Amnesty fights back

The New Neo Posted on by

As many have noticed, Amnesty International recently went over the top in likening the prison at Guantanamo to the Soviet Gulag. Now Roger Simon asks a question:

So why did Amnesty make such an insane (word choice deliberate) accusation? That is what is perplexing me. Why are some people, in this case an important human rights organization, incapable of rational discourse? The answers are depressing, I think, and lie at the intersection of psychoanalysis and greed. What America has tried to do in Afghanistan and Iraq provokes rage in many people because they feel their own personas threatened. At the same time, organizations like Amnesty believe their fund-raising goals are best achieved through making outrageous statements – a dangerous combination.

I certainly agree with Roger’s conclusions that rage and fund-raising are part of what’s going on here. But I also think that this type of statement arises out of the idea of relativistic truth. Words have become stripped of their meaning, because “truth” is, in the eyes of so many, a word that is always in scare quotes (whether the quotes are actually put in there or not), because it is always seen as suspect and arbitrary. Therefore a word such as “gulag” is used for its emotional import, to mean, in some very general and amorphous way “a prison environment where people are sent by a government, for political reasons rather than for something like theft, and where bad things happen to them.” To know (and care) what the actual Gulag was, how many people it affected, who they were, and why it has no relevance whatsoever to Gitmo, would be to learn something about history and facts–and truth.

It is no accident, no accident at all, that the metaphors used by Bush’s critics in Old Europe or on the left are either Nazi or Communist comparisons. This has another function, which is to say: “see, you think you are better than we are, but really, you are the same or worse.” If parts of Old Europe might feel a bit guilty about the Nazis or the Holocaust, well then, what better revenge than to say Bush is like Hitler? And if leftists might feel a tad remorseful about the excesses of Communism such as the Gulag, what better way to expunge their feelings than to say Bush is running his own Gulag?

Response to Austin Bay: on courage, the military, and liberals

The New Neo Posted on by

In our continuing dialogue and speculation about attitudes of liberals towards the military, Austin Bay asks me to comment on the following story (scroll down to the bottom of his post to find it):

[Neo-neocon’s] comments about courage remind me of a conversation I had in 1996 at the Texas Book Festival. Actually, it was a conversation I overheard. A man who had just been on a Texas history panel was fuming in a hallway and complaining to a couple of friends standing with him. From what I gathered, a woman (either on the panel or in the audience) had started calling the Alamo’s defenders racists and sexists, etc., and made a comment about the “sexist focus” of history. (And when I say I gathered that, I’m paraphrasing what the man said.)

I do not know why I asked him this, I guess it was because he was suddenly looking at me. I asked him “Why do you think she said that?”

He replied: “Because what those men did took courage, physical courage. And she doesn’t have it, she’s petty and afraid. So she has to diminish them so she doesn’t have to confront her own cowardice.”

Then he asked me: “Do you know what kind of courage it takes to face bullets?”

I was taken aback a bit, but I replied: “I know soldiers have to do what they have to do.”

He gave me a curt nod, turned back to his friends, and continued to fume.

Austin later writes:

I think the angry man in the hallway hit on a fundamental factor in a lot of the elitist Left’s condescending treatment of soldiers and disdain for the military. I’d be interested in neo-neocon’s assessment.

So, is this indeed the motivation behind the liberal/leftist attitude towards those who serve in the military (discussed earlier in this post of mine)? Obviously, I can’t read the minds of liberals or leftists–so what follows is merely my speculation and personal observation, based on a rather small sample. It is also, by necessity, full of generalizations, so I’ll add the caveat that I certainly do not think this represents the view of all liberals, or even all leftists.

However, I disagree. Unlike the angry man at the Texas Book Festival, I do not think that a major factor in the attitude of most liberals/leftists’ towards the military is a consciousness of the military’s bravery in contrast to their own cowardice. It’s not my impression that liberals/leftists necessarily even focus on the courage of the military. It’s my impression, from talking to liberals/leftists and reading what they write, that many primarily see the military (as I wrote previously) as either bloodthirsty–or, much more commonly and condescendingly, as unintelligent lower- or working-class pawns of a cowardly and exploitative ruling class (thus, the “chickenhawk” accusation against that ruling class, especially towards those who didn’t serve, or whose service is deemed inadequate–see this for a rather lengthy example of the genre).

