Revisiting Wallace and Jennings, 1987

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday commenter “Lizzie” wrote:

I remember watching the PBS “Ethics in America” episode where Charles Ogletree asked Peter Jennings & Mike Wallace what they would do if they were embedded with and the enemy, and they realized the enemy was about to ambush and kill American troops (detailed description here: http://tinyurl.com/bac57). Mike Wallace had no shame in admitting that he would just roll tape.

Journalists have fancied themselves separate (and decidedly above) the American public, and have developed contempt for America, her citizens, and their readers. They want to ”˜tell a story’ (i.e. build a narrative) instead of just report because they believe it is their job to interpret the news for us dummies.

Well, if you blog long enough, you cover a lot of territory, and Lizzie’s comment made me recall that I had written a couple of posts on that topic over five years ago. I think they bear repeating. By the way, there were some major differences between Jennings’ answer and Wallace’s, and the interplay between them is an interesting part of the story.

[Here’s the first post, updated a bit to reflect recent events such as Wallace’s death—and by the way, the original comment thread is worth reading, too.]

We now know a bit more about the charges against Iraqi AP photographer Bilal Hussein. It seems that he was tipped off to a planned IED attack against US forces, and that:

…he was standing next to the I.E.D. triggerman at the time of the attempted attack, and that he conspired with the I.E.D. triggerman to synchronize his photograph with the explosion.”

“Abominable,” you say, “if true.”

Agreed. But I wonder what Mike Wallace would have had to say about it.

Mike Wallace? Multiple award-winning elder-statesman journalist, he of “60 Minutes” fame? That Mike Wallace? Why on earth do I ask?

Back in 1987, Wallace was a member of a panel discussion on military and journalistic ethics that aired on public television and moderated by Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree. Wallace and Peter Jennings were the press representatives, and there were also various military officers on the panel, including General William Westmoreland, controversial figure during the Vietnam War.

Read this detailed account of what transpired, and understand how relevant that discussion of twenty years ago is to events of today. The first topic was a hypothetical dealing with the conditions under which torture might possibly be used by American military personnel; the second topic was a hypothetical about the duty of the press to warn US forces of an attack it has learned is imminent.

What is a journalist’s responsibility in such a case? It would seem to be a no-brainer, and in fact Jennings initially answered that a journalist’s duty to save the lives of American soldiers trumps any need to cover the story at hand “objectively” by simply being a spectator and recording what happens. Here’s Jennings answering the hypothetical about the North Kosanese (the enemy) vs. the South Kosanese (the allies with whom the US military is fighting):

With Jennings in their midst, the northern soldiers set up a perfect ambush, which will let them gun down the Americans and Southerners, every one. What does Jennings do? Ogletree asks. Would he tell his cameramen to “Roll tape!” as the North Kosanese opened fire? What would go through his mind as he watched the North Kosanese prepare to ambush the Americans? Jennings sat silent for about fifteen seconds after Ogletree asked this question. “Well, I guess I wouldn’t,” he finally said. “I am going to tell you now what I am feeling, rather than the hypothesis I drew for myself. If I were with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans.” Even if it means losing the story? Ogletree asked.

“Even though it would almost certainly mean losing my life,” Jennings replied.

But Mike Wallace begged to differ:

“I think some other reporters would have a different reaction,” [Wallace] said, obviously referring to himself. “They would regard it simply as a story they were there to cover.” “I am astonished, really,” at Jennings’s answer, Wallace said a moment later. He turned toward Jennings and began to lecture him: “You’re a reporter. Granted you’re an American”-at least for purposes of the fictional example; Jennings has actually retained Canadian citizenship. “I’m a little bit at a loss to understand why, because you’re an American, you would not have covered that story.”

Ogletree pushed Wallace. Didn’t Jennings have some higher duty, either patriotic or human, to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot? “No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!”

Jennings backtracked fast. Wallace was right, he said. “I chickened out.” Jennings said that he had gotten so wrapped up in the hypothetical questions that he had lost sight of his journalistic duty to remain detached. As Jennings said he agreed with Wallace, everyone else in the room seemed to regard the two of them with horror.

As do we, from a distance of twenty-five years.

