"To Me, You are Beautiful"

When my TAI blog was formed (or re-formed) some months ago, part of its name included “Jewcentricity” for a reason. For those who may not know, this is the title of a book I wrote in 2009.  There will be no second edition of the book, because the first edition attracted not a single major review and sold poorly in consequence. It has its fans, yes—some even in distant Australia, as I learned to my surprise on a visit there last June—but these fans a second edition will not evoke. So the blog was designed in part to allow me to continue to write about my interest in the subject post hoc on an à la carte basis.

As it has turned out, not all that many worthy Jewcentric new items have popped up lately. I did speak some weeks ago about the Iranian regime’s anti-Semitism—a vivid example of one of the four interlocking forms of Jewcentricity—but that post was justified solely on Middle Eastern grounds. Today, however, I have for you a perfect example to talk about—brimming with historical trivia, contemporary pop-cultural interest, and, certainly compared with the proclivities of the Iranian regime, of no real importance whatsoever. Easy reading, in other words.  So easy that full grammatical sentences aren’t even necessary.

Several days ago a dear cousin of mine, one of those mainly harmless people who love to play pass-along-the-junk on the internet, sent me a music video and urged me to watch it. I watched it. It struck me as a little strange, but there was something about it that intrigued me. So I watched it again. And then the next day again. And then again. And now I’m hooked, with my Jewcentricity antennae on high alert.

My youngest son got hooked on different music video last year: Duck Sauce’s rendition of “Barbara Streisand, Barbara Streisand.” (I don’t know if there’s anything Jewcentric about that. Barbara Streisand went to Flatbush Yeshiva as a child, a very Jewish place—Orthodox even. But there’s no evidence of which I am aware of her being particularly Jewish these days, nor any reason to think that Duck Sauce chose her name as a subject because she is Jewish. As Freud probably said, when he wasn’t smoking a cigar, sometimes a song is just a song.)  Anyway, this youngest son of mine played this “Barbara Streisand, Barbara Streisand” thing over and over and over until it nearly made me crazy, except that instead I sort of learned to like it—the way a victim of the Stockholm Syndrome learns to like his captors. Now I think I’m driving everyone else in the house crazy, but so it goes in the days of internetic cybermusic.

So what is the song, and this video, I’m talking about? Well, the song is that old warhorse of a favorite, “Bei Mir Bist du Shoen.” The video features a rendition recorded just last year by an Azerbaijani pop singer named Ilhama Gasimova. The soundtrack of the video is described as that of the singer and a disc jockey, DJ OBG (whatever that means), who appears surgically inserted—smoking a cigar and saying but one word, “shoen”—in the highly stylized visual dimension of the video. Youngest son assures me that while the vocal track is recent, no one played any musical instruments behind Ilhama’s singing. He says that the disc jockey assembled the soundtrack from old pieces manipulated to fit new purposes. I take him at his word. He knows about this kind of stuff.

It’s also worth pointing out that this new rendition of the song is not the whole song as it was first written and recorded in English in 1937. The original English version has an introduction and something along the lines of a verse before we get to the famous chorus, but Ilhama’s 2011 version is pretty much just the chorus over and over again.

The video is a rapid-fire hodgepodge of riotous images. A large chunk of those images features Laurel and Hardy doing some hot dance steps, but these are made to replicate themselves in rapid repeating clatter in the original Max Headroom style (if anybody remembers that). Most of the rest of the video features Ilhama herself and assorted other female dancers from older acts. I have to confess that one of the reasons I have become smitten with the video is that I have become smitten with Ilhama’s sexy beauty. Of course, such things are matters of taste—Bei mir, you will remember—and do I do not presume mine to be that of others. Go see for yourself on You Tube:

In any event, under the video before it begins to play on YouTube is a German text that explains that the star of the video is an Azerbaijani pop singer, and that the song went viral not only in Baku but throughout much of Europe last year. It has made her the latest thing. There is another video on YouTube in which Ilhama is interviewed by a German journalist about her sudden stardom. In the interview she’s not made up in 1930’s style as she is in the video, but she’s still real pretty; in the interview she speaks both German and English.

What is at least mildly Jewcentric about all this is that “Bei Mir Bist du Shoen”, this pan-European and even international pop hit, was written in a Yiddish-language context, by two immigrant Jews in Brooklyn back in or around 1932. The song was part of a show entitled “I Would If I Could.” The lyricist was Jacob Jacobs; the composer was Sholom Secunda.

Sholom Secunda was a most prolific songwriter and, it turns out, a dude of some passing interest. Although his family name is give-away Sephardic, he was born in Russia in 1894 and, at a remarkably young age, demonstrated an astonishing facility for singing and creating cantorial music. He came to America in 1907, and worked mostly in Yiddish-language theater, radio and orchestral music jobs in New York City. Of the many songs he wrote, the most dear to him appear to have been liturgical compositions. He worked with some well-known cantors and choirs back in the day. He also became a Labor Zionist, as may be illustrated by the fact that he worked summers in Labor-Zionist camps, joined a Workman’s Circle and, above all, wrote the music for “Shir HaPalmach.” This latter datum won’t mean much to most people, but for those familiar with the song and its storied history it will probably mean a lot. Secunda also wrote the music for one of the most beloved Yiddish/Hebrew (it exists in both languages) songs ever: “Dona, Dona.” I have known both of these songs for decades and it never occurred to me before seeing Ilhama’s video that the composer might be the same man who composed “Bei Mir Bist du Schoen.”

Anyway, the story of how the song migrated from Secunda & Jacobs in the Yiddish theater to what became in the 1930s the third-best-selling American song of all time is a matter of record, so to speak. Secunda was having trouble making a living for his wife and two young sons during the depression. When “Bei Mir Bist du Schoen” attracted no particular attention as part of the show, Secunda subsequently shopped it around to dozens of film executives, but they all agreed that the sound was much too Jewish for Hollywood audiences. So Secunda sold it to a publisher, J. and J. Kamman, for $30. Secunda then took the money and gave half to Jacobs. This seemed a good deal at the time because unless Jewish composers and lyricists sold their work to publishers, they had to publish them on their own—and that cost money.

Then a man named Sammy Cahn—a very famous songwriter, of course, in his own right—came upon the song, saw its potential, translated all the lyrics except the title line and a few other Italian and German words (to preserve the song’s hint of exoticism) into English, sped up the tempo from the original… and the rest is history. The then-unknown Andrews Sisters were matched to the song, and the result went viral as the Andrew Sisters’ reputation launched skyward.

Just to complete the tale of the English-language original 1937 song, J. and J. Kamman and the Andrews Sisters did really well with it. “Bei Mir Bist du Schoen” grossed more than $3 million, which was still a lot of money in the late 1930s. When the story got around that Secunda had grossed all of $15 from it, people assumed that he was extremely distraught by this turn of events. He wasn’t. He wasn’t concerned with wealth or fame; he was a humble man who just loved music and at the time was satisfied with his $75 per week job managing a Yiddish orchestra in New York.

Later on, in a 1961 interview (Secunda died in 1974), he noted that just about everyone else was more upset about the $15 than he was. Something else, however, did still bother him. He also noted that back in the day he and George Gershwin were pretty good friends. Gershwin, who admired Secunda’s talent, invited him to collaborate on Broadway, but Secunda turned him down. Later on, when he and Gershwin would run into one another around town, Secunda said, Gershwin, having by then made it very big, would rib him mercilessly but good-naturedly for his refusal to collaborate. “Aren’t you sorry now, Sholom, for refusing my proposal?” Secunda said Gershwin would ask him.