In my experience, liberals don’t necessarily even think very often in terms of concepts such as physical courage–it’s an old-fashioned word for an old-fashioned value. They think in terms of the values of kindness and/or tolerance and/or intelligence, which they feel that they themselves demonstrate. Or, if they do think of courage and admire it, it is more often the courage to speak out, or to stand up for a cause (to “speak truth to power,” for example).

Remember the old slogan, “Better Red than dead?” The people who said it meant it. And they weren’t all Communists, not by any means. They were people who believed that almost nothing–no abstraction, anyway, including freedom–was worth fighting for in the physical sense, and especially not worth dying for. Therefore anyone who does believe in fighting for something so abstract must be deluded in some way, or oppressed in some way, or both.

Don’t forget, also, that these concerns about one’s own physical courage and how it might measure up to that of others are somewhat of a masculine obsession. Not that women don’t think in these terms sometimes–especially in recent years–but the trajectories of the lives of most women tend to lack those moments of truth–the fistfights, the interpersonal physical challenges–that constitute the tests of physical courage against another human being that are more commonplace in the lives of men. Of course, there are many exceptions to that rule–but I think the rule still generally holds. Women’s physical courage, which does exist, is more often of the intra-personal rather than the inter-personal variety–such as enduring the pain of childbirth, for example.

And of course, many liberals are women. For them, I just don’t think the whole question of their own personal courage in the physical sense of being ready to die for a cause is one they have had to contemplate very much. I say this, of course, as a woman. I have no idea whether I would have had the courage to serve in that way, if called upon–and, personally, I was very happy to have never been forced to face that question, since the Vietnam era draft did not apply to women. If that makes me a chickenhawk–well then, I guess that’s what I am (although I’m not so sure women can be chickenhawks, can they?)

I also think that the template for the liberal/leftist view of the military was set during Vietnam, when the draft was one of the main ways to enter the service. To the best of my knowledge and recollection, many (if not most) of those who served in the Army then were reluctant draftees–and some who enlisted in the other branches were somewhat reluctant also, having joined up only to escape the draft and thus gain a bit more autonomy. People whose attitudes towards military service were based on that era are sometimes unable to understand the changes that have been wrought by the all-volunteer military. They continue to see those in the service as victims, although now they are not seen as victims of the draft, but as victims of coercion and class via economic incentives for joining the military, and/or as victims of the self-serving lies of politicians. It stands to reason that the class interpretation would be especially common on the left, since it fits in quite nicely with a socialist or Marxist viewpoint. And, if the enlistee is viewed as a pawn of economic circumstances, and his/her motivation is seen as economic, then it’s easier to circumvent the whole topic of personal courage.

This idea of the dead soldier as victim, rather than courageous hero, is often cited by the left for propaganda purposes against the administration and those “ruling classes.” Here’s a recent and very typical example of this type of thinking (found here in comment #80–supposedly it’s taken from Michael Moore’s website, but I looked and couldn’t find it there, so I can’t swear it’s a proper attribution):

Bush and the Crime Cabal in power sent 26 more soldiers to their graves this week and 26 more families to lives of living hell. 26 more lives and families devastated and destroyed for absolutely nothing. We will see the hypocritical mobsters of the state at their events today and tomorrow spewing filth from their mouths, such as: “Freedom isn’t Free,” and “We must stay the course in Iraq to honor the sacrifices of the fallen…Then the morons who killed our children will happily go back to their homes and have a nice Memorial Day dinner secure in the fact that their children will never die in a war and their children will have nice, wealthy, long lives because of the incredible riches this misadventure in Iraq has brought their fathers and mothers.

Then there is the idea of those who serve in the military as the “other.” Here’s an interesting article from the LA Times that discusses the change of heart a father experienced when his son, a Marine, went to Iraq. The father had never served in the military himself, and seemed to have never even considered what might motivate someone to serve. He writes:

Before my son unexpectedly volunteered for the Marines, I was busy writing my novels and raising my family, and giving little thought to the men and women who guard us…

But later, when his son returns from combat, the father writes:

I found myself praying and crying for all the fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, husbands and wives of those who were not coming home. For the first time in my life, I was weeping for strangers…. Before my son went to war I never would have shed tears for them. My son humbled me. My son connected me to my country. He taught me that our men and women in uniform are not the “other.”