It’s hard to read this without a cold chill running down the spine. How did it ever get to this point?

Oh, I know: postmodernism, reporters elevating themselves and their profession into “journalists” who stand above such petty emotions as nationalism—and even, it seems, their duty to prevent the killing of their fellow human beings. But somehow, that doesn’t really explain Mike Wallace’s reaction, or why Jennings allowed his own much better instincts to be overruled by Wallace’s amorality.

Wallace was not let off easy, however, by some of the military there:

A few minutes later Ogletree turned to George M. Connell, a Marine colonel in full uniform, jaw muscles flexing in anger, with stress on each word, Connell looked at the TV stars and said, “I feel utter . . . contempt. ” Two days after this hypothetical episode, Connell Jennings or Wallace might be back with the American forces–and could be wounded by stray fire, as combat journalists often had been before. The instant that happened he said, they wouldn’t be “just journalists” any more. Then they would drag them back, rather than leaving them to bleed to death on the battlefield. “We’ll do it!” Connell said. “And that is what makes me so contemptuous of them. Marines will die going to get … a couple of journalists.”

And then there was a cameo appearance by none other than a fairly young Newt Gingrich, who summarized the situation thusly:

The military has done a vastly better job of systematically thinking through the ethics of behavior in a violent environment than the journalists have.

Agreed. And that’s really no surprise, is it? The military’s job is to function in a violent environment and make split-second decisions involving life and death. They must train to think these things through in advance and in depth, so that the decisions they make quickly and under pressure will be more likely to be the correct ones. Too much depends on it to leave this to chance.

For journalists, though, covering a war is only a small part of what they do. It stands to reason they are too often thrust into that environment without the proper preparation. But that doesn’t stop some of them from arrogantly assuming they have a certain moral superiority by sheer dint of their ability to write a string of descriptive declarative sentences, punctuated properly.

There is a difference between Bilal Hussein’s alleged conspiratorial activities in Iraq and Mike Wallace’s hypothetical actions regarding the Kosanese, of course; the two are hardly exact equivalents. But the line from one to the other is not all that long, either.

And in a way, Hussein’s alleged actions would be the more understandable of the two, if in fact his motivation was allegiance to the insurgents’ cause. At least his actions would then be consistent with his beliefs. What was Wallace’s excuse?*

[And here’s the second post, with a lengthy comments thread as well.]

…I urge you to read the comments section of this earlier thread.

One of the many interesting comments there was by Mitsu, who wrote:

…A sort of non-interference principle of reporting, that reporters should be out there to observe but not interfere with what they’re observing…Of course, this principle it seems ought to be superceded by the principle of saving lives ”” however, you might consider this argument (I’m not saying I believe it, but I am offering it). One reason reporters are often allowed into dangerous areas, even enemy territory, is that they are seen, basically, as uninvolved observers. For this reason reporters have managed to get information to the public in a wide variety of very dangerous situations. If reporters started to regularly get involved in an active way with what they were reporting on, this information flow might stop. They might become much more active targets than they already are, in war zones, etc. This would have the effect of making it much harder for us to find out what is going on especially in parts of the world where we’re not ordinarily very welcome.

I submit that, although this sounds very reasonable on the surface, on reflection it does not conform with reality. For starters, it is a fiction (born of arrogance and/or ignorance and/or wishful thinking) that journalists can cover a story by accompanying enemy soldiers on a mission and not affect that story. Their mere presence affects it by giving the enemy an opportunity for propaganda. Furthermore, in order to continue that presence and get further access in such situations, the journalists must be careful not to be too negative towards those who are kind enough to grant them the access, the story, and possibly the scoop (don’t discount the factor of the reporters’ own ambitious professional ends, either).

Eason Jordan demonstrated the compromises reporters made in gaining that glorious and vaunted “access” to Saddam’s Iraq. The old saying “What price glory?” could be changed to read “What price story?” In this case—and, I submit, in the case of the Jennings/Wallace hypothetical—the answer is “Way too high for the benefit.” The “story” gained is just as likely to be a carefully constructed enemy propaganda edifice, except for the combat parts.

