, as when those mainly on the Left refuse to distinguish the Bush Administration's mistakenly thinking there was a lot of WMD in Iraq. There wasn't, but all the principals of the Bush Administration believed, for pretty good reasons, too, that there was. So to say that these principals "lied" about the matter, which is the standard vocabulary of many in this regard, is both inaccurate and preposterous. They were mistaken, yes; but they did not deliberately mislead others. (I know; I was there.) It's like the difference between a well-meaning pedestrian inadvertently giving wrong directions to a stranger in a car asking how to find a local address, and a nasty stranger deliberately sending the seeker off in the wrong direction. Again, if you cannot understand the distinction here, you're an imbecile.
In that light, it is altogether possible that bullshistory has an even wider application nowadays than bullshitistry, since most of the nonsense being peddled is not done so with malice aforethought. Today we have the Tea Party account of U.S. history, which is hilarious when it's not scary, joined to an older leftwing systematic distortion, epitomized by Howard Zinn's popular "peoples history" of the United States. My friend Ron Radosh has written over the years about both, and has recently done so again. He needs to take up the term bullshistory if he continues in this vein; it's just too perfect to omit.
So, for that and other reasons, I am very glad for Ben's effort in this direction: Thank You, BM!! (speaking of bullshit, you've really got to do something about those initials.......)
I agree that bullshistory sounds better than bullshitistry, because it's shorter by a few letters and easier to pronounce. But it doesn't mean the same thing. While bullshitistry means skillful lying, bullshistory means distorted accounts of the past--not really the same thing at all, since the purveyors of the latter don't think they are telling mistruths, and hence in their own minds are not lying.
If a person cannot tell the difference between saying something mistaken by accident and doing so deliberately, then they are moral illiterates. Of course, this is remarkably common today, as when those mainly on the Left refuse to distinguish the Bush Administration's mistakenly thinking there was a lot of WMD in Iraq. There wasn't, but all the principals of the Bush Administration believed, for pretty good reasons, too, that there was. So to say that these principals "lied" about the matter, which is the standard vocabulary of many in this regard, is both inaccurate and preposterous. They were mistaken, yes; but they did not deliberately mislead others. (I know; I was there.) It's like the difference between a well-meaning pedestrian inadvertently giving wrong directions to a stranger in a car asking how to find a local address, and a nasty stranger deliberately sending the seeker off in the wrong direction. Again, if you cannot understand the distinction here, you're an imbecile.
In that light, it is altogether possible that bullshistory has an even wider application nowadays than bullshitistry, since most of the nonsense being peddled is not done so with malice aforethought. Today we have the Tea Party account of U.S. history, which is hilarious when it's not scary, joined to an older leftwing systematic distortion, epitomized by Howard Zinn's popular "peoples history" of the United States. My friend Ron Radosh has written over the years about both, and has recently done so again. He needs to take up the term bullshistory if he continues in this vein; it's just too perfect to omit.
So, for that and other reasons, I am very glad for Ben's effort in this direction: Thank You, BM!! (speaking of bullshit, you've really got to do something about those initials.......)
Friday, October 29, 2010
bullshitistry
A neologism I like, which came to me at the end of this morning's dreamwork:
bullshitistry, being a compound of bullshit and artistry, and meaning, of course, elaborate and passingly skillful lying.
It's going to be a good day.......
bullshitistry, being a compound of bullshit and artistry, and meaning, of course, elaborate and passingly skillful lying.
It's going to be a good day.......
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Tony Curtis, RIP
News comes that Tony Curtis has passed away at the age of 85. All the obits will naturally focus on his acting career. That's fine; I enjoyed many of his old movies. His line in Spartacus, "Yonder is my father's house", which he delivered with a beer-up-your nose Brooklyn accent, just slays me every time I hear it, or even think about it.
But that's not what I think about when I hear his name, which, the obits do mention, was changed from Schwartz at the outset of his acting career. What I think about is a synagogue in Budapest.
There is a synagogue in the old part of town that has a storied history. Part of it concerns the fact that the synagogue and its grounds were used by the Nazis and their Hungarian allies to imprison a number of Jews in 1944 and early 1945. Some died there under terrible conditions and were buried on the grounds. Most of the others and many more Hungarian Jews besides were deported to Auschwitz and murdered there. The synagogue fell into disrepair after the war; in Communist times it just sat there and more or less rotted. Then, when it became possible, Tony Curtis, whose parents were immigrants from Budapest, led a group of people who paid to have it restored, and its dead properly memorialized and honored. Curtis spent well over a few million dollars of his own money on the restoration, which is beautiful to behold.
Curtis was not a religious person. He was involved in New York area youth gang wars as a kid, in which anti-Semitism played the usual leading role. When he wanted to replace Schwartz as a professional name, he picked a version of Kertesz, a Jewish family-related name from the old country. He married six times, and I think that not even one of his wives was Jewish (except maybe the last one, whose name was Deutsch). But deep down he knew who he was, and he was not ashamed or reluctant to show it.
If you're ever in Budapest, you might want to stop by the place, and sit for a few moments. I have been there: see .....
But that's not what I think about when I hear his name, which, the obits do mention, was changed from Schwartz at the outset of his acting career. What I think about is a synagogue in Budapest.
There is a synagogue in the old part of town that has a storied history. Part of it concerns the fact that the synagogue and its grounds were used by the Nazis and their Hungarian allies to imprison a number of Jews in 1944 and early 1945. Some died there under terrible conditions and were buried on the grounds. Most of the others and many more Hungarian Jews besides were deported to Auschwitz and murdered there. The synagogue fell into disrepair after the war; in Communist times it just sat there and more or less rotted. Then, when it became possible, Tony Curtis, whose parents were immigrants from Budapest, led a group of people who paid to have it restored, and its dead properly memorialized and honored. Curtis spent well over a few million dollars of his own money on the restoration, which is beautiful to behold.
Curtis was not a religious person. He was involved in New York area youth gang wars as a kid, in which anti-Semitism played the usual leading role. When he wanted to replace Schwartz as a professional name, he picked a version of Kertesz, a Jewish family-related name from the old country. He married six times, and I think that not even one of his wives was Jewish (except maybe the last one, whose name was Deutsch). But deep down he knew who he was, and he was not ashamed or reluctant to show it.