Prior to his son going to war, this man was almost dissociative in his ability to tune out the military. They simply did not exist for him as people–or, if they did, they were the “other.” What he means by that I’m not sure–were they the “other” in his eyes because of perceived class differences, personality differences, or merely a failure of imagination on his part? One might say he seems to lack the ability to put himself in someone else’s shoes–and yet it turns out he is an author, and a novelist! Very perplexing indeed.

I can only conclude that people like the author, Frank Schaeffer, are operating with blinders on. The motivations of people in the military are not understood by them, and they are not curious about those motivations. Schaeffer’s change of heart occurred for one simple reason: a military man finally became “real” to him, because that man was his son. He could no longer regard this particular Marine as the “other,” because he knew him and loved him, and that ended up humanizing all military personnel in his eyes.

Anonymous sources revisited: progress on several fronts

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not surprised that USA Today seems to be leading the pack in curbing its use of anonymous sources (see this earlier post of mine for a discussion of the history of the anonymous source). After all, its founder, Allen H. Neuharth, was the guy who called the anonymous source “evil.” USA Today has even created a new position, that of standards editor, for the sole purpose of tracking the use of anonymous sources in the paper, and has reduced the practice by 75% in the year since they tightened their rules.

Even Newsweek is starting to reign in its out-of-control use of the anonymous source–at least a tad.

And then there’s this revelation. If it’s true (large “if”), then what a coincidence of timing! The greatest anonymous source of them all–the source of the anonymous source, you might say–Deep Throat, now coming forward with this:

Felt was initially adamant about remaining silent on the subject, thinking disclosures about his past somehow dishonorable. “I don’t think (being Deep Throat) was anything to be proud of,” Felt indicated to his son, Mark Jr., at one point, according to the article. “You (should) not leak information to anyone.”

Could it be that someone’s been reading neo-neocon :-)?

For Memorial Day: freedom isn’t free

The New Neo Posted on by

Austin Bay delivered this Memorial Day speech in Texas a few days ago, at the request of a group called “Tejanos in Action.” Reading the speech, and speculating on what many of my liberal or leftist friends would think of it (and, knowing it’s always dangerous to speak for others, I’m writing this with the caveat that I could be wrong about their reactions), I came to the conclusion that I don’t think they would understand his speech in the way it was meant. To them, it would sound like mere platitudes and cliches.

I am virtually certain that all of my friends feel sorrow at the death of young men and women in the military–they are not cold-hearted, far from it. But I think they see them as victims, not as people who freely chose to do this, knowing that the possible cost might be their very lives. And yes, I know that not all in the military, especially those in the Guard, thought all of this through when they signed up. But I believe that the majority of those in the military were well aware of the risks when they enlisted.

I don’t think most of my friends can conceive of a person making such a choice of his/her own free will. And of course it is difficult to comprehend; that kind of courage is not ordinary, and will never be ordinary. I think my friends look on military volunteers of today as being either bloodthirsty warmongers (the minority), or poverty-stricken and brainwashed cannon fodder who have no idea what they’re getting into (the majority). Someone such as Lance Corporal Perez, of whom Austin Bay speaks, a young man who served in the Marines and was killed in Iraq, would probably be seen as the quintessential victim of Bush, Rumsfeld, et. al., because of his Hispanic heritage.

I think my friends would certainly understand this part of Bay’s speech:

Military service is hard service. Everyone who’s ever worn the uniform knows that. It is a special burden, particularly in a free society.

The idea of hardship is one with which they would agree, and the idea of burden. But not the sad necessity of it, expressed in this part of the speech:

In some ways it is the hardest job as well as the most necessary job. It is the job of the soldier that makes our liberty possible, and it is our liberty that makes everything else possible.

Many, if not most, of my friends live in a dreamworld where such things can be avoided, if only we listened to and revered the UN, Europe, and Jimmy Carter. There is no problem that can’t be solved with love, understanding, and talk. Perhaps I’m exaggerating, but not by a whole lot, I’m afraid. Would that they were correct, and that human nature worked this way!