And do we really need a description of a battle against Americans, as told from the other side by those who would fail to warn those American soldiers of what lies in wait for them? Would it not be enough to write about a battle from the US side, as was done with the embedded reporters during the Iraq War? Sure, it would be a fuller picture—and certainly an interesting one—to get reportage from the enemy side. But how necessary, and at what risk? And to pretend that such coverage can ever be “objective” is absurd.

The Wallace point of view reminds me of nature photographers who take those interminable films of lions stalking their prey and killing it. They never intervene; it would ruin the story. And, after all, nature is red in tooth and claw; survival of the fittest and all that. If the littlest and weakest member of a herd of wildebeest is taken down, it’s merely the operation of that process, and to protect the wildebeest makes no sense.

But an American reporter in wartime gaining access to the enemy for the sake of a story, and failing to warn American soldiers of an upcoming ambush, is no nature reporter. His actions engender a chill up the spine because they offend on both a gut level and a logical level. In such a case, objectivity is a phantom, the vain (in every sense of the word) pursuit of which leads the reporter to an ethical black hole.

[*I’m adding this in March 2013, because I realize that the answer many people would have today is that his hypothetical actions would have been consistent with his beliefs as a man of the left. How far left did Wallace lean? He certainly didn’t think it was very far:

Wallace considered himself a political moderate. Wallace was friends with Nancy Reagan and her family for over 75 years. Nixon wanted him for his press secretary. Fox News said, “he didn’t fit the stereotype of the Eastern liberal journalist.” Interviewed by his son on “Fox News Sunday”, he was asked if he understood why people feel a disaffection from the mainstream media. “They think they’re wide-eyed commies. Liberals,” Mike Wallace replied, a notion he dismissed as “damned foolishness.”

Here’s an article about the interview, in which the elder Wallace went on to add:

“Even a liberal reporter is a patriot, wants the best for this country,” he said. “And people, your fair and balanced friends at Fox don’t fully understand that.”

Can’t imagine why they wouldn’t “fully” understand that, would we, after the 1987 interview?]

It’s that time again—again

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP. And many thanks to those who’ve donated so far.]

passhat

Yes, it’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Time passes so quickly when we’re enjoying ourselves.

But yes, it’s been a while since I asked you to donate to a semi-worthy cause: this blog. And so I’m going to ask you again to use the “donate” button on the right sidebar beside the photo of the hat, and give whatever you see fit.

Every single donation— large or small—adds up, and helps me a great deal in continuing the blog. If each and every reader gave even a few dollars, it would be a glorious thing. But whether you decide to donate or not, please keep visiting and keep commenting. I appreciate all of you. Comments and readers are a very big part of what makes this blog work.

I thank you all in advance. I’ll probably repeat this notice every now and then, the equivalent of jiggling that cup/hat. But I’ll be discreet about it. And it’s a lot better than those fund-raising drives they have on TV, isn’t it? No interruption of the scheduled programming.

The press has won

The New Neo Posted on by

Back in the earlier half of the 20th century right through my childhood years and up to the Vietnam War and the cultural explosion we call the Sixties, the press (with some more liberal pockets) was predominantly—at least compared to today’s press—pro-American and at least somewhat supportive of whatever government might happen to be in power, especially during wartime.

Time and Life were not only read by a huge number of Americans, but they were published by a man who was fairly conservative, Henry Luce, and they set the cultural tone, especially Life. The Saturday Evening Post was similar and the Reader’s Digest was read by a lot of people, too. Movies were on the same page.

During the 60s, as we know, all of that changed. We can date the change to this moment or that, but I think we can all agree that major elements for the press were Vietnam after Tet (including Cronkite’s response, whom I’ve written about here), the Nixon years and Watergate. Suddenly, or perhaps not so suddenly but over a period of less than ten years, the press saw itself as “speaking truth to power,” reforming government and making it more responsive to the people. It became, at least in its own self-admiring eyes, a whistleblower on government.

This would have been okay except for a couple of things. One was that America doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The press’s relentless negativity about the country and its policies, and some of its presidents, was taken as gospel and accentuated abroad. After all, it was almost unheard of for other countries to do something similar to themselves, so why wouldn’t they believe things must be even worse than the press was saying? Another was that it required even-handedness; the press needed to speak truth to power whichever party was in power, and to require of itself a strict devotion to getting its facts straight.