If you're ever in Budapest, you might want to stop by the place, and sit for a few moments. I have been there: see .....
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Mizpah II: A Jewcentric Aside
My discovery of the Mizpah phenomenon has developed more detail since my original post of September 15 -- hence this Mizpah II post.
Having learned that Mizpah jewelry existed, I wanted to see what it looked like. This led me to one Jean Baker, who lives in the UK. She is a serious collector of Mizpah, not only jewelry, but also old postcards and other paper memorabilia. Some of her collection is pictured on her website, but it is not particularly well identified. So I found her email address and put some questions to her. As it turns out, most of the items in her collection range from about 1880 to 1920, as I suspected. Most of the items are British, which is not surprising since she herself has been collecting in Britain; but she does have some American items, too. In particular, she has some paper items, one of which she thought, after reading my original post pointing out that the whole Mizpah thing is based on a misreading of Biblical text, would interest me. She managed to use her new scanner to send it to me, and it is great fun (for me, at least....others' tastes may differ, admittedly).
She sent a two-page brochure on Mizpah from the Magnetic Comb Company of Pekin, Illinois. When I say two-page, I mean a single sheet printed on both side and folded vertically, so that four columns of text are created. You can see all four pages of the brochure, above. The page on the far right, headed "Mizpah", is page 1. Pages 2 and 3 are in the left image, and page 4, the back of the brochure, is the leftmost column on the right-side image. In other words, the image on the left above is printed on the reverse of the image on the right. Get it?
On the basis of the printing and fonts, this brochure looks to be from sometime between 1906 and 1914. I say that because I have found mention of the Magnetic Comb Co., in Pekin, Illinois, in official documents of the State of Illinois, which used to register and inspect businesses. One, in 1906, describes the Magnetic Comb Company as a printing business. The 1911 document mentions something called "magnetic concrete." I have no idea what that is, nor am I yet sure even what a magnetic comb is. I think it has to do with the idea that if you put magnets in your comb or hair brush, it does something healthy with your hair and head. There are Chinese versions of this product available today, and I take them to be successors to some earlier original. Rather dramatic health claims are in fact made for them. (The only other possible meaning I have been able to derive for a magnetic comb is a more modern one: the combs that barbers fit onto electric hair trimmers are sometimes called magnetic combs. You can find photos on the Internet. But did such electrical hair-trimming devices exist back in 1906, or 1914? I doubt it; I don't know when they were invented and came into use--any help from readers would be appreciated here.)
I am pretty sure that, whatever Magnetic Comb referred to, it was something on the outer edge of science and rationality. Just read the brochure, which can be enlarged if you click on it (I think and hope).
The Mizpah deal of the Magnetic Comb Company of Pekin, Illinois reminds me strongly of the Prayer of Jabez business, invented some years ago by the "Reverend Dr." Bruce Wilkinson. For those who don't remember or have been otherwise spared knowledge of this, Wilkinson picked an obscure verse out of the Hebrew Bible and suggested to people--not so subtly but still carefully enough so that he would not be legally libel--that if they recited this prayer they would become prosperous. The book he created, called The Prayer of Jabez, and several follow-up volumes (The Prayer of Jabez for Women, etc.) sold wildly. The Magnetic Comb Company, and no doubt many other hucksters of the English-speaking world, anticipated Wilkinson by more than a century, even if they were not as commercially successful as he was.
Any possibility, one might ask, that the proprietors of the Magnetic Comb Company actually believed this nonsense? Not a chance, folks. Any doubts? Just go view The Music Man once again, and you'll get the proper feel for the times. (Do avoid Buddy Hackett's rendition of "Shapoopie", however; it has been known to be lethal above 20 decibels.)
What interests me particularly about the brochure is its classic Jewcentric content. On the one hand, it exudes an aura of Jewish chosenness even as it indulges in the standard anti-Semitic stereotypes of the era. So, as you can read for yourself above, "For thousands of years the secret of the Mizpah has been confined to the Hebrew race. From poverty they have attained riches. Success has been theirs in love, as well--you hear of no Hebrew divorces. Health is theirs to a ripe old age." And yet: "Did you ever observe how a Jew could start out as a pack-peddler and in a few years have a store and later become a great banker, money-lender and millionaire?/Have you said to yourself? `It isn't intelligence--for he is dull; it isn't hustle--for he is slow; it isn't hard work--for he takes life easy.'"
After this, as you can see, there follow two quotes about the promise of wealth afforded by Mizpah. The first has no source implied; the second is attributed to "a wise old sage in Bible days. . . " Both are made up completely out of whole cloth.
But it seemed a common view -- else why use it to get on the good side of potential buyers of Mizpah rings -- that Jews were dull, slow and took life easy. How did that come about, since I think it is safe to say that neither Jew nor gentile today in America (or Britain) would think this an accurate general description of Jewish character?
Of course, I don't know, but I can venture a guess. Since American Midwesterners in those days had little contact with Jews other than immigrants who were indeed pack-peddlers to begin with, it is not hard to figure out how at least some of these stereotypes set root. Jews were reticent, since they feared prejudice on account of their "stranger" status. Most did not speak fluent or unaccented English, so typical Americans may well have taken that for "dull." They were slow, perhaps, because they were damned tired shleping all over the countryside with their wares, even those who eventually were able to buy a horse and wagon.
As for taking life easy, this is puzzling. What would made people think that Jews took life easy? Maybe compared to the life in Eastern Europe they fled, they smiled a lot in Illinois. Who knows? As for the idea that there were no Jewish divorces, clearly, non-Jews rarely knew Jews well enough, outside of business exchanges, to know whether they were happily married or not. And one suspects that marital matters would not readily come up in business-related conversations between Jews and others. This made it easy for the Mizpah hucksters to make such a enviable claim without fear of rebuttal. Message? Buy a Mizpah ring and your spouse will shape up and do you right.
I wonder how many rings they sold.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
More Nobel Wisdom from Jimmy Carter
In today’s New York Times, former President Jimmy Carter tells us that the North Korean regime is ready for a deal. Should we believe him? We don’t have to answer on the basis of mere supposition. There is some history here.