I was watching the news the other day–I think it was MSNBC, but I’m not certain. They had a feature on a young Hispanic man who had been killed in Iraq. I don’t think he was the same young man of whom Bay spoke, Lance Corporal Perez, but it’s possible that he might have been, because this man had also been nineteen years old when he died, as I recall. The news showed wonderful photos of a handsome and smiling young man who looked nearly like a kid (well, he wasn’t so far away from having been one, was he?), and an interview with his father.

The father’s courage and dignity were almost unbearably moving. It seems the young man was not a citizen, but he’d signed up anyway. The father showed some sort of memorial statuette of the twin towers that he owned, and he pointed to it and said that the son had been greatly affected by 9/11, and determined to join and serve. The father said he’d asked his son, if he had to join up, why couldn’t he be something like a cook? But the son had said no; he felt he needed to do more than that. Then the father went over to an American flag he had on his wall, and put his finger on one of the red stripes, and said something like this (only far more eloquently), “When I see this red stripe, it symbolizes the blood of my son and all the others who died so that we could be free–because freedom isn’t free.”

Heartbreaking and well said, on this Memorial Day.

For Memorial Day: on patriotism and nationalism

The New Neo Posted on by

I was driving down the highway yesterday, and I noticed that the car ahead of me had a small American flag decal on its trunk. It got me to thinking about how I’ve never displayed a flag on my car or my home, except for a small one on my porch on the very first Fourth of July after 9/11. I’ve never been one to wear T-shirts with slogans, or campaign buttons, or any of those sorts of public declarations of self and/or belief. I’m just a very private person (the apple in front of the face, for example).

But I clearly remember that huge proliferation of flags post 9/11. Flags on cars, on homes, pinned to lapels–everywhere one looked, so many more than ever before. There were, of course, those who carped about it (see this for a typical example). Too nationalistic. Too jingoistic. But I rather liked it–even though at the time I was still an unreconstructed liberal. It gave me a feeling of comfort and continuity. We might be down, but we weren’t out yet.

For many days after 9/11 I found myself going to the ocean and sitting on the rocks, watching the ubiquitous commercial fishing boats and ferries go by. Everyone remembers that blue blue sky of 9/11, but I don’t know how many recall that it stayed that way for some time afterwards. The weather was spectacular, almost eerie in its beauty, and very serene, although I felt anything but. At the ocean, I would ordinarily see airplanes on a regular basis–but those days, the almost supernaturally blue skies were very, very quiet.

I thought about many things as I sat there. I believed another large attack was imminent, maybe many attacks. I had no idea what could ever prevent this from happening. I thought about George Bush being President, and at the time the thought did not fill me with confidence, but rather with dread. Snatches of poems and songs would wander in and out of my head, in that repetitive way they often do. One was the “Star-Spangled Banner”–all those flags brought it to mind, I suppose.

I’d known the words to that song for close to fifty years, and even had to learn about Francis Scott Key and the circumstances under which he wrote them. But I never really thought much about those words. It was just a song that was difficult to sing, and not as pretty as America the Beautiful or God Bless America (the latter, in those very un-PC days of my youth, we used to sing as we marched out of assembly).

The whole first stanza of the national anthem is a protracted version of a question: does the American flag still wave over the fort? Has the US been successful in the battle? As a child, the answer seemed to me to have been a foregone conclusion–of course it waved, of course the US prevailed in the battle; how could it be otherwise? America rah-rah. America always was the winner. Even our withdrawal from Vietnam, so many years later, seemed to me to be an act of choice. Our very existence as a nation had never for a moment felt threatened.

The only threat I’d ever faced to this country was the nightmarish threat of nuclear war. But that seemed more a threat to the entire planet, to humankind itself, rather than to this country specifically. And so I never really heard or felt the vulnerability and fear expressed in Key’s question, which he asked during the War of 1812, so shortly after the birth of the country itself: does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

But now I heard his doubt, and I felt it, too. I saw quite suddenly that there was no “given” in the existence of this country–its continuance, and its preciousness, began to seem to me to be as important and as precarious as they must have seemed to Key during that night in 1814.

And then other memorized writings came to me as well–the Gettysburg Address, whose words those crabby old teachers of mine had made us memorize in their entirety: and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Here it was again, the sense of the nation as an experiment in democracy and freedom, and inherently special but vulnerable to destruction, an idea I had never until that moment grasped. But now I did, on a visceral level.