In the 1961 interview Secunda finally answered Gershwin’s question, but not in a way you might expect. He remembered noticing that the cascade of recordings of “Bei Mir Bist du Shoen” after that of the Andrews Sisters often featured a Gershwin tune on the B-side.  So Secunda quipped that here he was collaborating with George after all, after his death. He said he had actually lost sleep thinking about it, because he loved George Gershwin and his music. (George Gershwin died of a brain tumor in July 1937 at the age of 38, so he didn’t live long enough to rib Secunda about the $15 he netted from “Bei Mir Bist du Schoen.” Certainly, he would have if he could have—double entendre entirely deliberate.)

Of course, the Andrew Sisters were not Jewish, and most of the song’s fans were not Jewish either. Reports from the time relate how some fans managed to completely misunderstand its one non-English line. The most common homophonic rendition of what has since become known as a “mondagreen” was apparently something along the lines of the dyslexic, “My Beer, Mister Shane.”

Not all of the fallout from the song was so funny. The song’s popularity quickly spread far and wide, including to Nazi Germany, where it became a big hit until the authorities learned that the composer and lyricist were Jews, upon which the song was promptly banned.

American Jews also loved the song, and of course many knew of its original Yiddish-language origin. It made sense for American Jews to love the song in English translation, too, because by the mid-1930s the Yiddish theater was starting to die out for lack of Yiddish speakers. It became a sentimental hit for them, the kind of song ubiquitous at wedding celebrations and the like.

After the Holocaust, the sound of “Bei Mir Bist du Schoen” became acutely bittersweet. It evoked the now guilty joys of a murdered era, and memories of youth among a heartbroken generation. My maternal grandmother Jennie Luber could not hear it without crying.

My Jewcentric point? Only that that a song of this nature, with such a history and so much emotional baggage, could in 2011 become a giant European (and especially a German) pop hit, sung by an Azerbaijani woman and decorated by truly wild (and completely un-Jewish: one backdrop behind Ilhama looks like St. Peter’s, in the Vatican!) visual images is, well, sort of breathtaking. It almost makes me dizzy just thinking about it.

Independence Kurdistan

Aug. 24 -- written as a flow-on to other posts by Walter Russell Mead about the Kurds, and their ways  (ha, ha, ha):

The Rise of Independent Kurdistan?

ADAM GARFINKLE

Via Meadia has zeroed in during the past month or so on the Kurdish portfolio. In three posts, Walter has pointed to the key role of some 30 million Kurds in the mix of antipathy—or better, multi-balanced opposition—among the Syrian government and its rebel opponents, the Iranian government, the Iraqi government, and the Turkish government. Those who understand how complicated matters are within Syria, and its adjunct sufferer Lebanon, should be warned that matters Kurdish are more complicated still. Walter has done a good job of marking out the main contours in the context of recent developments;  in his overseas absence I mean here only to dot a few background “i”s and cross one or two strategic-assessment “t”s on the subject.

Walter has deftly picked through some of the relevant history in his reference to Sykes-Picot. In that secret agreement among the World War I allies, the Kurds got the shaft, true enough. But there is an older history, more social than political, that bears a brief comment.

The various peoples of the Middle East and North Africa—Arabs, Kurds, Berbers, Persians, Turks, and others—have tended historically to identify themselves not in terms of ethnic or linguistic particularisms, but in terms of sectarian affiliation, with Islam fully dominant from the 8^th century onward—that is, from the times of the early Abbasid Empire until the latter days of the Ottoman Empire. Modern nationalism is a European invention, and it made its way to the Middle East slowly and unevenly. Thousands of pages of scholarly investigation await you if you really want to understand this process, but in the meantime just register that it was the Young Turk revolution of 1905 that provides the most convenient date to mark the advent of nationalism in the region. Some Turks (and not all of them were literally young) looking to save their imperial domain from continuous decay decided, half consciously and half not, to imitate the ways of the more powerful Europeans who were bearing down upon them. And when the Turks broke the link of authority that matched political power to sectarian affiliation, the notion spread to the non-Turkish residence of the Empire.

The reason this matters is that the Kurds never thought of themselves as a separate nation until very recently, certainly not before the 20^th century. As a mountain-dwelling people speaking mutually incomprehensible dialects of Kurdish and lacking an extensive written literature, the Kurds focused their collective identity largely on the tribal and drew that identity in contradistinction to other, sometimes competitor Kurdish tribal confederacies, and whenever non-Kurdish power hovered around them. That is why, while Kurds often played important roles in the great parade of Muslim empires, they did not do so self-consciously as Kurds, but rather as Muslims. It is well known, for example—at least to those who have dipped their toes into the exhilarating waters of Middle Eastern history—that the great Saladin himself, that scourge of the Crusaders, was a Kurd.

The explosive power of national identity has come more slowly to the Kurds than to the Arabs, the Turks, and most other Middle Eastern peoples. The reasons are several, and one has already been mentioned: the mountainous terrain of Greater Kurdistan (and I mean here a geographical expression like Scandinavia, not necessarily an in-waiting political definition) tended to divide peoples into tribal groupings and made any sort of central government authority very difficult to develop and maintain. This geographically based division also exacerbated linguistic separation over time.

The other reason this matters for practical purposes is that the territory of Greater Kurdistan was chopped up into four different zones, each one corresponding to a piece of peripheral sovereign territory in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. While it would be too much to say that these four countries managed to create hermetically sealed borders, they were sealed enough to make it difficult for Kurds to move or coordinate across them. That makes the situation of the Kurds somewhat different from that of Pashtuns on either side of the Durand Line dividing Afghanistan and Pakistan. The mountains and the tribalism and the divisions are similar, but the politically operative geography has been different.

Moreover, while 19^th- and 20^th-century governments in Baghdad, Tehran, Damascus, and Ankara often left the Kurds alone in a kind of de facto autonomy, just because they were too much trouble to bother with given limited state administrative capacities, they did not always leave them alone. At various times, all four governments posed serious problems for their Kurdish residents. Intimidation, suppression, repression, co-optation, and land theft are not inappropriate terms to describe these problems, but they differed in all four countries as the regimes and circumstances of those countries themselves differed. The result was that Iraqi Kurds, Syrian Kurds, Iranian Kurds, and Turkish Kurds each developed what one might call different problem sets that shaped their political attitudes and strategies. And the difference among those problems sets in turn contributed to the fissiparous tendencies among the Kurds themselves.

Again, illustrating this general point is a long and voluminous history of detail and nuance for which we do not have remotely enough time. But just consider, as a way to grasp the point, that until just a few years ago in Iraqi Kurdistan alone geographical and tribal divisions created extremely serious and debilitating obstacles to Kurdish political power. The long-running competition, sometimes violent, between the Barzani and Talabani clans was the stuff from which local politics was made. These clans created what looked like, but really were not, modern political parties: the Talabanis had the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Barzanis the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP). The division between them enabled both the Iraqi government and the Turkish government to arbitrage to their advantage between the two, playing the Kurdish factions against each other. Multiply this division a dozen-fold as you expand the territorial perimeter to include Syria and Iran, and you get some idea of the multi-level and multi-actor game that has been going on for decades.