On June 22, 1994, after Carter’s return from Pyongyang carrying what became known as the Agreed Framework, he was interviewed on CNN by Judy Woodruff. Here is an excerpt from that conversation:
I think this blast from the past speaks for itself. Obviously, the extent to which Carter was wrong in June 1994, about both North Korea and Yasser Arafat, is nothing short of breathtaking. The North Koreans did cheat, big time, and there was no Israeli-Palestinian “peace agreement”, only a framework for negotiations that ultimately failed.
One has to hand it to Carter: He is consistent. One also has to hand it to the New York Times; it is, too.
On June 22, 1994, after Carter’s return from Pyongyang carrying what became known as the Agreed Framework, he was interviewed on CNN by Judy Woodruff. Here is an excerpt from that conversation:
Jimmy Carter: . . .what the North Koreans were waiting for was some treatment of their exalted leader with respect and a direct communication. . . .I think he was quite ready. I didn’t have to argue with him. When I outlined the specific points that I had been informed in Washington was the administration’s policy. . . . with very little equivocation he agreed. . . . I think it’s all roses now. . . . I’ve known that there were people in Washington who were skeptical about any direct dealing with the North Koreans. They were already condemned as outlaws. Kin Il-sung was already condemned as a criminal. . . . And it was kind of a miracle and almost an incredible statement that Kim Il-sung gave me in response to my proposals, and it was hard to believe. . . .
Judy Woodruff: Are you absolutely persuaded that the North Koreans are going to honor this agreement, that while the talks are going on that it’s not just a matter of buying time on the part of the North Koreans, that they will not secretly pursue the program they were pursuing earlier, the nuclear program?
Jimmy Carter: Judy, I’m convinced. But I said this when I got back from North Korea, and people said that I was naïve or gullible and so forth. I don’t think I was. In my opinion, this was one of those perfect agreements where both sides won and got what they wanted and there were no—nobody blinked, nobody had to yield. . . . I think the most important lesson is that we should not ever avoid direct talks, direct conversations, direct discussions and negotiations with the main person in a despised or misunderstood or condemned society who could actually resolve the issue. And we went through this for ten years when nobody in our government would meet or talk with Yasser Arafat. The Norwegians did, and they were the ones that brought the peace agreement last summer. . . .
I think this blast from the past speaks for itself. Obviously, the extent to which Carter was wrong in June 1994, about both North Korea and Yasser Arafat, is nothing short of breathtaking. The North Koreans did cheat, big time, and there was no Israeli-Palestinian “peace agreement”, only a framework for negotiations that ultimately failed.
One has to hand it to Carter: He is consistent. One also has to hand it to the New York Times; it is, too.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Mizpah
I was delighted to read about Denver’s Mile High Station in the September/October 2010 issue of Humanities, and was particularly intrigued by the photo of the Mizpah Arch. Pamela Carter-Birken tells us that the departure-facing side of the arch contained “the Hebrew word MIZPAH, meaning God watch over you while we are apart.”
A lovely sentiment, to be sure, but the word mizpah -- really mitzpah, since the second letter in the word is a tzadi, not a zayin, but our alphabet has no symbol for the “tz” sound, so substitutes in transliteration a “z”-- literally means no such thing. As with all Semitic languages, Hebrew is quite compact in written form, but even Hebrew cannot generally express an entire complex sentence with a single four-letter word, as mizpah is in the Hebrew alphabet.
Mizpah does not literally mean “God watch over you while we are apart”, but, as any speaker of Hebrew knows and as any Hebrew-English dictionary will affirm, it is a noun that means simply “lookout” (not as a sentry but as a place). A secondary meaning is “watchtower.” It comes from the verb tz-f-h or tzofeh (nearly all Semitic verbs are composed of a root made from three consonants), which means to look over from a height (as opposed to “look over” meaning to inspect or “overlook” meaning to miss seeing something). That is why the Hebrew word for bird is “tzipor”, literally a creature that looks over its environment from a height.
Ms. Carter-Birken is in no way at fault here, however. She did not invent the more expansive translation, but rather inherited it from an accepted understanding of a Biblical phrase—specifically, Genesis chapter 31, verses 48 and 49—in the Anglo-American Protestant tradition. She is merely repeating what the typical resident of Denver thought it meant back when.
Indeed, the word Mizpah, taken to mean “God watch over you while we are apart”, gave rise to a category of jewelry (broaches, mainly), postcards, poetry and the like around the end of the 19th century in both Britain and the United States. (It does not seem to have caught on in other places.) Since then towns, steamboats, Masonic lodges and several other things in the United States have been named Mizpah, always in the letters of the Roman alphabet, never in the Hebrew alphabet. At the present time a woman named Helena Lind is trying to make a business out of Mizpah, claiming that the word bears sacred and secret meanings thousands of years old. Check it out on the Internet.
The original reason for all this is fairly straightforward. From the time of the Puritans, Anglo-American Protestant leaders and laymen alike have demonstrated an affinity for the symbols and personalities of the Hebrew Bible. But the Protestant expositors of the Bible who thought Mizpah meant “God watch over you while we are apart” seem to have allowed their fertile imaginations to trump their frail knowledge of the Hebrew language. Mitzpah was a fairly common place name; the Hebrew Bible contains about half a dozen such geographical mentions. It was called that (as well as Galeed, which mean heap) in the Genesis text noted above because of the heap of stones that Jacob and Laban used to mark and symbolize an agreement between them, not the other way around; Jacob and Laban did not make a heap of stones because there was already a general belief that such a heap, called a mitzpah, connoted a divine blessing or a broader sentiment. A place called Mitzpah just meant an elevation from which one could get a panoramic view of what lay below, period—like Mitzpe (slight spelling variation, same word) Ramon today in Israel, a spot in the Negev that overlooks a huge crater called the makhtesh. To get this backwards is testimony to the interpretive fecundity of those Anglo-Protestant expositors. For it to then turn into a kind of cultural curlicue in the Protestant tradition is both amusing and, in an entirely harmless way, wacky.
The more grandiose translation of Mizpah derived from the story in Genesis seems to exist only in the Protestant tradition. Catholics don't have it, and Jews have not used the word mitzpah as a symbol of anything, or as a short form of the phrase “may God watch over you while we are apart.” There is no Jewish mitzpah jewelry using the Hebrew script, at least none I have ever seen. Note, too, that the Jewish liturgy does contain a “traveler’s prayer,” called t’filat ha-derekh in Hebrew, which asks God’s protection whilst one is one the road, separated from friends and loved ones. The prayer’s main part consists of slightly over a hundred words, not a single one of which is any form of the verb tz-f-h.