As time has gone on, though, that press has fallen more and more behind on that latter task. It goes without saying that they were always going to be rough on Republican presidents, beginning with Nixon. But to the best of my recollection they were not especially easy on Carter either, once the honeymoon period was over (isn’t it quaint, now, the idea of temporary a “honeymoon” period for both a Democratic and a Republican president—the Democratic because it’s a never-ending honeymoon now, the Republican because even the honeymoon is a knock down drag out battle?). And even Clinton, although he got a lot of good press for a long time, wasn’t always a media darling.

That changed with Obama, of course. Obama is the recipient of such fawning worship, such complete lack of criticism (and the opposite for the opposition) that it would be almost laughable if it weren’t so dangerous.

The reasons are fairly obvious. Obama is the president the MSM of this generation has always dreamed of, as though sent by central casting. And it occurs to me that the press, having worked so hard for so many decades to “speak truth to power” and to further its own liberal agenda, recognizes that it has finally gotten what it wanted. Criticizing Obama would be to kill one’s own beloved creation, the fruits of all one’s labors. Why would anyone want to do that for some abstract notion like truth, or reporting? Wasn’t the point of all the reporting to coax America into electing someone like this, and then another person like this, and another?

And so, in an interestingly ironic twist, the press—which earlier in the 20th century was marching somewhat in lockstep with the government, at least in wartime, and which had some respect for the person who held the office of president no matter which party, and which had set itself up as the official government whistleblower during the 60s and beyond—has come full-circle back to marching in lockstep with the government, probably more than ever before, while somehow simultaneously retaining its own vision of itself as whistleblower by concentrating that function on Republican administrations. The press rebelled and remade American opinion in its own desired image, and is now the mouthpiece for the party a la Pravda, turning in its press badges to become bards and tribute singers to the current administration.

Nanny Bloomberg is in error

The New Neo Posted on by

New York’s Mayor Bloomberg on his favorite government topic, weight control:

If you eat less than 2,000 calories you’ll lose weight,” the mayor said on his weekly WOR radio show today. “If you eat more than 2,000 calories, you’ll gain weight.

We are all equal, aren’t we, in the Brave New World of Mayor Bloomberg? However, for me and for many others, around 1600 or 1700 calories a day is the break-even point.

Not that it’s any business of Mayor Bloomberg’s.

The fairest of them all?

The New Neo Posted on by

I first heard her sing when I was in college. I had some friends who’d been to Europe and had brought back a few of her records. I didn’t much care for her music and promptly forgot about her, until I came across her name a few days ago on some Wiki site.

Stunning when young (lots of photos at the link), I think Francoise Hardy’s looks are even more extraordinary now that she’s in her late 60s (sixty-nine, to be exact).

The woman is absolutely incapable of taking a bad photo at any age, so it’s hard to choose, young or old. Bone structure, bone structure, bone structure! and being rail-thin helps.

This one will do for Hardy young:

Hardy

And this:

hardyStripe

And this one will do for recently (she’s 68 in this photo):

Hardy68

And at around 65:

Hardy65

When she was young, all the greats of rock and roll lusted after her (Malcolm McLaren: “I know for a fact that many of the groups who were notorious and slowly becoming successful, such as the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones and Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and many others were desperately interested in having Frané§oise Hardy become their girlfriend in some way”).

But her heart was given early on to fellow French singer Jacques Dutronc, with whom she began living in 1967 but didn’t marry until fourteen years later, which was eight years after their son was born. Even then, it seems to have been a vale of tears:

Her intense infatuation was matched by her partner’s coldness. Much of the singer’s 2008 autobiography, Le Désespoir des singes et autres bagatelles, focused on that period. Today it provides the theme for her twenty-seventh album and her first novel, both entitled L’Amour fou.

The novel took thirty years of writing, rehashing and rebuilding. It dissects a love story based on obsession and despair between a woman consumed by passion and a man keen to guard his distance. It doesn’t take much detective work to see that Hardy is telling her own story…

My goodness. So this women, the object of extremely generalized as well as highly specific desire (David Bowie: “I was for a very long time passionately in love with her, as I’m sure she’s guessed. Every male in the world, and a number of females also were, and we all still are”) chose as her lifelong partner a man who held himself at a remove.