This protracted game forms the essential background against which to understand the current policies of the Kurds in the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq and Kurds elsewhere, as well as the policies of the four national governments toward the Kurds. No one forgets anything in this part of the world. The principals remember details, slights not least, that most American State Department, Defense Department, and intelligence community officials responsible for this region never knew in the first place.

Okay, so much for the necessary background in brief. What has changed? Four rather different sorts of things, I would say.

First, the Kurds are less divided today than they have been historically. This is partly a function of increased literacy and urbanization. The increased importance of written language has helped to overcome to some extent the linguistic pluralism within the Kurdish language. There are also cell phones and other modern gadgets in Greater Kurdistan today, as there are in all sorts of remote areas, from Papua New Guinea to the jungles of South America. No one really knows just what sort of influence this technology is having on Kurdish identity construction, but it’s not a stretch to suppose that something non-trivial is going on.

Second, for the first time ever there is a Kurdish epicenter to which other Kurds can look for inspiration, guidance, and actual political and economic coordination: that center is of course the KRG. The next issue of The American Interest, November/December 2012, will feature an analysis of Kurdish prospects by a truly world-class expert that details the development of the KRG from an accidental autonomous zone, the result of two Gulf Wars, into what for all practical purposes is a de facto sovereign state. Suffice it to say for now that the KRG is a going concern that is not going to be reabsorbed into a unitary Iraqi state. Not only does the new Iraqi constitution concede as much, but the Kurds have also marshaled enough power and morale to fend off any imaginable effort by Baghdad to subdue them.

Kurds in Syria, Iran, and Turkey know that, and this has made a discernible difference in how these four Kurdish communities relate to one another. In particular, Syrian Kurds now caught in the midst of a collapsing Syrian state have every reason to make common cause with Iraqi Kurds, and Iraqi Kurds have every reason—some ideological, some geostrategic—to return the favor. But this, as Walter has suggested, just restarts the great game in and around Kurdistan. It is conceivable, theoretically at least, that the union of KRG territory in Iraq with Kurdish territory in Syria could reach all the way to the Mediterranean. That would certainly revolutionize heretofore landlocked Kurdish circumstances. The Turkish government knows this and, with the most to lose in the face of a burgeoning Greater Kurdistan movement, realizes that it must prevent such a notion from moving from theory into reality.

This is the underlying strategic calculus behind the recent Turkish threats and exertions concerning the supposed Syrian reactivation of support for the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party). The Turks claim that the Assad regime has again turned to using these particularly nasty Marxist Kurds against Turkey, as it did for a very long time in the past. The Turks had to capture their leader and credibly threaten an invasion to get the Syrians to stop. There is no reason to doubt Turkish accusations. At the same time, what the Syrian regime is doing creates a real dilemma for the Barzani leadership of the KRG, and that brings us to our third point of change.

That third point of change has been a fairly remarkable reversal of the traditional Turkish attitude toward how to play the Kurdish great game. With the most to lose at the hands of a successful and unified Kurdish nationalism (about 20 million out of 30 million Kurds live in Turkey), the Ataturkish governments in Ankara before the present Muslim-oriented one generally took a hostile attitude toward all Kurdish political activism. The Turkish state, modeling itself after that of secular France, brooked no tolerance for separatist ambitions based on ethnic division. The model was that everyone who lived within the boundaries of the new Turkish state was a Turk, just as everyone who lived within the boundaries of France was a Frenchman, regardless of lingering particularisms from the past. So the Turkish state took to calling its Kurds “country Turks” and other such ridiculous names to hide the fact that the country was in truth not ethnographically and hence politically homogeneous. They also banned the use of the Kurdish language in schools and in the media, and in other ways tried to extirpate Kurdish cultural separateness within the Turkish state. As for Kurdish political activism across the border in Syria, Iraq, and Iran, the Turks were against it. Unlike the Iraqi and Iranian governments who sometimes used Kurds across the border to discomfit each other, the Turks as a rule avoided that kind of tactic.

The AKP government has adopted a far more flexible, nuanced, and possibly quite dangerous attitude toward the Kurds both within Turkey and beyond. Current Turkish leaders reject at least to some extent the blood-on-the-saddle Ataturkish attitude toward the definition of Turkish citizenship. Because they are more pan-Islamic then pan-Turkish, at least compared to earlier Republican Turkish governments, they have extended the budding trend to allow more Kurdish cultural expression within the country. But most amazingly, the AKP government has decisively reversed the tactical proclivities of its predecessors by embracing the KRG across the border in Iraq. Indeed, Turkey has become the KRG’s main lifeline to the world.

Why the change? On one level it’s about money. Turkish companies and entrepreneurs are all over the place, and many have made quite a bundle, not least in oil-related activities. But more fundamentally than that, the Turkish leadership has calculated that by making friends with the KRG it can both moderate its policies—specifically preventing KRG support for the PKK—and even use the burgeoning strength of the KRG as leverage against Iraq, Iran, and the Assad regime in Syria. In other words, if you can’t beat them, use them.

Whether this change of approach will actually work for the Turks in the long run is a matter of speculation. It certainly hasn’t solved Ankara’s PKK problem thus far, but that’s not the be-all and end-all of the approach. And that brings us to our fourth change.

One of the reasons the current Turkish government thinks it can use the KRG as leverage against its neighbors, and particularly against Iran in the long run, with which it has deep and historical problems going back to Ottoman-Safavid times, is that all the states of the region have grown far weaker than Turkey. Turkey is in good shape. The AKP attitude toward the economy has been far more liberal then the statist approach of the Ataturkish leadership, and that has led to rapid and broad economic growth. The party is reasonably unified and popular, a real change from the feeble and corrupt Turkish governments of the preceding three decades. Turkish strength and self-confidence contrast fairly dramatically with the situation in Iraq, a country still reeling from war, civil strife, and regime change. It also contrasts, obviously, with the mayhem in Syria. And it contrasts, as well, with a weakening of the Islamic regime in Iran, which now must deal with international isolation on top of its thoroughgoing incompetence and increasingly acute lack of legitimacy among most of the Iranian population.

If the Turkish government thinks it can maneuver its relationship with the KRG effectively in an environment of ambient weakness, just imagine what the Kurds must be thinking. Yes, they are thinking it: independence.

There is a natural debate going on right now among the KRG leadership. On the one hand, these men know how risky a declaration of formal independence would be, especially if they do not have the prior endorsement of the United States, the European Union, and Turkey. Without such protection, Kurds outside Iraq could come under intolerable pressures and pain.  Losing their Turkish lifeline would be especially harmful, and while the Turks are playing the game now in a way that helps the KRG, it’s by no means clear that the Turks can tolerate such a bold new step.

On the other hand, Kurdish leaders also know that they now have at hand a window of opportunity that may not remain open for long. The ways of the world, in this part of it at least, have a nasty habit of changing for the worse when you least want them to. For now the KRG leadership is continuing its creep toward a capacity for independence, doing everything it can to build institutions that can allow at least Iraqi Kurds to make a go of it on their own. Ultimately, the disposition of the United States is critical, because however much deteriorated the emotional dimension of the U.S.-Turkish alliance is, only the United States can deliver eventual Turkish acquiescence to Kurdish independence.