Another school memory of long ago was the story “The Man Without a Country.” It used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book–as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers–that I ever was assigned to read in school. As such it was exciting, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad–and unfair, too–that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that probably would never be assigned nowadays to students.

Patriotism has gotten a very bad name during the last few decades. I think part of this feeling began (at least in this country), like so many things, with the Vietnam era. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were seen to have wrought during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, but it seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.

Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:

If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…”

A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country, who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which unbridled and amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response, one that helped lead to the formation of the EU. The nationalism of the US is seen by those who agree with him as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.

But the pendulum is swinging back. The US is not Nazi Germany, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. And, in fact, that is one of the reasons they try so hard to make that particular analogy–because Nazi Germany is one of the very best examples of the dangers of unbridled and amoral nationalism.

But, on this Memorial Day, I want to say there’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores morality, but one that embraces it and strives for it, keeping in mind that–human nature being what it is–no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but it is a good country nevertheless, striving to be better.

So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Normblog poll: movie stars

The New Neo Posted on by

Norm Geras loves those polls! This one’s a request from Norm to list your ten favorite movie stars.

It’s a bit embarrassing to admit that I’m not much of a moviegoer. Over the years I’ve gone to the movies less and less, and liked far fewer of them than I used to. That’s not to say I don’t have favorites. And the movies I do like, I tend to love inordinately.

Same for whatever passes for movie stars these days. To me, there aren’t any current ones, although there are certainly excellent actors and actresses (or, in the interests of gender equality, aren’t they all called “actors” these days? So hard to keep up with these trends). But to me, the real movie stars are all in the past.

So, this will be my very idiosyncratic, and exceedingly retro, list. What do these stars have in common? Well, as with movies—the ones I like, I tend to love. And so I have some feelings of love—not just admiration, or interest—for each of the following movie stars. Listed in no particular order:

1. Cary Grant

The most charming guy in the world, who always seemed to be mocking himself ever-so-slightly, and letting the audience in on the delightful joke.

2. Audrey Hepburn

If Cary Grant (see above) was the most charming guy in the world, she was definitely the most charming lady. Nobody ever looked remotely like her, and nobody ever will.

3. Gary Cooper

My idea of a hero—complex and somewhat tormented. Watch the amazing play of emotions on his deceptively immobile face in “High Noon.”

4. Henry Fonda

I fell in love with the achingly young Fonda (“Drums Along the Mohawk;” “Young Mr. Lincoln”) when I was about seven years old. The movies were in black and white, on our tiny TV, but it didn’t much matter. Fonda as Abe Lincoln? Forget about historical accuracy—just watch the movie.

5. Jack Lemmon

He could do pathos (“Days of Wine and Roses”). But no one has ever been funnier than he was in “Some Like it Hot.”

6. Sophia Loren

See her in anything she made with the wonderful Marcello Mastroianni. Then watch her as an Italian Mother Courage in “Two Women.”

7. Steve McQueen

I told you this was about love, not acting. My favorite bad boy. Brando didn’t hold any interest for me; McQueen did. Go figure. Especially in that exciting hymn to male pulchritude (not a woman in the entire cast) and courage, “The Great Escape.”

8. Natalie Wood

If you haven’t seen “Splendor in the Grass,” you may wonder why she’s in here. If you have seen it, then I bet you don’t wonder.

9. Liv Ullman

Transcendent and luminescent in “The Emigrants” and “The New Land,” two of the greatest movies of all time.

10. Paul Newman

Another childhood crush, in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and “The Hustler.” He had an edge. And boy, has he aged well!

Fair and balanced

The New Neo Posted on by

The following is a portion of a comment I wrote during this discussion over at Roger Simon’s. Roger had posed the question “what is ‘fair and balanced’?” The context of the query was that he and others are engaged in setting up a new blogger consortium called Pajamas Media, and are signing up hundreds of blogs as part of it, and are making decisions about whether it’s possible to achieve “fair and balanced” representation there.

The phrase “fair and balanced” (at least, as I interpret it) is something of an oxymoron.

Why? Because “fair” means, to me, logical, well-reasoned, factual. And “balanced” means “giving equal play to advocates of all sides of an issue” (a sort of “one from column A, one from column B, one from column C approach). Unless you subscribe to the morally relativistic position that all truths are equal, then striving for “balance” will probably dictate that some “unfair” views will, of necessity, be given a platform.