Puzzling, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s not, not at all.

Looking back: the long reach of time

The New Neo Posted on by

My mother’s very first memory was of being frightened by booming noises—guns? cannon? fireworks?—while being held aloft above a crowd to view a New York harbor filled with ships. She wept and her parents comforted her. The year was 1918, and she was four years old, and they told her there was no reason to cry because it was a happy occasion: the end of the Great War.

They didn’t yet realize that someday it would be known as the First.

That was a long time ago. But it really wasn’t all that long ago, since my very own mother remembered it. She grew up in an extended family shaped like an inverted pyramid, the only child of an only child. Her father had become chronically ill around the time she was born, and so her parents had to move in with her mother’s parents. They never moved out again until both grandparents had died and the house was sold, around the time of my birth.

So that’s how it happened that my mother was raised by four people, two of whom had been born during the early 1850s. All four of them had held and reassured my mother when those booming noises had announced the end of the Great War in that scene that constituted her first memory. So, although my mother became a modern woman who smoked cigarettes, drove a car, went to college, and voted as soon as she turned twenty-one (in that order, I believe), two of the people closest to her in her youth remembered the Civil War vividly.

This story illustrates how easy it is to reach back in time, at least in a “six degrees of separation” sort of way. All it takes is a family with a series of long-lived people who have children relatively late in life.

For example, with the proper connections, my mother could easily have known someone who knew someone who lived in the 1700s—and in the early 1700s, at that. That’s how we get the phenomenon of those Civil War widows who died as late as the early years of the twenty-first century. The recipe for that requires a very elderly woman who had gotten married very young to a veteran husband who was very old.

I’ve already described my mother’s family. But my father’s family also had an exceptionally long reach back in time. My paternal grandfather was born around 1860 and died in the 1920s. But he was the youngest of twelve children, the eldest of whom was a sister of his born in the year 1838.

Please let that sink in for a moment: my own grandfather’s sister was born in 1838. Not only that, but she lived to be over 100 years old and dance at my parents’ wedding. She appears in photos of the occasion, a small figure wearing a black headscarf, almost impossibly old and wrinkled but smiling.

I never met her; she died some years before I was born. But what tales she might have told! One of the difficulties of reaching back in time by talking to the elderly is that the young rarely have the inclination to do it before it’s too late. Old people—who cares what they have to say?

The answer might be: people who collect oral histories, that’s who. And while it’s true that there’s a growing industry of recording the memories of the elderly while they are still around to tell them, I wonder how many people will be listening in the future. It’s in the nature of the young these days to dismiss what used to known as the wisdom of the ages, or the thought that the experience of the past has any relevance to the present or the future. It’s one of the reasons why we fail to learn all that much from history.

If only Obama knew

The New Neo Posted on by

The Woodward/WhiteHouse war of words continues with this Woodward claim:

Bob Woodward said this evening on CNN that a “very senior person” at the White House warned him in an email that he would “regret doing this,” the same day he has continued to slam President Barack Obama over the looming forced cuts known as the sequester.

As soon as I read this latest installment, I thought of the old saying “if only Stalin knew.” If you’re not familiar with the phrase, here’s a quick summary of what it was about:

Surprisingly, many Soviet citizens did not realize who was responsible for the madness [the purges and terrors], thinking it was due to some breakdown in the system or officials who had gone off the deep end. People would say: “If only Stalin knew!” Sometimes concerned citizens would even try to write Stalin with complaints, an action that was likely to prove a grave mistake. Stalin often scribbled comments on documents and letters that went across his desk; when he received pleas from citizens in desperate distress, he would scrawl mocking or contemptuous remarks on them — and often order the arrest of the authors.

No, the White House official wasn’t threatening to send Bob Woodward to the Gulag—at least not the real one. But a metaphorical one will do quite nicely. Meanwhile Obama maintains plausible deniability, keeping himself removed from the dirty work that continually swirls around him, and of which Bob Woodward is hardly the only recipient. He just may be the one who’s talking about it.