A lovely sentiment, to be sure, but the word mizpah -- really mitzpah, since the second letter in the word is a tzadi, not a zayin, but our alphabet has no symbol for the “tz” sound, so substitutes in transliteration a “z”-- literally means no such thing. As with all Semitic languages, Hebrew is quite compact in written form, but even Hebrew cannot generally express an entire complex sentence with a single four-letter word, as mizpah is in the Hebrew alphabet.
Mizpah does not literally mean “God watch over you while we are apart”, but, as any speaker of Hebrew knows and as any Hebrew-English dictionary will affirm, it is a noun that means simply “lookout” (not as a sentry but as a place). A secondary meaning is “watchtower.” It comes from the verb tz-f-h or tzofeh (nearly all Semitic verbs are composed of a root made from three consonants), which means to look over from a height (as opposed to “look over” meaning to inspect or “overlook” meaning to miss seeing something). That is why the Hebrew word for bird is “tzipor”, literally a creature that looks over its environment from a height.
Ms. Carter-Birken is in no way at fault here, however. She did not invent the more expansive translation, but rather inherited it from an accepted understanding of a Biblical phrase—specifically, Genesis chapter 31, verses 48 and 49—in the Anglo-American Protestant tradition. She is merely repeating what the typical resident of Denver thought it meant back when.
Indeed, the word Mizpah, taken to mean “God watch over you while we are apart”, gave rise to a category of jewelry (broaches, mainly), postcards, poetry and the like around the end of the 19th century in both Britain and the United States. (It does not seem to have caught on in other places.) Since then towns, steamboats, Masonic lodges and several other things in the United States have been named Mizpah, always in the letters of the Roman alphabet, never in the Hebrew alphabet. At the present time a woman named Helena Lind is trying to make a business out of Mizpah, claiming that the word bears sacred and secret meanings thousands of years old. Check it out on the Internet.
The original reason for all this is fairly straightforward. From the time of the Puritans, Anglo-American Protestant leaders and laymen alike have demonstrated an affinity for the symbols and personalities of the Hebrew Bible. But the Protestant expositors of the Bible who thought Mizpah meant “God watch over you while we are apart” seem to have allowed their fertile imaginations to trump their frail knowledge of the Hebrew language. Mitzpah was a fairly common place name; the Hebrew Bible contains about half a dozen such geographical mentions. It was called that (as well as Galeed, which mean heap) in the Genesis text noted above because of the heap of stones that Jacob and Laban used to mark and symbolize an agreement between them, not the other way around; Jacob and Laban did not make a heap of stones because there was already a general belief that such a heap, called a mitzpah, connoted a divine blessing or a broader sentiment. A place called Mitzpah just meant an elevation from which one could get a panoramic view of what lay below, period—like Mitzpe (slight spelling variation, same word) Ramon today in Israel, a spot in the Negev that overlooks a huge crater called the makhtesh. To get this backwards is testimony to the interpretive fecundity of those Anglo-Protestant expositors. For it to then turn into a kind of cultural curlicue in the Protestant tradition is both amusing and, in an entirely harmless way, wacky.
The more grandiose translation of Mizpah derived from the story in Genesis seems to exist only in the Protestant tradition. Catholics don't have it, and Jews have not used the word mitzpah as a symbol of anything, or as a short form of the phrase “may God watch over you while we are apart.” There is no Jewish mitzpah jewelry using the Hebrew script, at least none I have ever seen. Note, too, that the Jewish liturgy does contain a “traveler’s prayer,” called t’filat ha-derekh in Hebrew, which asks God’s protection whilst one is one the road, separated from friends and loved ones. The prayer’s main part consists of slightly over a hundred words, not a single one of which is any form of the verb tz-f-h.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
54 Notes
On December 3, 2009, two days after President Obama’s speech on the Afghan War at West Point, my annotations to that speech appeared in AI Cont’d. Altogether I wrote 90 notes to the President’s text, some having to do with the policy substance and implications of his remarks, some with what Peggy Noonan once called “the black arts” of the speechwriting craft. After December 3 I returned to my annotations to add several “afternotes” commenting on subsequent developments. 54 Notes….
on the Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the End of Combat Operations in Iraq, Oval Office, August 31, 2010, 8:00 P.M. EDT
* * *
54 Notes….
on the Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the End of Combat Operations in Iraq, Oval Office, August 31, 2010, 8:00 P.M. EDT
Good evening. Tonight, I’d like to talk to you about the end of our[1] combat mission in Iraq, the ongoing security challenges we face[2], and the need to rebuild our nation here at home.
I know this historic moment comes at a time of great uncertainty for many Americans. We’ve now been through nearly a decade of war. We’ve endured[3] a long and painful recession. And sometimes in the midst of these storms[4], the future that we’re trying to build for our nation -- a future of lasting peace and long-term prosperity -- may seem beyond our reach.
But this milestone should serve as a reminder to all Americans that the future is ours to shape if we move forward with confidence and commitment.[5] It should also serve as a message to the world that the United States of America intends to sustain and strengthen our[6] leadership in this young century.
From this desk, seven and a half years ago, President Bush announced the beginning of military operations in Iraq. Much has changed since that night. A war to disarm a state became a fight against an insurgency. Terrorism and sectarian warfare threatened to tear Iraq apart. Thousands of Americans gave their lives; tens of thousands have been wounded. Our relations abroad were strained. Our unity at home was tested.
These are the rough waters encountered[7] during the course of one of America’s longest wars. Yet there has been one constant amidst[8] these shifting tides.[9] At every turn, America’s men and women in uniform have served with courage and resolve. As Commander-in-Chief, I am incredibly[10] proud of their service. And like all Americans, I’m awed[11] by their sacrifice, and by the sacrifices of their families.
The Americans who have served in Iraq completed every mission they were given. They defeated a regime that had terrorized its people. Together with Iraqis and coalition partners who made huge sacrifices of their own, our troops fought block by block to help Iraq seize the chance for a better future. They shifted tactics to protect the Iraqi people, trained Iraqi Security Forces, and took out terrorist leaders. Because of our troops and civilians -- and because of the resilience of the Iraqi people -- Iraq has the opportunity to embrace a new destiny[12], even though many challenges remain.