So what about the American attitude? The United States used to be against Kurdish independence, period and full stop. But the reasons for this opposition no longer claim much power. American administrations opposed it in part because Kurdish independence was a short-term ploy of the Soviet government after World War II, designed to hurt two American associates at the time, Iran and Turkey. Somehow it stuck in our heads that Kurdish independence was a bad thing even after the Soviet opportunity to use the Kurds to advantage had long since disappeared. But there were other reasons, too. We did not think it was a good idea in general to mess with the national boundaries of the area, artificial and prone to mousetrap/ping-pong ball collapse as they are. In particular, as a subset of this general concern with shaky boundaries, successive U.S. administrations supported the continuation of Iraq as a unitary state.

None of these reasons make a lot of sense anymore. Iraq is no longer a unitary state, thanks in large part to what we did to it. Other borders have been tampered with lately, Sudan and Mali being the two most recent cases in point, and the great crescendo of clattering of mousetraps has not been heard as a result. (Not that the results have been pretty.) And the Turks now seem for the first time at least theoretically reconciliable to the idea of an independent Kurdish state, so long as they think they can more or less control the dangers it might pose to them.

That doesn’t mean that the United States should suddenly change its tune and support the transformation of the KRG into an independent state. From a moral aesthetic point of view, such a shift would be fully justified. There are thirty million Kurds who, if you asked them, would almost certainly choose to be together in a sovereign state. I can’t think of any other people on earth so voluminous and so set on self-determination in a national framework as the Kurds. Do they deserve a state, all else equal? Sure, but all else is never equal. Alas, moral aesthetics alone should not determine U.S. policy. Here’s why.

If the current KRG obtained independence, it would to one degree or another become an irredentist magnet for Kurds in Syria, above all, but also in Iran and ultimately in Turkey. There is plenty of unfinished business at hand, too, with a potential to generate vast amounts of violence. For example, the current borders of the KRG are far too circumscribed as far as Kurds are concerned because they do not include Kirkuk and Mosul (ancient Nineveh). For another example, Syrian Kurds are incensed still, decades after the fact, at the appropriation of fairly huge chunks of their ancestral lands by the Syrian government and the forced influx of Arabs upon them. They want their land back, and they are finally in a position to imagine actually taking it. Not entirely dissimilar circumstances exist in both Iran and Turkey. In other words, KRG independence could well be just the beginning of a very messy and protracted process, not the end of one.  And if the United States plays midwife to Kurdish independence, it will very likely get stuck with a shitload of dirty diapers to manage for years to come.

Could such a mess possibly be in U.S. interests? Well, there are some imaginable benefits from it. It could certainly screw with the mullahs, and that’s good. It could actually increase U.S. leverage over Turkey under some circumstances. But only a fool looks forward blithely to an unpredictable upheaval of this magnitude. As they would say in the State Department, where I hung my bowler hat for a few years, the matter requires some study.

The broader point is that we seem to be on the verge of a real game-changing phenomenon in the region. Just as the Berber/Tuareg rising has changed the shape of North Africa and the Sahel (and that’s just at its early stage, most likely), the Kurdish rising may change the shape of Southwest Asia, reverberating via Syria across the Levant. The Arabs have a saying: “Everything starts small except calamity.” We may be about to experience an illustration of that ma

Crazy

Everybody has their good days and their bad days, I think it is fair to say, but some of us also have our bizarre days. I had one recently, but it wasn’t my fault. I was provoked. I was provoked by the premonition that large chunks of the world as we know it have gone crazy.

Yes, of course, it’s August, and in August people are more inclined to take leave of their senses as they take leave of familiar surroundings. It’s called “vacation” in every possible sense of the word. We are also in the midst of a presidential campaign, so it is silly season to boot. And I admit that I was alarmed, but not really surprised, that Tuesday’s New York Times op-ed page gave prime real estate to none other than Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, two of the most reality-challenged citizens of our fair Republic, to defend the likes of Julian Assange, who is less reality-challenged then simply evil. (Are all the adults at the paper on vacation?) But none of that really prepared me for yesterday’s New York Times front page.

Looking just at that page above the fold, insanity seemed to suggest itself from wall to wall. If you did not see it, let me briefly describe its contents.

Starting on the far right (not exactly incidentally maybe) is an article about Representative Todd Akin. This man is crazy. At least what he said about women and abortion is crazy. I don’t mean crazy in a clinical sense necessarily, although in this case I do not casually rule it out. I mean crazy in the colloquial sense. No one who made it through high school, one would think, could possibly entertain such idiotic views. Well, one would need to think again, I guess.

Married to the article about Akin’s abortion views is a more general analysis pointing to the centrality of rolling back abortion in the Republican Party’s current political agenda. In that article the author points out that the only reason the federal government is functioning right now—by which I mean has a continuing budget resolution—is that the measure attracted enough votes only by dint of an amendment restricting abortion in the District of Columbia. This, too, is crazy, and here is why.

Culture war issues should be demoted from our national political discussion. They should be sent back to local communities, where some sense of cultural commonality offers hope of settling them, if not once and for all, then at least to an extent that is good enough for government work. On the national level, given the irreconcilable and categorical moral character of the positions taken, these issues—whether abortion, homosexual marriage, surrogate parenthood and others—can never be settled. All they do is continually polarize our politics, contributing to gridlock far and wide. (It is probably worth pointing out, too, that as far as I can tell there is no constitutional basis whatsoever for the federal government to involve itself in such matters; and that not a single culture war issue matters one whit to the increasingly urgent effort to find real solutions to the problems that will in fact define our country’s future. But no one seems to care about any of that, so I’ve put these remarks in parentheses.) It is therefore irresponsible, if not actually crazy, for the Republican Party to emphasize such issues, and it is completely crazy to graft amendments concerning abortion or gay marriage or what-have-you to legislation whose essential purposes have nothing whatsoever to do with such issues.

Moving a bit further toward the left on the front page (no political insinuation intended) is a story about Japanese nationalist activists planting the Rising Sun on an uninhabited disputed island in the Senkaku Islands chain. According to the story, the captains of the boats carrying the activists warned them not to land, lest doing so provoke a diplomatic incident. But the activists ignored the captain, jumping overboard and swimming through shark-infested waters to shove their metaphorical bamboo shoots under Chinese fingernails. These people are crazy. They are dangerous, too.

All the way to the left, beneath the heartrending photograph of parents mourning at the funeral of their son, is a story about the latest American casualty of the Afghan War. Marine Lance Corporal Gregory T. Buckley, Jr. was scheduled to leave Afghanistan later this month. But before he could do so he was murdered by one of the Afghan trainees he was trying to help.

Was this Afghan crazy? That’s hard to say without knowing his motives, but it is not too much of a stretch, I think, to label someone who kills an honest soul trying to help you as crazy. But that’s not the only thing that’s crazy in Afghanistan. The war itself has become ever so slightly crazy since the Obama Administration’s “surge” returned counterproductive results that are now far too clear to deny. That we stay in a country whose future soldiers and policemen are more interested in shooting us than in shooting Taliban is, yes, crazy.

Way back in 1961, Willie Nelson wrote the best song of his lifetime. It was called “Crazy”, and it was made famous by the incomparable Patsy Cline. The lyrics to that song are about an unrequited love that the jilted victim anticipated but pursued anyway. It has nothing to do with brainless politicians, errant Republican Party obsessions, Japanese nut cases, or futile foreign wars. Yet it is not completely irrelevant either, because the song shows how otherwise normal human beings can do crazy things even knowing at the very time they are doing them that they are in fact crazy—but they just go and do them anyway. I have a hunch that, if anything ties these above-the-fold stories together, this is it.