So, I think “fair and balanced” isn’t really the goal–not in that way, at least. If you take all comers, you’ll certainly have some blogs that aren’t “fair.” And, if you don’t accept all comers, then you won’t have good “balance” (or, at least, it would surprise me mightily if you did, since I’m not a moral relativist).

All you can do is to strive for blogs that use reason, logic, and facts, rather than sophistry, as their main tools. And if this means that you end up with a somewhat skewed distribution in terms of political orientation (and I won’t say to what side I think that might be–let that remain my secret :-))–well then, so be it!

Whether or not you agree with me on which side could be the one that is overrepresented in the “fair” column (and reasonable people may differ on that) it’s still an interesting question: how to choose? Should you give a forum to anyone and everyone who wants in? Does a sort of “pure capitalism” approach work best–let the market (i.e. the reader) sort it out? Or, if you want to have standards, how to apply them? Do you try to accept only those blogs you think are well-written and/or well-reasoned? How do you avoid letting your own political leanings color your decisions about this? Or, should you even try?

As I believe I’ve said before, all journalists–and certainly all bloggers–have a political point of view, and it’s best to be up-front about it. Here’s a section of another comment of mine on the subject (from this fascinating discussion at Jay Rosen’s blog about the politics of the press):

Yes, the press is a political animal–or rather, animals. Each newspaper and periodical, and each journalist, has a political point of view which informs what it publishes, and what he/she writes. To pretend otherwise is to deny the obvious. The public can best be served by knowing the politics up front, and having the press drop the fiction of objectivity. So, to answer your question about what politics the press “should” have: transparent ones.

(How lazy can I get, eh? Reduced to cannibalizing my own comments on other blogs! Go easy on me–it’s a holiday weekend, and the first day of sun we’ve had in about two centuries.)

Aging boomers (and I guess I’m one of them)

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve gotten to the point that going to the doctor, any doctor, is something I hate to do. I never liked it, but now I simply detest it. After all, the best that can happen is that things have stayed the same. But the reality is that, as time goes by, it becomes more and more likely that the news will be bad.

Those of you who are of a certain age know what I’m talking about. Slowly, more and more of your friends are taking pills–high blood pressure, cholesterol. A hearing aid blooms here and there, blushing pale pink in a (usually masculine) ear.

You want to postpone the test, the check-up, the mammogram, the prostate exam, the colonoscopy, and sometimes you do. But sooner or later the postponement goes on too long, and fear takes over, and so you go.

All this is a lead-in to say that yesterday I had an eye exam. I don’t even wear glasses, except for night driving and the theater, or reading glasses for those intimate low-light restaurants. Oh, yes, and computer glasses for blogging. But in normal life I don’t need them, and I can even read books without them.

So yesterday it was a surprise to me when the technician looked into my eyes, prior to the opthamologist’s grand entrance, and said, “I’m going to have the doctor come in now to take a look before we dilate you.” And then he went into some arcane discussion of the angle of my iris and the fluid and the shape of my eye and something something something. When I asked whatever was he talking about, he tried to find a diagram of the eye to show me. I didn’t want to see a diagram of the eye, I said, I wanted to know what it all meant–did I have some eye disease? Oh no, no, he said, just something that might make it dangerous to dilate my pupils. And then he left me alone to ponder that thought.

Next there was quite a bit more fussing with my eyes by several people, including the doctor. Measuring, putting numbing drops in, measuring again, being told to stare at little targets. Their conclusion was that yes, indeed, I have some relatively rare malformation of the eye that is congenital but gets worse with age (doesn’t everything?).

What does it all mean? Well, although it’s highly unlikely to happen soon, as the thing progresses, I would be at risk for sudden blindness if my eyes dilate quickly or forcefully, blocking off some sort of fluid canals and causing a clogged-drain effect in which the eye fluid pressure builds up alarmingly and speedily.

Huh? Not exactly what I expected to hear. That’s what he meant by “dangerous;” the eyedrops used to dilate eyes for the eye examination can cause an attack, requiring immediate emergency surgery to preserve the eyesight. Modern medicine being the relatively wonderful thing it is, however, there is a simple (they say; I hope!) laser surgery that puts a little hole in the iris and prevents any possible buildup.

The doctor then said he thought it would be okay now to dilate my eyes to examine them.