So tonight, I am announcing that the American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country.[13]
This was my pledge to the American people as a candidate for this office. Last February, I announced a plan that would bring our combat brigades out of Iraq, while redoubling our efforts to strengthen Iraq’s Security Forces and support its government and people.
That’s what we’ve done. We’ve removed nearly 100,000 U.S. troops from Iraq. We’ve closed or transferred to the Iraqis hundreds of bases. And we have moved millions of pieces of equipment out of Iraq.
This completes a transition to Iraqi responsibility for their own security.[14] U.S. troops pulled out of Iraq’s cities last summer, and Iraqi forces have moved into the lead with considerable skill and commitment to their fellow citizens. Even as Iraq continues to suffer terrorist attacks, security incidents have been near the lowest on record[15] since the war began. And Iraqi forces have taken the fight to al Qaeda, removing much of its leadership in Iraqi-led operations.
This year also saw[16] Iraq hold credible elections that drew a strong turnout. A caretaker administration is in place as Iraqis form a government[17] based on the results of that election. Tonight, I encourage Iraq’s leaders to move forward with a sense of urgency to form an inclusive government that is just, representative, and accountable to the Iraqi people. And[18] when that government is in place, there should be no doubt: The Iraqi people will have a strong partner in the United States. Our combat mission is ending, but our commitment to Iraq’s future is not.[19]
[20]Going forward, a transitional force of U.S. troops will remain in Iraq with a different mission: advising and assisting Iraq’s Security Forces, supporting Iraqi troops in targeted counterterrorism missions, and protecting our civilians. Consistent with our agreement with the Iraqi government, all U.S. troops will leave by the end of next year. As our military draws down, our dedicated civilians -- diplomats, aid workers, and advisors -- are moving into the lead to support Iraq as it strengthens its government, resolves political disputes, resettles those displaced by war, and builds ties with the region and the world.[21] That’s a message that Vice President Biden is delivering to the Iraqi people through his visit there today.
This new approach reflects our long-term partnership with Iraq -- one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect. Of course, violence will not end with our combat mission. Extremists will continue to set off bombs, attack Iraqi civilians and try to spark sectarian strife. But ultimately, these terrorists will fail to achieve their goals. Iraqis are a proud people. They have rejected sectarian war, and they have no interest in endless destruction. They understand that, in the end, only Iraqis can resolve their differences and police their streets. Only Iraqis can build a democracy within their borders. What America can do, and will do, is provide support for the Iraqi people as both a friend and a partner.
Ending this war is not only in Iraq’s interest -- it’s in our own. The United States has paid a huge price to put the future of Iraq in the hands of its people. We have sent our young men and women to make enormous sacrifices in Iraq, and[22] spent vast resources abroad at a time of tight budgets at home. We’ve persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people -- a belief that out of the ashes of war,[23] a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it’s time to turn the page.
As we do, I’m mindful that the Iraq war has been a contentious issue at home. Here, too, it’s time to turn the page. This afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush. It’s well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset.[24] Yet no one can doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security. As I’ve said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hopes for Iraqis’ future[25].
The greatness of our democracy is grounded in our ability to move beyond our differences, and to learn from our experience as we confront the many challenges ahead. And no challenge is more essential to our security than our fight against al Qaeda.[26]
Americans across the political spectrum supported the use of force against those who attacked us on 9/11. Now, as we approach our 10th year of combat in Afghanistan, there are those who are understandably asking tough questions about our mission there. But we must never lose sight of what’s at stake. As we speak, al Qaeda continues to plot against us, and its leadership remains anchored in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. We will disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda, while preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a base for terrorists. And because of our drawdown in Iraq, we are now able to apply the resources necessary to go on offense. In fact, over the last 19 months[27], nearly a dozen al Qaeda leaders -- and hundreds of al Qaeda’s extremist allies -- have been killed or captured around the world.
Within Afghanistan, I’ve ordered the deployment of additional troops who -- under the command of General David Petraeus -- are fighting to break the Taliban’s momentum.
As with the surge in Iraq, these forces will be in place for a limited time to provide space for the Afghans to build their capacity and secure their own future. But, as was the case in Iraq, we can’t do for Afghans what they must ultimately do for themselves. That’s why we’re training Afghan Security Forces and supporting a political resolution to Afghanistan’s problems. And next August[28], we will begin a transition to Afghan responsibility. The pace of our troop reductions will be determined by conditions on the ground[29], and our support for Afghanistan will endure. But make no mistake: This transition will begin -- because open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people’s.
Indeed, one of the lessons of our effort in Iraq is that American influence around the world is not a function of military force alone.[30] We must use all elements of our power -- including our[31] diplomacy, our economic strength, and the power of America’s example -- to secure our interests and stand by our allies. And we must project a vision of the future that’s based not just[32] on our fears, but also on our hopes -- a vision that recognizes the real dangers that exist around the world,
but also the limitless[33] possibilities of our time.
Today, old adversaries are at peace, and emerging democracies are potential partners. New markets for our goods stretch from Asia to the Americas. A new push for peace in the Middle East[34] will begin here tomorrow. Billions of young people want to move beyond the shackles of poverty and conflict. As the leader of the free world, America will do more than just defeat on the battlefield those who offer hatred and destruction -- we will also lead among those who are willing to work together to expand freedom and opportunity for all people.[35]
Now, that effort must begin within our own borders. Throughout our history, America has been willing to bear the burden of promoting liberty and human dignity overseas,[36] understanding its links to our own liberty and security. But we have also understood that our nation’s strength and influence abroad must be firmly anchored in our prosperity at home. And the bedrock of that prosperity must be a growing middle class.[37]
Unfortunately, over the last decade, we’ve not done what’s necessary to shore up the foundations of our own prosperity. We spent a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits. For too long, we have put off tough decisions on everything from our manufacturing base to our energy policy to education reform.[38] As a result, too many middle-class[39] families find themselves working harder for less, while our nation’s long-term competitiveness is put at risk.