We are a strange species. Does any other animal on earth behave this way? Maybe tomorrow’s Times will take up the question.

Back from the Ether

I learned just the other day, Friday I think, that an old friend of mine is apparently very sick with lung cancer. Of course this is depressing news, especially given that he is only a few months my elder.  His illness has not kept him from continuing to work, which in his case concerns writing. But he took out a bit of time from his main concern to reflect on the fact that as word spread of his illness, a torrent of messages arrived before his eyes giving testimony to the fact that people have actually been reading his stuff over the years. He quipped that this was not only emotionally much appreciated, but that it showed him that he had not just been reeling off words into the ether. You never know, he said, who might see and be influenced by an argument launched into cyberspace.

That remark struck me upside the head on Saturday afternoon. There I was, minding my own business reading the newspaper when what should I see in Colbert King's regular Washington Post column but my own name. It nearly knocked me off my chair. King quoted, without actually using quotation marks, a line or two from what I thought was my 2009 book Jewcentricity.  Perhaps he did, but when I was later sent an electronic version of the piece by a friend in, of all places, Ra'anana, the link to my name referred back not to the book but to the 2006 essay in The American Interest, "The Madness of Jewcentricity," that in a sense launched it. It doesn't matter. What matters, as my sick friend suggests, is that the ether sometimes talks back to you.

After the end of the Sabbath, I wrote a note to Colby King thanking him for mentioning me, and thanking him, too, for a fine column on an important issue.  In the process I sent him a pre-pub electronic version of the new, September–October issue of The American Interest,  the bulk of which deals with issues of race and class in America.  One article in particular, by Richard Thompson Ford, I drew to his attention as the best of the lot at least as I see it. I hope he reads the piece and recommends it in turn to his audience.

 He wrote me back, thanking me for my note and for the issue.  He said he was a strong admirer of my work, and had been reading it for years.  Who knew?

 Socrates had lots of reasons for disliking the idea of writing stuff down, but of course we only know that because Plato wrote it down. Socrates apparently never said anything about  how disembodied speech, in the form of writing, could end up bringing ideas together without the people who articulated them. One can only imagine what he would think of today's very noisy ether.

What Has the Arab Spring Changed?

Aug. 4:


The great and garrulous one who has bestrode Via Meadia for the past several years, to much acclaim far and wide, is taking a short break. He is doing so not in order to take anything so trivial and intellectually dissipating as a summer vacation but to sally forth from Mead Manor in beautiful downtown Queens on a quest for new knowledge, still deeper understanding, and an entirely new curried appreciation of cuisine. He is going to India.

The great one’s absence will surely seem much longer than it really is, and that is because I have been asked to mutter about in this space until Walter returns. I can’t help but be reminded of the famous scene toward the end of The Wizard of Oz in which the Wizard instructs his subjects to take orders from the Scarecrow and his assistants “until what time, if any, that I return.” So as Walter the Wizard flies off to the universe within a universe that is India, I hereby declare myself Scarecrow-for-a-day (or three).

I am tempted to begin my stand-in peregrinations by talking about Syria, as I am wont to do on my own blog here at The American Interest Online. But except for one brief marginal note to follow immediately after this sentence, I will resist that temptation for now. The marginal note is this: The manner in which the New York Times puts things frequently has a way of taking my breath away. Kofi Annan resigned yesterday as UN peace envoy for Syria, and the article about it, written by Rick Gladstone, characterizes this resignation as, “A move that throws new doubts on whether a diplomatic solution is possible.”

Anyone who still thinks that a diplomatic solution is possible in Syria just isn’t paying attention. Either that or a form of mental exoticism is at work; as another Walter, Walter Lippmann once put it, “It is a disease of the soul to be in love with impossible things.” Rick Gladstone, and presumably his editors, remind me a little of the extremely earnest eight-year olds who needs to be told at least a dozen times that, no, there is no Santa Claus after all, before they will actually believe it.


Rather than perseverate further over Syria or the strange ways of the New York Times, better, I think, to enlarge the discussion of the Arabs and their discontents, in this case with the aid of a newly published essay by my friend Olivier Roy in the current issue of the Journal of Democracy. The article, entitled “The Transformation of the Arab World”, must be read in its entirety; no truncated discussion of it can do it full justice. But before I proceed to truncate here, let me better introduce the matter and the man.


Professor Roy is French. He is the author of many fine books, most of them translated into English, on modern and postmodern Islam. He is also a long-time world-class expert on Afghanistan. Among experts in these fields he is considered without exception absolutely top shelf. His creativity, deep understanding, and willingness to buck the tide of common knowledge and interpretation have no peer. He is always instructive and stimulating even when, in my view, he is not entirely correct. Most unfortunately, those Americans who are not expert in these subjects are unlikely ever to have heard of him.
 
This is partly because, as I say, he is French. I don’t mean by that that there is anything wrong with French people, and I don’t even mean to thereby implicate the insularity of the American press (although I could if I felt like it). What I’m getting at is that the French understand political sociology against the background of their own long-developed intellectual traditions, and they express themselves often in loaded conceptual language that doesn’t easily deconstruct into English equivalents. I know both the subject and Olivier well enough to grasp, most of the time, what he is actually trying to say even when the words in English don’t exactly say it. That problem shows up, at least a little, in this new essay, as I note below. It’s not a particularly easy read for those not used to probing this subject, and it may require a second and a third reading even for those who are. Nonetheless, it’s very much worth the effort.

Those who are familiar with Dr. Roy’s writing will recognize many themes from of old in this new essay, but he takes these themes into new territory, applying them to new circumstances, and he does so brilliantly. Let me only add one more introductory caveat before getting down to particulars.

As I say, I don’t always agree with Dr. Roy, and in that I am not alone. In this essay he recalls a contention that helped make him well known some years ago among experts in Islamist politics—namely his assertion that political Islam has failed. Of course, the accuracy of this assertion depends on what exactly is meant by “political Islam” and what exactly is meant by “failed.” What Olivier meant at the time, in 1997–98, is that, if I may put it in somewhat simplified fashion, the fear that radical Islamists would seize control of a host of Muslim–majority nations, and through that control upset the geopolitics of the world, turned out to be vastly exaggerated. The reason, again to simplify, is that the utopian dreams of radical Islamists turned out to be impossible to translate into the terms of the modern world. The ubiquitous slogan “Islam is the answer” presupposed understanding the question, and, according to Roy, the Islamists never really did.

I agreed with this assessment at the time, but with a major reservation. Yes, the proximate danger of Islamist takeovers in Arab and other Muslim states was not so great, but, in my view, the progressive Islamicization of these societies might very well create a new, much higher, and more propitious base for future attempts at seizing political control. In other words, my argument at the time was that the key long-term impact of Islamist ambitions was not to be found in proximate high politics, but rather down deep within society itself and off some ways into the future. Olivier was not wrong, as far as he went; my uneasiness about this argument was that he did not go far enough.

This recollection actually provides a perfect bridge to discuss his brilliant new essay. That is because he begins by asserting this very principle. The place to look for the sources and impact of the so-called Arab Spring is not in high politics, whether in Egypt, Tunisia, or elsewhere. The place to look is down deep in society. This is extremely important advice, because the standard common knowledge today, at least as far as one can judge from most commentary here and in Europe, is that the tumult of the past nearly two years hasn’t produced anything of much value, certainly not as concerns democracy and liberal values.