But it’s been clear to me that Woodward doesn’t really know the character of the man and the White House he’s dealing with, although he’s playing catch-up mighty quick. But he still says things like these, which show a lack of understanding (to which he admits):

[Woodward] clearly is skeptical of Obama’s approach to the job. “I’m not sure he fully understands the power he has,” Woodward said. “He sees that the power is the public megaphone going around to these campaign-like events, which is real, but the audience he needs to deal with is on this issue of the sequester and these budget issues is John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.”…

“Sit down and work through this,” he said. “I can see exactly how you come up with a deal that would dispose of lots of things.” Woodward, who helped bring down one presidency and has written instant history on every one since, added: “Color me a little baffled. I don’t understand this White House. Do you?”

It’s not that complicated, really. For example, yes, Obama fully and completely understands the power he has. He also intends to use it (and has been using it, finely calibrated so as not to make the frog jump out of the boiling water) to fundamentally transform the US, and he’s not going to let an old has-been and somewhat naive reporter get in his way.

It would help if Woodward understood that the main goal of most of the previous administrations on big issues—although they were interested in power, of course, and winning—was not to obliterate the other side, but to actually work with them on at least some of the problems that faced the nation, in order to benefit the nation. But this is not Obama’s goal, so why should it happen?

Woodward does not understand this. I’m not even sure it’s occurred to him; the thought is too dreadful. That’s why, in my mind, when I first heard about this but had not yet read the Politico piece, I thought of those naive Soviet citizens who could not believe that Stalin would authorize the sort of things going on in the Soviet Union, and wanted to tell him so he could set it straight. I could just picture Woodward saying to himself, “Oh, if only Obama knew.”

But I was joking. At least, I thought I was—until I got around to reading the Politico article. Because there I discovered that I wasn’t far from the truth:

Come on,” [Woodward] said. “I think if Obama himself saw the way they’re dealing with some of this, he would say, ”˜Whoa, we don’t tell any reporter ”˜you’re going to regret challenging us.’”

Holy cow.

[NOTE: I didn’t read this Henninger article from the WSJ until after I’d written the above post, but look how well it fits, although it’s not even about Woodward:

Mr. Obama likes to convey the impression that he doesn’t think or do business like other presidents. It’s time to take him at his word. If Washington is starting to look like an alternative universe, that’s because the president is creating an alternative universe, the Obamaian Universe…

He doesn’t want to cut spending. He wants more of it. Forever. Public spending is beyond ideology for Barack Obama. It’s the oxygen in his universe.

This explains Mr. Obama’s End-of-Days speeches the past week. Rationalists around Washington’s professional budgeting community have been trying to explain that this apocalypse is entirely avoidable. The bureaucracies can move spending under many shells. But Mr. Obama really believes the stars will fall from the sky if spending declines.

In Washington’s standard model, it’s all just politics. Mr. Obama is running an established strategy of driving public opinion to marginalize and ultimately defeat Republicans. Who could doubt it? But maybe it is also time to start taking Barack Obama at his word. Maybe it’s time to come to grips with the fact that he sees the public economy of federal spending as the life force of the nation as no president ever has, not even Franklin Roosevelt.

If after all these years no one in Washington can cut a deal with Barack Obama on spending, taxes and economic growth, maybe it’s because he is in a place indeed occupied by no one else.]

[ADDENDUM: Comment seen at Althouse:

I’m afraid Woodward is suffering under the delusion that truth still matters.
He couldn’t be more wrong.

Bingo.]

[ADDENDUM II: I just noticed that Glenn Reynolds had the same thought as I, only he phrased it in its older version, “If only the Tsar knew.”

Indeed.]

[ADDENDUM III: Actually, come to think of it, I think Obama would have chastised the aide who’d sent the email to Woodward. Obama would have said the aide should never make such statements in an email when a phone call would have done just as well and not left any evidence behind. Sloppy.]

[ADDENDUM IV: Excellent stuff from Ace.]

Joan Rivers’ Heidi Klum joke: not so very funny, not so very knowledgeable

The New Neo Posted on by

In the Heidi Klum thread, commenter “JuliB” asks:

Any comment on the uproar over Joan Rivers saying that the last time a German looked so hot, they were pushing Jews into the oven?