Now, one word I really don’t like to hear a doctor say is “I think” (actually, that’s two). So I inquired about this “think” thing, and he said if I was apprehensive (if?), I could just have the laser surgery soon, and postpone the drops for afterwards.

I made an appointment for laser surgery in three weeks. And then decided to write this little post to tell all of you that it’s not a bad idea to keep up with your regular eye exams. A cautionary tale.

Religious intolerance

The New Neo Posted on by

In the May 30th issue of the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg’s “Comment” piece on the Newsweek incident contains the following phrase that caught my eye: We have to be respectful of Muslim sensibilities and Muslim beliefs…

Which brings me to a single, simple question: why? Is it because Islam is a religion? Are all religious beliefs worthy of respect, no matter what they are?

I seem to recall that the Aztecs had a religion that required them to rip the living hearts out of human sacrifices. The Aztecs would undoubtedly have called the belief system that required them to do this a religion, and they would have been correct. The ancient Greeks murdered little girls for similar reasons, as I recall (Iphegenia comes to mind). The Hindus had the quaint custom of requiring widows to be burned alive on their husbands’ funeral pyres. Which brings us to my next point.

Here’s a favorite story of mine (I hope it’s not apocryphal, but it doesn’t really matter if it is):

When General George Napier was governor of Sind province in India in the 1840s, he vigorously enforced the ban on suttee, the practice of throwing a Hindu widow on to the funeral pyre of her husband. A delegation of Brahmins came to him to explain that he must not prohibit the practice at the funeral of a particular maharaja, as it was an important cultural custom.

“If it is your custom to burn a widow alive, please go on,” Napier responded.

“We have a custom in our country that whoever burns a person alive shall be hanged. While you prepare the funeral pyre, my carpenters will be making the gallows to hang all of you. Let us all act according to our customs” The Brahmins thought better of it, and the widow lived.

I actually have nothing against a custom that says that a Koran, or any holy book, shouldn’t be desecrated (leaving aside the question of whether this actually happened at Guantanamo). But I have no problem whatsoever with saying not all customs of a religion, or a culture, need be respected just because they are under the protective penumbra of the words “religion” or “culture.”

I’ll respect those aspects of any religion or culture that are worthy of respect. Those that are not, I do not. How do I make those decisions? I use my sense of what is admirable in human beings–based on, of course, my own culture and my own beliefs, but taking into account certain universal principles of morality: respect for human life, for example, and the right to basic autonomy (both of these principles rule out suttee). One could restate these two principles as the right to “life and liberty.” Sound familiar?

I also have a simple rule about tolerance: it’s fine, but it does not extend to tolerating intolerance. On that score, Islam almost constantly falls short, so Islam’s intolerance is not to be tolerated.

It must be true–after all, it’s in the FBI report

The New Neo Posted on by

One story, four headlines.

The story: in 2002-2003 some Guantanamo detainees told FBI investigators that guards had flushed a Koran down the toilet, and desecrated the Koran in other ways.

Now, the headlines:

Yahoo news: FBI memo reports Guantanamo guards flushing Koran

The Boston Globe: FBI records cite Quran abuse allegations

The LA Times: Guantanamo Detainees Had Alleged Koran Desecration–Government documents reveal perceived abuses

The New York Times: Documents Say Detainees Cited Abuse of Koran by Guards

So, we have one story and four headlines. We all know how important headlines can be, since a certain percentage of readers hardly read beyond them. There is a difference in the impact of the headlines: the first two headlines could easily lead a reader to conclude that the allegations may have had some substance or independent corroboration, while the latter two make it clear that the allegations were made only by the detainees themselves.

But then we have the overarching question: why report this particular story at all, and why now? After all, what does it tell us? It is virtually a non-story; the equivalent of “Osama Bin Laden alleges the US is out to destroy the Moslem world,” or even “11th century Christians allege Jews stick pins in host.” Each of these statements might end up being quoted in an FBI report (well, maybe not the second), but that doesn’t mean the claimants are speaking the truth. And it isn’t as though detainees at Guantanamo are unbiased sources without an ax to grind.

So, why bother to report this story at all? My guess is that it’s an attempt to say “where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Here’s the smoke.” A subtle–or perhaps not so subtle?–way to circle the wagons and support Newsweek, and to drive home the point that, as Amnesty says, the US is running the Gitmo Gulag.