Let’s take a look around, shall we? Egypt remains in thrall to its military, and even if the Muslim Brotherhood manages to wrest control from it, that certainly portends no great success for democracy. Dr. Roy is as clear-eyed as can be on this: He will have none of the ignorant foolishness that tries to characterize the Brotherhood as an organization devoted, or potentially converted, to democracy, let alone to liberal values. The situation in Tunisia is not much better than it is in Egypt, and the situations in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Sudan, the UAE, Oman, Syria, and Lebanon are either the same as before, more or less, or worse by any reasonable measure of political decency. Only in Iran in recent years has there been visible agitation from the street for greater democracy, and that did not get very far at the hands of the regime’s enthusiastic thugs.

On the basis of this track record, a lot of observers have reached the conclusion that the whole thing—this Arab Spring—has been a wash, that it has long since sprung a leak and been drained of its benign potential. The Arabs and other Muslims, many now like to say, are suspended between secular authoritarians with or without their military uniforms and religious authoritarians with or without (as in Turkey) their beards. It’s all about culture, as some people might say. In other words, nothing of any significance has happened.

This is a view one might reasonably take from a focus exclusively devoted to high politics. And it is a view that, as Dr. Roy shows, is completely wrong.

Why has this error become so common? It’s quite simple, really. In order to see the dramatic changes within Arab society that gave rise to the so-called Arab Spring, and to understand their implications going forward, an observer has to actually know something about these societies. That means that an observer will have had to invest hundreds if not thousands of hours in serious study, in at least attempting to learn a Middle Eastern language or two, and in some extended travel. Very few Americans meet those qualifying criteria, certainly compared to the relatively vast number who are deft with journalistic lingo. That is why Olivier Roy’s insights are so valuable; for the reasonably serious of mind, Roy’s work at least can plant the right questions for the sake of his otherwise expertise-deficient readers.

So what’s the essence of his argument?  Roy asserts that the Arab uprisings of the past two years give lie to the standard script applied by outsiders to the region. These upheavals have not been about abstractions, whether religious or otherwise; they have been about neither the umma nor pan-Arabism. They have not concerned themselves with relations among states, and they have not had anything to do with Palestine or Israel. They have not gone in search of charismatic leaders either. Here is how he puts it: The Arab Spring “simply would not follow the script which holds that the centrality of the Arab-Israeli conflict is fostering an ever-growing Islamization within Arab societies, a search for charismatic leaders, and an identification with supranational causes.” Rather, they have been about individuals, about individual rights and individual dignity. (Olivier muddies the water a bit by use of the term “citizenship”, which does not have the same meaning in Arabic as it does in Western languages, including French.)

What has changed, in a nutshell, to enable this new focus is that the younger demographic in the Arab world no longer respects the social authority of the old system, which, after all, has long since proven its incapacity to negotiate modernity. Changes in technology and the overhang of globalization have individuated Arab society, not uniformly and not all at once, but in ways that undermine old authoritarian habits. As Roy sees it, these deep social changes open the way not necessarily for democracy, but for democratization. Roy insists on seeing the concept not as a static noun but as a process.

Moreover (and here he is at his very best), Roy insists on disentangling democracy as a process from both secularism and liberalism. Americans in particular tend to bundle these three concepts together, because they have been thus bundled more or less in the American historical experience. But this is simply not the case historically or analytically, as a recent essay in The American Interest by Vladislav Inozemtsev took pains to point out, and as Francis Fukuyama’s most recent book also explains at length. Roy’s argument is that Arabs can become democrats without becoming secularists or liberals, and that, indeed, the new context of Arab society is mandating exactly such a circumstance. Roy notes that even Egypt’s salafists, certainly no friend of democracy by any measure, have no choice but to promote what he calls the “autonomization of politics.” No party, whether secular or religious, has a lock on ideological attractiveness, let alone purity, and no party can get away any longer with slogans bereft of actual programs.

As he has argued before, underlying this transformation is a change in the very concept of religiosity, a change ironically promoted by fundamentalist exertions over recent decades. In traditional society, religious behavior is utterly social. As some observers have put it, observances are largely mimetic, which is to say that people learn proper religious behavior by following the examples of their elders. As urbanization and literacy advance, and as individuation attends both, the social support structures of religion tend to dissolve into private faith. “There is a cultural gap”, Roy points out, “between the Islamists and the younger generation that is less about Islam per se than about what it means for a person to be a believer.” Islamic fundamentalism, as Roy has contended for many years, has aided mightily this process because its appeal is to individual believers in the face of, and as opposed to, received static tradition, which fundamentalists have savaged as being adulterated with accumulated superstition, corruption, laxity, and even idolatry. Fundamentalism, in other words, has diversified––indeed, pluralized––Islam. As Roy explains (and here I piece together a quote assembled from different discussions within the essay):

This individualization and diversification have had the unexpected consequence of disconnecting religion from daily politics, of bringing religion back into the private sphere and excluding it from that of government management. Fundamentalism, by disconnecting religion from culture and by defining a faith community through believing and not just belonging, is in fact contributing to the secularization of society. . . . The growing de facto autonomy of the religious arena from political and ideological control does not mean that secularism is necessarily gaining ground in terms of culture and society. Yet certainly a new form of political secularism is emerging. Once it takes hold, religion will not dictate what politics should be, but will itself be reduced to politics. . . . Religious identity and faith are two different (and possibly opposed) concepts in politics. Identity might be a way to bury faith beneath secular politics.

As I have already indicated, accept no substitute—not even mine—for reading Dr. Roy’s essay in its entirety. That is the only way for you to understand his words properly in context. I have tried to give only a bit of their flavor, and some key elements of his thesis. Please take time to do the rest of the work yourself; whether you agree with him in the main or not, you’ll end up much wiser for the engagement. You will at the very least learn where the real action is in Arab and other Muslim societies: It’s in places you rarely get to read about in the newspaper.

Roy does not elaborate what the social developments he espies mean for either French or U.S. foreign policy. That is not a criticism, merely an observation. There is only so much one can do in a single essay, and this essay brims with such insight that it would be churlish to criticize it for what it never set out to do. Roy is no starry-eyed idealist. He doesn’t see trends in Arab society in politically utopian terms. He is under no illusion, I am sure, that still very lightly institutionalized populist democracies will bring their people only roses and serenity. But I think it’s worth making explicit what Roy leaves here unsaid. Two points seem to me, if not also necessarily to him, most germane.

First, American policy is no stranger to the difficult problem of choosing between values and interests deemed equally important. The policy of the Obama administration toward Egypt illustrates this very well, as did, in other contexts, the policy of several administrations before it. Of course, we’re Americans, and so we want other countries to be democracies, or to be more stable and vigorous democracies than they are. At the same time, we want them to respect and contribute to the protection and advancement of our interests, and because we want both things so much, many people have persuaded themselves that the more democratic other countries become, the more likely they are to have similar interests to our own. Sometimes this is true, but sometimes it isn’t.

For example, there isn’t much question that most Egyptians (and the reasons are not important for the time being) don’t like Israel and don’t like the peace treaty Egypt has observed with Israel since March 1979. The more the Egyptian government resembles and reflects popular opinion, the more likely that treaty will either collapse or be discounted into frailty if not irrelevance. But that treaty, whatever else it has been good for, obviates war in the region on the scale of 1967 and 1973, and for a whole host of reasons that is important to the United States. A more democratic Egypt is not an Egypt necessarily more aligned with American interests.