Well, yes. When I read the Joan Rivers joke, my response to it was that the quip is very unfunny as a joke, so why bother?

But the thing that struck me most was that Rivers, in addition to being unfunny, was also historically incorrect. The Nazis actually didn’t sully their hands with that particular job—putting Jews and their other victims designated for death into ovens after they’d been gassed. While it is true that the victims were herded (and tricked) into the gas chambers by the Nazis, the task of incineration was delegated to special squads of inmates organized by the Nazis for that purpose: the Sonderkommando.

Anyone who has studied the Holocaust and how the death camps operated knows about this especially dreadful fact, as Rivers herself should have. It’s hardly esoteric knowledge. Here’s the Wiki entry:

Sonderkommandos were work units of Nazi death camp prisoners, composed almost entirely of Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during The Holocaust…Sonderkommando members did not participate directly in killing; that responsibility was reserved for the guards, while the Sonderkommandos’ primary responsibility was disposing of the corpses. They were forced into the position; in most cases they were inducted immediately upon arrival at the camp, and were not given any advance notice of the tasks they would have to perform. They had no way to refuse or resign other than by committing suicide. Because the Germans needed the Sonderkommandos to remain physically able, they were granted moderately less squalid living conditions than other inmates: they slept in their own barracks, which more than any other in the camp resembled normal human dwellings; they were allowed to keep and use various goods such as food, medicines and cigarettes brought by those who were sent to the gas chambers; and, unlike ordinary inmates, they were not subject to arbitrary, random killing by guards. As a result, Sonderkommando members tended to survive longer than other inmates of the death camps ”” but few survived the war.

Because of their intimate knowledge of the process of Nazi mass murder, the Sonderkommando were considered Geheimnistré¤ger ”” bearers of secrets ”” and as such, they were kept in isolation from other camp inmates, except, of course, for those about to enter the gas chambers. Since the Nazis did not want Sonderkommandos’ knowledge to reach the outside world, they followed a policy of regularly gassing almost all the Sonderkommando and replacing them with new arrivals at intervals of approximately 4 months; the first task of the new Sonderkommandos would be to dispose of their predecessors’ corpses. Therefore since the inception of the Sonderkommando through to the liquidation of the camp there existed approximately 14 generations of Sonderkommando.

One of the Sonderkommando units at Auchwitz was famous for an organized rebellion:

There was a revolt by Sonderkommandos at Auschwitz in which one of the crematoria was partly destroyed. For months, young Jewish women, like Ester Wajcblum, Ella Gé¤rtner, and Regina Safirsztain, had been smuggling small amounts of gunpowder from the Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke, a munitions factory within the Auschwitz complex, to men and women in the camp’s resistance movement, like Ré³za Robota, a young Jewish woman who worked in the clothing detail at Birkenau. Under constant guard, the women in the factory took small amounts of the gunpowder, wrapped it in bits of cloth or paper, hid it on their bodies, and then passed it along the smuggling chain. Once she received the gunpowder, Robota passed it to her co-conspirators in the Sonderkommando. Using this gunpowder, the leaders of the Sonderkommando planned to destroy the gas chambers and crematoria, and launch the uprising.

When the camp resistance warned the Sonderkommando that they were due to be murdered on the morning of 7 October 1944, the Sonderkommando attacked the SS and Kapos with two machine guns, axes, knives and grenades. Over 70 SS men were killed, including two who were pushed alive into a crematorium oven after being stabbed by a member of the Sonderkommando. Some of the Sonderkommando escaped from the camp for a period, as was planned, however they were recaptured later the same day. Of those who didn’t die in the uprising itself, 200 were later forced to strip, lie face down, and then were shot in the back of the head. A total of 451 Sonderkommandos were killed on this day.

Words such as “terrible” do not begin to describe the moral and other dilemmas and trials faced by the Sonderkommandos. Their plight is a good example of just how vile the Nazis were, as if we needed reminding.

I guess some of us do.

[NOTE: I want to call attention to the fact that Rivers is also wrong in implying it was only Jews who were killed in the death camps (for example, gypsies were also targeted). However, it is correct that it was Jews who constituted the vast vast majority of the gassed, the inmates, and members of the Sonderkommando units.]