And so at this moment, as we wind down the war in Iraq, we must tackle those challenges at home with as much energy, and grit, and sense of common purpose as our men and women in uniform who have served abroad. They[40] have met every test that they faced. Now, it’s our[41] turn. Now, it’s our responsibility to honor them[42] by coming together, all of us, and working to secure the dream that so many generations have fought for -- the dream that a better life awaits anyone who is willing to work for it and reach for it.[43]
Our most urgent task is to restore our economy, and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work. To strengthen our middle class[44], we must give all our children the education they deserve, and all our workers the skills that they need to compete in a global economy. We must jumpstart industries that create jobs, and end our dependence on foreign oil.[45] We must unleash the innovation that allows new products to roll off our assembly lines, and nurture the ideas that spring from our entrepreneurs. This will be difficult.[46] But in the days to come, it must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as President.
Part of that responsibility is making sure that we honor our commitments to those who have served our country with such valor. As long as I am President, we will maintain the finest fighting force that the world has ever known, and we will do whatever it takes to serve our veterans as well as they have served us. This is a sacred trust. That’s why we’ve already made one of the largest increases in funding for veterans in decades. We’re treating the signature wounds of today’s wars -- post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury -- while providing the health care and benefits that all of our veterans have earned. And we’re funding a Post-9/11 GI Bill that helps our veterans and their families pursue the dream of a college education. Just as the GI Bill helped those who fought World War II -- including my grandfather -- become the backbone of our middle class[47], so today’s servicemen and women must have the chance to apply their gifts to expand the American economy. Because part of ending a war responsibly is standing by those who have fought it.[48]
Two weeks ago, America’s final combat brigade in Iraq -- the Army’s Fourth Stryker Brigade -- journeyed home in the pre-dawn darkness. Thousands of soldiers and hundreds of vehicles made the trip from Baghdad, the last of them passing into Kuwait in the early morning hours. Over seven years before, American troops and coalition partners had fought their way across similar highways, but this time no shots were fired. It was just a convoy of brave Americans, making their way home.
Of course, the soldiers left much behind. Some were teenagers when the war began. Many have served multiple tours of duty, far from families who bore a heroic burden of their own, enduring the absence of a husband’s embrace or a mother’s kiss. Most painfully, since the war began, 55 members of the Fourth Stryker Brigade made[49] the ultimate sacrifice -- part of over 4,400 Americans who have given their lives in Iraq. As one staff sergeant said, “I know that to my brothers in arms who fought and died, this day would probably mean a lot.”
Those Americans gave their lives for the values that have lived in the hearts of our people for over two centuries. Along with nearly 1.5 million Americans who have served in Iraq, they fought in a faraway place for people they never knew. They stared into the darkest of human creations -- war -- and helped the Iraqi people seek the light of peace.[50]
In an age without surrender ceremonies, we must earn victory through the success of our partners and the strength of our own nation. Every American who serves joins an unbroken line of heroes that stretches from Lexington to Gettysburg; from Iwo Jima to Inchon; from Khe Sanh to Kandahar -- Americans who have fought to see that the lives of our children are better than our own. Our troops are the steel in our ship of state.[51] And though our nation may be travelling[52] through rough waters[53], they give us confidence that our course is true, and that beyond the pre-dawn darkness, better days lie ahead.
Thank you. May God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America, and all who serve her.[54]
[1] It would have been better to have said “the U.S. combat mission” rather than “our combat mission.” When you begin a Presidential speech, you should begin formally, with proper nouns spelled out. This is not a fireside chat.
[2] We face where? In Iraq? In the Middle East? In the world? This is an unfinished phrase that leaves the listener wondering and distracted; not a good thing to do, especially in the first conceptual breath of a speech.
[3] It would have been better to say “We are enduring”, because this Great Recession is obviously not over. For unemployed people, the use of the past tense seems sort of insulting.
[4] The introduction of the weather metaphor here strikes me as an example both of over-writing and also of trite choice. If any metaphor has been overused, this is it. It comes across, to me at least, as exceedingly hackneyed and almost exudes insincerity. It’s a Hallmark metaphor, at best. It also sounded flat out of the President’s mouth when he delivered it. It sounded like his heart wasn’t in it.
[5] Yes, nice, but it helps make my point about why I don’t like the weather metaphor. We cannot control the weather. Using such language makes it seem like wars, not least ones we start, are natural events, but of course they aren’t. That makes the weather metaphor a category error, if one thinks about it. Fortunately for speechwriters, very few people ever do think about such things.
[6][6] This is, strictly speaking, a grammatical error: The pronoun that goes with United States of America is “its”, not “our”, but this is violated by almost everyone in the speechwriting business these days. That doesn’t make it right, however; it still hurts my ears.
[7] This is a terrible sentence, clunky in every way. It should be past tense, not present. There are those stormy waters again, too. “Encountered” has to be the wrong word. How about “endured”?
[8] I don’t like “amidst” here; excessively purple. “Amid” would have done nicely.
[9] More weather; now I’m getting seasick.
[10] I’ll bet he is, too, but use of the word “incredibly” may suggest to many something quite different: that he is not to be believed. Why? Because a lot of Americans in uniform think that this Administration has ignored Iraq over the past 18 months, and will ignore it in future whether it is in our national interest to do so or not. And many believe that the President’s July 2011 off-ramp for Afghanistan is serious, too, regardless of conditions on the ground, because the President wants to run for re-election without being a war president, and damn the consequences.
[11] “Awed”? Another bad word choice. We are awed when we are simultaneously impressed and surprised. No one who has been paying attention should be surprised by what the U.S. Armed Forces have done in Iraq. I’m “deeply grateful” would have been a lot better.
[12] I would have ended the sentence with “destiny”, and begun a new paragraph here that names some of the challenges ahead. Doing that would offer some evidence that the President understands the situation, and suggests that he cares about it. And then I would have noted that these challenges ahead are not amendable to military solutions, and that would have provided the right transition into the next sentence, which is the deliverable of the speech, insofar as it has one. It would have set that deliverable up properly; as it is, it sort of blurts its way onto the listener out of nowhere.
[13] Yeech. Better like this, to avoid a passive voice construction: “I declare the American combat mission in Iraq to be over. Operation Iraqi Freedom has come to an end as Iraqis assume primary responsibility for their country’s security.” Much better, see?