That’s not all. It has been American policy for a while now to promote gender equality in the Arab world. There are all sorts of programs in the State Department, USAID, and even the Justice and Defense Departments set up and funded for this purpose. Of course, 21^st-century Americans cannot do otherwise, and if anyone still doubts that foreign policy is very often a projection of domestic political culture, let him ponder this new imperative. But a more democratic Muslim country whose society remains traditional in its religious culture, whether Arab or not, is very unlikely to promote gender quality, as we understand it, as a key public policy goal. One of the first things that some new members of the Libyan transitional government wanted to do was to reinstate the legality of polygamy. Not only does the “autonomization” of politics in Arab countries not promise an alignment of interests; it does not promise an alignment of values either.

And second, to put it as simply as I can, the democratization process in the Arab world will put paid to democratic peace theory. By pluralizing democratic politics far beyond its current extent, and particularly by creating democratic political cultures that are neither secular nor liberal (if, indeed, that is what the future portends), it will be much harder to say with any assurance that democratic countries do not make war against one another. We may very well learn from this experience that what has kept democracies from making war on one another has not been democracy but rather the liberal values that have tended to lie side-by-side with democratic politics for most of the past two and a half centuries. (Tended to, but not always: Note that Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power by democratic means; they were not, however, liberal.) As diverse as democratic cultures are today—European (Northern, Southern, Iberian, and Eastern), North American, South American, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Israeli, Indian, and more—each one of these varieties underwent (or did not require) a protracted period of secularization before it underwent significant democratization. Arab societies, to one degree or another, are exceptions to this historical trend, with implications we will learn if Dr. Roy’s assessment of their political trajectories turns out to be correct.

A person could be forgiven, I suppose, for confusing correlation with cause in a case like this. But I suspect that a lot of well-meaning Western and especially American idealists, of both conservative and liberal temperament, will not take this news very well if and when it comes eventually to stare them in the face. Yes, they too will have to concede that, in the end, there really is no Santa Claus.

The USPS Default: More Than Meets the Eye

August 1: Yesterday there were warnings in the news that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) was about to default on its prepaid pension obligations. And today, sure enough, the USPS announced that it could not meet today's obligations, and also that it would not meet those pending six months hence. For loyal and long time readers of The American Interest, this is no surprise: We predicted this would happen in our July/August 2009 issue in a pseudonymically authored essay by Georg Jensen entitled “The Imminent Death of the U.S. Postal Service.”

I recommend that anyone who is interested in the subject go back and read that essay, because it explains the circumstances of the USPS default far more carefully and in depth than what has passed for analysis in the press lately. But before I briefly review the circumstances, let me take up a prior question: Why should you be interested? The financial circumstances of the USPS are hardly the stuff genuine national crises are made of; certainly the story does not hold a candle compared to the onrushing financial cliff, the continued instability of our financial institutions, the anemic condition of the economy, the roaring dysfunction of American politics, and, of course, one could go on. Nevertheless, the ills of the USPS are in truth symptomatic of broader problems. It is a story that focuses on leadership with no vision, on a Congress whose parochial shenanigans almost invariably produce counterproductive outcomes, and, not least, on the inner workings of American plutocracy. It is not as marginal a story as all that, as it turns out.

So what has the press had to say about the now validated USPS default? A good example is yesterday's New York Times column by Joe Nocera. Nocera points out that the pension pre-funding stipulation is truly bizarre, is Congress’ doing, and only ever made sense in the first place in the Alice-in-Wonderland environment of American politics. All this is true, and it's also true that the pension pre-funding stipulation is the proximate cause of today's default. Nocera points out, too, as has just about every observer, that the real culprit here is technology and the failure to keep up with it. Moving information through the manipulation of physical pieces of paper cluttered with ink lines and dots used to be the only way to do this beyond shouting range. Obviously, this is no longer the case, and there is really no dispute over the drop in the volume of first-class mail during the past half-dozen years thanks to email and now texting.

But these points are to a satisfactory explanation of the problem what a mere thirteen clubs are to a full deck of cards. So let me try to round out the picture for you.

While the pension pre-funding stipulation is the proximate cause of the USPS default, default was in the cards anyway because the imbalance of revenue to expenditures is huge and growing huger everyday. Yes, it's true that the USPS leadership has been trying to reduce costs, particularly labor costs, and it has succeeded to some degree. But it has done so belatedly and cannot hope to keep up with the slope of decline. It has a structural problem, not a cyclical or temporary problem.

This downward slope, however, has as much to do with second-class mail as it does with first-class mail. And here's where the story gets interesting.

Many years ago the USPS leadership designed its business model around the idea that advertising mail provided a larger and more lucrative revenue stream than did first-class mail. So the USPS tried to incentivize advertising through the mail by offering a range of bulk and presort discounts. Over time, USPS offers to business customers became ever more complex and, generally speaking, ever more inviting as de facto subsidies to advertising. As a result, too, USPS technology innovations largely shaped themselves around second-class mail, both in terms of extent and anticipated volume and the character of the automated sorting functions themselves.

This critical decision of the USPS leadership, to cater to and rely on advertising revenue to keep itself afloat and to finance its technology automation programs, has turned out to be disastrous because the volume of second-class mail is also now in sharp decline. The reason is clear: Beyond the general economic stagnation of the past four years, advertisers, just like ordinary users of the postal system, are turning to the internet and other non-print media to get the word out on their wares. This leaves the USPS with not only an oversized automotive, real estate and labor infrastructure, but also with a vastly oversized mail-handling technology investment.

But what is not generally recognized, and what is I admit somewhat controversial and hard to prove with facts and figures (since the USPS doesn’t even know its own numbers and would not share them if it did), is that the decision to depend heavily on second-class mail was catastrophic from the start.

First, in order to attract the diverse array of business customers the USPS complexified its rate structure to truly bizarre degrees. All you have to do to see the outcome of this process is to get a hold of a copy of the post office manual for commercial customers. It is thousands of pages long. It almost gives the Medicaid manual a run for its money. It is indecipherable to ordinary mortals, too.

It did not used to be this way. Back before the early 1970s the rate structure of the Post Office, which was, at the time a cabinet-level Executive Branch department before it was semi-privatized in 1971, was very simple. Aside from standard services like first class mail, airmail, special delivery and parcel post, there was only one second-class bulk-rate. When the first-class rate was 2¢, the bulk rate per piece once ounce or less was 1.5¢. The Post Office Department issued its first 1.5¢ stamp in 1925, just in time for Calvin Coolidge’s proclamation that the business if America was business.  (It bore a likeness of the late President Harding—something that should have given us pause at the time, but didn’t.) Commercial mailers could buy “pre-canceled” stamps to use to send this mail. That was it. The rate manual fit on two sides of a single sheet. 

After that complexity grew slowly. In 1943 the Post Office Department produced a 4.5¢ stamp to pay for heavier bulk mail items. It wasn't until 1960 that things started to get strange, when the Post Office Department issued a 2.5¢ stamp and, most ominously, a 1.25¢ stamp to go with the 1.5¢ item. You can track how rapidly things got out of hand simply by noting the existence of the following stamp denominations that proliferated as rates adjusted for inflation during the 1970s and 1980s: 3.1¢, 3.4¢, 3.5¢, 4.9¢, 5.2¢, 5.3¢, 5.5¢, 5.9¢, 7.1¢, 7.4¢, 7.6¢, 7.7¢, 7.9, 8.3¢, 8.4¢, 9.3¢, 10.1¢, 10.9¢, 12.5¢, 13.2¢, 16.7¢, 17.5¢, 20.5¢, and, last but not least, 24.1¢. 