“People considered ketchup spicy”…

The New Neo Posted on by

…back in the 1950s, according to food writer Ruth Clark, a specialist in the food of that era.

Well, I must say that I don’t remember that, although I do recall that ketchup was considered to be an almost universal sauce, suitable for enhancing the taste of nearly everything except desserts.

Which brings me to one of my favorite subjects: jello. Now, those of you who have followed my jello posts over the years may be under the understandable impression that I like jello. The truth is that I don’t much care for it, and in particular have never had an affinity for the jello mold—with the single exception of one my late mother-in-law used to make. It was socko, a scrumptious concoction of jello (usually red) and canned fruit (always mandarin oranges were involved, but the rest could vary), and sour cream. I don’t even like sour cream, but this stuff was manna.

But I digress. Clark is interviewed on the subject of 50s food and is asked specifically about jello:

Why was Jell-O was such a big deal during this time?

Clark: I think there are a couple different reasons for that, kind of like when you ask someone, “Why did the Civil War start?” There are lots and lots of reasons. I think the main appeal of Jell-O was convenience. You could pour boiling water in it, add cold water, and then you have dessert.

Advertising was also a big part of Jell-O’s fame. I think it was in the ’30s that Jack Benny started talking about Jell-O on his radio show. He did the “J-E-L-L-O” thing, which became famous because everybody listened to Jack Benny. He also put out a Jell-O cookbook.

I think there was such a proliferation of advertising that it created this mindset that, hey, I can use Jell-O as an easy dessert or an easy lunch. I don’t have to mess around with it a lot. If you’ve looked through any stash of vintage cookbooks, invariably there’ll be at least one Jell-O recipe book in it because everybody owned one.

It’s really hard to say why the savory Jell-O salad became something. I was talking to my dad about this the other day, and he said it became this crazy thing in his family where every holiday, all my aunts would try to outdo each other with these fantastic, multi-layered gelatin molds.

Clark is correct as far as she goes, but she doesn’t go far enough. She’s ignoring the deeper history, which is explored in a book I just happen to have read about twenty-five years ago, entitled Perfection Salad, in which author Laura Shapiro reveals the Victorian roots of mid–twentieth-century trends. I don’t have a copy of that surprisingly entertaining book in front of me, but to the best of my recollection jello, although a newer product, was actually a continuation and simplification of the vogue for the more-difficult aspic vegetable mold that had flourished in Victorian times.

The reasoning behind those earlier aspic molds (and I say “reasoning” because the food movements of those times were reflections of philosophies of food and eating) was that vegetables were wild and unrefined and needed taming in order to be genteel, and the medium of the aspic (gelatin) mold was considered perfect for the task. It took the sprawling and uncultured mass of whatever—salad, or green beans that had been boiled until all semblance of structure was leached out of them—and made it into a delicate and coherent edifice fit for consumption at ladies’ luncheons and the like.

I am summarizing here from memory, but that was pretty much it as far as I recall. And I think the 50s impulse was a not altogether dissimilar one.

Likewise, a phenomenon that began in Victorian times and continued right through the 50s, but which you (mercifully!) don’t see too much these days, was the ubiquitous and completely tasteless white sauce, which covered everything and was thought to dress it up nicely with the perfect finishing touch.

And don’t get me started on another trend Shapiro described, the craze for white foods, which were thought to be more pure and therefore wholesome. The pinnacle of the genre was the Crisco sandwich on white bread.

Yes, the Crisco sandwich on white bread. Nuff said.

jello

Take the Civic Literacy Exam

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Maetenloch.]

If you like to test yourself, here’s one that’s kind of interesting. It doesn’t take too long, either.

I don’t mean to brag (actually, yes I do) but I got 31 out of 33 correct, which is pretty decent. And one of the two I got wrong had no truly correct answers, IMHO.

Are you more knowledgeable than the average citizen? The average score for all 2,508 Americans taking the following test was 49%; college educators scored 55%. Can you do better? Questions were drawn from past ISI surveys, as well as other nationally recognized exams.

Fascinating. “College educators” are only slightly better than the average citizen—and the average citizen is not very knowledgeable, because although some of the questions on the test are somewhat difficult, most are not.

Explains a lot.