[14] Very awkward: “Iraqi” and “their own” do not match up. Easy to fix, but no one fixed it.
[15] Should say, “security incidents are near their lowest level since….” There is no reason to mention any “record” – this is clumsy, lazy writing.
[16] Double yeech. Really terrible writing. What’s wrong with, “This year, too, in March, Iraq held credible democratic elections that…..”? It would have been good to mention the month; concretizes the narrative some and again shows the Presidents knows some details of what he is talking about. A minor matter, true, but a missed opportunity all the same.
[17] As “Iraqis work to form a government” would be better, since it’s obviously been difficult, and that difficulty is a major problem on the larger stage. It might have been nice at this point to add a sentence something like this: “The process of forming a government has been a difficult one. Americans are not accustomed to such a lengthy process in a parliamentary system. But it should not be forgotten that the process of forming a genuine democratic government is both relatively new for Iraqis, and a marvel in the eyes of Iraq’s Arab neighbors, for whom such a noble test has not yet arisen.”
[18] Don’t need the word “And” here, and it hurts the flow.
[19] This key sentence, in my view, needed elaboration. The next paragraph is really very thin gruel. And this is the place, I suppose, to reflect on what the President did not say that he might usefully have said. There is nothing, anywhere in this speech, about the significance of Iraq’s future for the Middle East and the Muslim world—and the American interest in such developments. The word Arab is not mentioned. The word Muslim is not mentioned. We had a coalition in Iraq, which, while make-believe in some respects, was not entirely so. Great Britain is not mentioned in this speech—all the others who helped are mentioned only in passing and in the briefest way imaginable. UN personnel suffered tragedy and trauma in Iraq—this also is not mentioned. These are all opportunities lost, it seems to me, to make some useful points and do a little retail diplomacy from the top. The fact that none of this was done suggests, again to me at least, that the President’s attentions, matching his body language here, are elsewhere. Well, it is what it is, then, but it’s too bad. And it may well bear a price the nation may have to pay.
[20] It would perhaps have been better to tie the last sentence in the previous paragraph, which is the key sentence in the speech, to the next paragraph by saying, “And that is why, going forward, a transitional complement of U.S. troops. . .”—better than saying a “transitional force” of troops; that just sounds weird.
[21]Is he ashamed to mention the Department of State? State is in charge of this, as everyone knows, and the State Department has a Secretary. It is, all else equal, a little strange that Obama does not mention his Secretary of State, or his Secretary of Defense, or our Ambassador in Baghdad, or the last commander in the Iraq theater, General Odierno. If I had been tasked with writing this speech, I would have assumed the grace notes to include a mention of these people, as well as the current Prime Minister and President of Iraq. Without this, the speech as a whole has a desiccated feel to it. And this is, again, a missed opportunity to do some retail diplomacy, both in the interagency and viz Iraq.
[22] “and we have spent” it should be; in a speech these parallelisms are good things, whereas in essays they often are not.
[23] This comma does not belong here; it slows the flow.
[24] This, finally, is a presidential thing to do. I hope President Obama is finished with blaming most everything that bothers him on a given day on his predecessor, using President Bush as a kind of catchall political piñata. I hope this sentence signals that, but I’ll believe it when I don’t hear it.
[25] Awkward; better, “hopeful for the future of the Iraqi people.”
[26] A politically sensible thing to say, but not at all a self-evident truth. I can think of several ways to think about U.S. national security that do not elevate al-Qaeda into the number one problem.
[27] 19 months? Why 19?
[28] August? Did he not mean April, as specificed in the December 1, 2009 speech? Where did the August date come from?
[29] This is the key phrase the military wants to hear and that Secretary Gates has referred to often, “conditions on the ground.” But the President is clearly sticking to his guns to start a withdrawal next year even if the military opposes it. This is the President’s answer to General Petraeus’ swing through town a few weeks ago. This looks to be one humdinger of a civil-military pushing and shoving contest in the making
[30] This is a flaming non-sequitur. The place to have discussed the nature of non-military vs. military instruments was earlier on, where I indicated.
[31] This “our” and the next one should have been deleted.
[32] The word “just” and “also” should have been deleted. Reads much better without them, and besides, since when does an American President tell the world that the strongest country on earth is motivated by its fears? This is not a wise thing to do.
[33] Wrong word; by definition, nothing human is “limitless.”
[34] Illustrates the bizarre American shorthand that equates Arab-Israeli, and in this case merely Palestinian-Israeli, affairs for those of the entire Middle East. It is sloppy conceptualizing like this, innocently embedded in the way we use language, that abets dangerous nonsense like “linkage”, which Obama and his NSA seem to be fervent believers in; I suppose it made sense, given the timing, to mention the new direct negotiations between Netanyahu and Abbas, and I am glad that no explicit iteration of linkage showed up here. But let’s restate the obvious anyway, but it evidently needs restating: What happens in Palestine is not tantamount to what happens in the Levant, and what happens in the Eastern Med is not tantamount to what happens in the Middle East.
[35] Nice paragraph, though I was sort of surprised to see the phrase “free world.” That phrase arose during the war against fascism and endured throughout most of the Cold War against communism. It became a signal of political division after Vietnam: liberals tended not to use it because it suggested the highly abstract ideological mindset that supposedly sucked us into Vietnam. What does it mean now, with no USSR and no international communist movement to trouble us? I don’t know, which is why I find it jarring here. I think, if I had been asked to draft this speech, I would have found a way to avoid this language.
[36] This is, of course, not true, even though it sounds nice. For most of our history we have had no such ambition because we manifestly had no such capabilities. The President might want to refresh his memory of John Quincy Adams.
[37] I nearly fell over when I heard this. I cannot remember any other Presidential speech that names “the middle class” in this fashion. Typically, a President does not publicly acknowledge the existence of class differences as such. There are times when it has been necessary to speak of racial and sectional differences, as a matter of course; but class, no. And this sounds so odd coming from this President. This President, unlike most of the members of his Party, actually cares about poor people, and about redistributional justice, as he sees it, for better or worse. Most other Democrats manage to get excited about traffic gridlock and other middle-class whines, but not Barack Obama. So where on earth does this come from?