You think I’m joking, don’t you? In normal, which is to say non-bureaucratc, life, I would be. But sad to say, I’m not. You could look it up.

What the USPS never took properly into consideration as all this was going on were the enormous transactional costs of this new complexity. For every new curlicue in the rate structure (zip-plus-four, bundled, presorted, etc.) the USPS had to hire personnel to manage it, and every new employee who sat on his or her duff instead of actually going out and delivering the mail cost a lot of money. That employee had to have an office, so the USPS real estate (and insurance) bill went up. That employee had a pension, and medical benefits. All those employees required the hiring of human relations employees to take care of the other employees, and so on and so forth.

And of course the byzantine complexity of the third-class mail rate (now called standard mail, as if advertising is more "standard" than first-class) structure led, in the case of many larger businesses at least, to the hiring of specialists just to deal with the post office. Smaller businesses sometimes had to hire consultants to do the work of keeping up with the glass bead game artists at the USPS. So gratuitous complexity at the USPS sired more gratuitous complexity in the private sector, more transactional costs, the creation of vested interests on the part of those whose jobs depended on all this, and guess who ultimately has been paying the tab? We taxpayers have. If we have a cousin or a friend whose business depends on printing junk mail, we may note the microcosmic economic value of the arrangement. But it’s still junk. If you’re looking for a below-the-radar example of the logic of collective action at work, it would be harder to find a more pristine example.

If that were not enough, the job descriptions of the various rate-structure employees brought on to manage the increasing complexity of the commercial mail structure were fairly high on the salary pecking order. These were management jobs, and they were paid accordingly. Moreover, most of these jobs fell under the purview of the Postal Service union, which made it very hard to get rid of people who were just sucking oxygen and really not doing very much. And, although it is uncomfortable to have to say this, a rather large percentage of these employees in urban areas were minority hires, as the growth of post office complexity dovetailed with affirmative action programs inside the federal government. One might therefore say that this whole arrangement formed part of the “blue model” of government that Walter Russell Mead has discussed so shrewdly in this space.

Now, when USPS officials reported their evolving budgetary circumstances to their own overseers, and also to Congress, they never included the full cost of their third-class-mail-first strategy, most likely because they themselves never fully understood it. The numbers made it seem like the strategy was working. More revenue was coming in, the revenue trend lines pointed up for many years, and operating costs plus technology investments seemed more or less in balance. But these numbers failed to account for the future costs of these transactional add-ons, and they banked on estimates of future volume and productivity advances that were often unrealistic. The systematic understatement of fixed and future costs became part of the culture of USPS accounting. It was, in short, a kind of Ponzi scheme that paid off the present by discounting the future. This is not a unique phenomenon in government, alas. Look at Social Security, or for that matter, the entire Greek government.

And there is more. As the USPS incentivized advertising through discretionary third-class mail rates, business-friendly lobbies sought and succeeded in getting Congress to allow most advertising costs to be deducted from corporate taxes. In plain English, this means that businesses did not have to pay the full cost of what amounted to a subvention to the USPS: taxpayers did. You have to follow the money to understand the politics: The USPS offers small businesses and large corporations alike deals they cannot, or at any rate do not, refuse, and these businesses and corporations then turn around and muscle Congress to get taxpayers to indirectly foot most of the bill. Are you annoyed by all the junk mail that ends up littering your anteroom floor six days a week? Well, how annoyed are you now when you realize that you yourself are subsidizing it? Pretty annoyed, I would guess.

The moral of the story, I suppose, is that it takes many contributors to really screw up a good thing. No one can deny that Congress is largely responsible for this mess, not only through the ridiculous prepaid pension obligation, but also because for the usual self-interested, parochial reasons, Congress has prevented the USPS from diversifying its business model. In most other countries post offices offer a range of services: paying bills, buying cell phones, even postal savings banks. But Congress, in thrall to business interests as or beyond usual, refuses to allow new competition for those who dump dollars into their re-election coffers. It is also holding up major changes in USPS servicing, like dropping Saturday home delivery, and with every delay the USPS deficit soars.

But Congress is not to blame for the entirety of the USPS’s woes. USPS leadership over the years has been slow to react to technological change, extremely timid in taking on its union, and has failed miserably to understand the full implications of its own business strategy. Perhaps this was inevitable given the neither here nor there sort-of-for-profit character of the operation. The USPS is supposed to stand on its own two feet financially without taxpayer subsidy, but it has benefited in many ways from its in-between status (too complicated to detail here), and it has always supposed that, in a pinch, taxpayers would bail it out. (We'll soon see about that.) All you have to do is compare USPS parcel service technology with that of FedEx or UPS to get the point.

As I said, the troubles of the USPS are not cause for any loss of sleep. I'm sure that most Americans seeing today's news about the default can barely summon more than a large yawn in response. That's probably appropriate, as long as there's no curiosity to look under the rock. Move that rock, however, and quite a bit of smarmy activity comes into focus. You're shocked, I know.

Can this be fixed? In today's dysfunctional political environment, no, probably not. But otherwise, as with most things in public policy these days, the answer is yes, of course. How would we do this?

First, we would decomplexify the rate structure, and make businesses pay the full cost of advertising through the USPS. All relevant subsidies and business tax write-offs should be eliminated; let the market sort out the most efficient way to advertise. My bet is that there would be a great deal less junk mail produced and delivered as a result. I’m way over the top for that. This would hurt the business of some printers, true, but if we are determined to save all job categories then we would still be making lots of saddles and bridles and horseshoes and the like a century and more after the arrival of the automobile.

If we simplify the rate structure, the USPS can shed a huge proportion of its overhead costs.  Jobs would disappear, true, but again, these are jobs that don't produce anything except paper and delay and are, if one calculates properly, a debit to net national product. Moreover, these jobs are in the not-for-profit sector in effect, and so they do not reflect a wise allocation of capital.

The USPS must maintain its universal service obligation, which has been at the core of its mandate since the days when Benjamin Franklin first set up shop. Yet it need not provide the kind of door-to-door service everywhere that it has in recent years. In the history of the post office this is anyway a rather recent innovation. Not all that long ago most Americans had to go down to the post office to pick up their mail. It would not be the end of the world if service were reduced, especially since the extent to which people depend on the mail is a great deal less today than it used to be.

If I had it my way, too, I would introduce a special 2¢ rate for all mail sent by constituents to their political representatives on the local, state and federal levels. I would call it the “My Two Cents” rate, and of course I would order up a spanking new, red white and blue stamp for the purpose.

In short, there is still a role for the postal system, just a smaller one. If the post office were able to diversify its products, get out from under the pressure of its union, and downsize its business model to focus on ordinary citizens instead of businesses, it could create a new equipoise and maintain its stability indefinitely into the future. Unfortunately, as simple and logical as this sketch is, it will never happen as long as the Congress acts like the Congress, corporations act like corporations, public service unions act like public service unions, and all three go merrily dancing hand-in-hand down lover’s lane, all the way to the bank.