Perhaps the President thinks that the bulk of economic activity resides in the so-called middle class, and that is his point of reference. Judging from context, this seems the most likely explanation. But it does not justify or validate this usage. The term middle class as politicians and everyday citizens use it bears little resemblance to the category “middle class” as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The phrase is a symbolic blockbuster in the American narrative, not a technical term. I will have to give some thought to how this language will strike people, but it strikes me as a mistake to have used it. We should not, in my view, care about a growing middle class as such, but about greater and more equitably shared prosperity across our entire society. That’s the kind of language I would have used, lest Americans who’re not quite, or think themselves not quite, of middle class status, be moved to say, “Hey, what about me, Mr. President? Don’t I matter in your eyes, too? Don’t my kids deserve your attention and concern even if they don’t live in middle class situations?”
[38] I could not agree more, but the blame here goes back further than ten years. It envelops the Clinton period, too.
[39] The phrase middle-class could have and should have been dropped. Read the sentence without the phrase—does it lose anything? Is this some sort of political stratagem, looking to the mid-term elections or to 2012? If it is, it’s power and logic are lost on me.
[40] He speaks as if the uniformed military are a society apart. “They”?
[41] And us. The military are “they” and we are “us.” This is a horrifying construction, and totally unnecessary, if not also revealing. Would it not have been better to say, “Our military has met every challenge, now we who are the benefactors of their courage must emulate their energy, and grit….” and so on? That would have been lots better.
[42] Again, “our” and “them.” Horrifying, as though our warriors are of another species.
[43] This sounds downright old-fashioned, pro-market and pro-liberty, and I love it. I only wish he really meant it.
[44] No, not to strengthen our middle class, but to strengthen our nation—and then the text refers to “all” our children. Since not all our children are part of the middle class, this sentence is therefore internally contradictory, or at the very least inconsistent.
[45] This is a red herring, but a popular one. It belies a misunderstanding of basic economics. The idea of energy independence, and specifically of ending our reliance on foreign oil, is not a stupid idea, but it relies on a geopolitical logic, not an economic one as is implied here. If you take the economic logic of this statement to heart, it means that the United States should be autarkic. We should not depend on foreigners for “stuff.” Now, you don’t have to like, or even to have heard of, David Ricardo to know about the idea of comparative advantage that underlies the theory (and largely the practice) of international trade. If someone else can produce something a lot cheaper than you can, for whatever reason, and you can produce stuff cheaper than he can, and you both desire some of the other guy’s production, it makes sense to trade. When we started importing oil back in the 1950s, in the Eisenhower Administration, it was because it was cheaper to buy from low-cost foreign sources than it was to produce it here at home—keep it in the ground, Ike and his advisors said, and it’ll be worth more later. That was correct. It still is. It still makes sense, on economic grounds anyway, to buy cheaper energy from abroad if we can. It reduces the cost of economic inputs, which in turn shows up in higher productivity. It also helps keep inflation down. The reason to wean ourselves off of foreign oil has to do with what the money in the hands of the recipients can finance that we do not like. That is not an economic question. The fact that the President stuck this phrase in here, where he is talking about the economy, suggests that perhaps he doesn’t understand this, and that is disheartening. Either that of this is just plain political pandering—usually a highly eligible explanation in cases like this.
[46] This is the most preposterous statement in this entire speech. For years multiple voices have been urging this Administration to privilege innovation in economic policy. From Thomas Friedman to Bob Litan to Bill Gates…..and me….well, everyone with even a little sense in these matters. And there are many ideas out there about how to do this—using tax policy, immigration reform, better use of federal R&D money, and so on and on. And what has the Administration done in this area? Next to nothing. It has preferred to cater to political constituencies like teachers union and shovel-ready-related unions that are mired in the old economy, in the least innovative sectors of our economy. It has shown a near total ignorance of and even an antipathy toward how business really works to create jobs. It is not difficult to think of government policies that can stimulate the “innovation nation” as Bill Bonvillian, writing in TAI years ago, referred to it. That the President thinks this is difficult means to me that he hasn’t given any serious thought to it, at least until now. Let’s hope that changes; we’ve wasted nearly two years on this score.
[47][47] This mention of the middle class is actually historically accurate and I don’t mind it, in this otherwise boilerplate-like paragraph, which is obligatory in speeches like this, and so nothing more need be said about it.
[48] Last sentence is a nice sentence; one of few in this speech compared to the December 1 speech and some earlier ones.
[49] Should be “have made”, I think.
[50] Another of the few elegant sentences in this speech.
[51] Also not bad, as speech sentences go; maybe the best of the lot.
[52] One too many “l”s here, I think.
[53] Now we’re back to seasickness. In all fairness, if you’re going to beat a metaphor to death in the beginning of a speech, no one can begrudge you one last pass at it toward the end. It’s even necessary in a way, if that’s how one insists on beginning. It still sounds forced and, on balance, sort of crappy.
[54] Now this “her” stuff is interesting. In a speech like this, where God has just been invoked, it doesn’t seem quite right to use “it”, though we tend these days to avoid feminine anthropomorphism in all other cases. This all goes back to when nations had female symbols for their noblest principles. So, for example, Britannia was conceived and often drawn as a woman, which is maybe why Queen Victoria just seemed so “right” as the monarch over whose empire the sun never set. In France it has been Ceres and, more recently, Mariane. In America, of course, it started out being Lady Liberty, and if case you forgot, American coins from the very beginning nearly all had on their obverse side a symbolic depiction of Liberty as a woman. When we did this, referring to America as a “her” made more sense. Referring to the United States of America as a her is more of a stretch, linguistically speaking. In 1909, the first American coin to have a likeness of an actual person made its debut—Lincoln on the penny. Jefferson comes to the nickel in 1938—before that it was an Indian, and before that Liberty—a kind of exception to the rule. The dime’s obverse was Liberty symbolically until 1946, the quarter until 1932, the half dollar until 1951. Today, Liberty is nowhere to be found, and I find that both revealing and sad. (I’d trade the “In God we trust” motto on the coinage for the return of Lady Liberty in a heartbeat.) With this is mind, it becomes a little clearer why using “her” as a pronoun for the United States strikes most of us as a little odd, though it’s not important enough (most of the time) to actually articulate. I think, had it been up to me, I would have just avoided this construction altogether by saying, “May God bless America, and all who serve our great nation.” Or something like that.
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