Tracing the use of the anonymous source

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, it turns out you can blame it on Watergate.

The recent prominence of anonymous sources in the Newsweek Koran-flushing story tweaked my curiosity about the history of the practice.

To the best of my recollection, the newspapers of my youth attributed every quote to an actual named person–not that I was paying a whole lot of attention at the time to subtleties like that. Now, however, it seems as though articles are often merely glorified gossip columns full of anonymous commentary–a sort of “he said, he said” kind of journalism–especially any article written by Seymour Hersch, which usually consists of nothing but a long string of such tidbits.

The only thing we know for sure is the identity of the article’s author. We are asked to take the facts on trust, without a chance to evaluate the source of the remarks. This over-reliance on the anonymous source gives both the journalist and his/her informant an overwhelming power, and takes away our ability to judge the veracity of what we are being told. I believe it’s one of the most pernicious trends in journalism.

This practice seems to be the logical development of a phenomenon that started with Vietnam and became stronger with Watergate. As I’ve written earlier, during that era many people’s attitudes towards the government and the military became more negative, while their attitudes towards the press became correspondingly more positive, in a sort of reciprocal seesawing movement. As trust in the press grew, it seems that the time-honored journalistic methods of sourcing, previously acting as a system of checks and balances against the power of the press, were now considered unnecessary.

The most famous anonymous source of them all, of course, was Deep Throat of Watergate fame. He was not only a seminal (pardon the pun) figure in Nixon’s denouement (and thus a hero to liberals everywhere), but he was so renowned that he had his own nickname, taken from a popular porn flick. It turns out that Deep Throat had another claim to fame: he was the trailblazer in the practice of relying on anonymous sources, now so commonplace in today’s journalism.

I had suspected all along that Watergate might be at the heart of it, but it was difficult to document when I first tried to do some online research on the subject. I finally struck pay dirt with this article from American Journalism Review. It’s hardly up-to-date (it was written way back in 1994), but it was the only discussion of the history of anonymous sources that I could find. It turns out Watergate was indeed a watershed in the use of this practice:

Although confidential sources predate Watergate, they were infrequently used before that celebrated story, which produced the most famous unnamed source of all time. Deep Throat, whose identity remains a mystery, helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein bring down Richard Nixon in 1974. After that, the use of anonymous sources flourished, with many reporters considering it sexier to have an unnamed source than a named one.

Unfortunately, it’s only gotten worse since then. See this, if you want to remember the good old days:

“Of course, you talk to everybody when you begin a story,” says Philip Scheffler, a senior producer for CBS’ “60 Minutes.” “Off the record. On the record. In the record. For background. Not for attribution no matter what. But it’s not the raw notes we are talking about. We are talking about what goes on the air.” And “60 Minutes” does not use anonymous sources on the air.

Would that that last sentence were still true!

And how about this guy:

There’s not a place for anonymous sources,” says Allen H. Neuharth, founder of USA Today and chairman of the Freedom Forum. “I think there are a few major historical developments that happened in journalism ”“ the Pentagon Papers, maybe Watergate ”“ where anonymous sources had a more positive influence than a negative impact. But on balance, the negative impact is so great that we can’t overcome the lack of trust until or unless we ban them.

Where is Mr. Neuharth now? Retired to Florida and eighty-one years old–which makes him something of a dinosaur, I guess. As recently as 1998, though, he was still speaking out against the use of the anonymous source, which he calls evil. Here’s an excerpt from a 1998 interview with Neuharth:

Traditionally journalists were taught to believe in accuracy above all else. And that changed. I think it changed with Watergate, and I think the anonymous source is the most evil thing that newspapers and the media have adopted or adapted in the last 25 years. It started with Watergate, (when) journalists coming off college campuses (were) determined to be (Bob) Woodward or (Carl) Bernstein. They believed that because of Watergate’s successes there was dirt under every mat in front of every office. They came out as young cynics. The journalists of my generation were taught to be skeptics. And there’s a hell of a difference between a skeptic and a cynic. All you need to do is be accurate and fair.

Sounds about right to me.

Back when that 1994 American Journalism Review article was written, there was apparently a great deal of variation in the rules for using anonymous sources–some papers used them liberally at the time, and some vary sparingly or not at all. I wonder whether some papers have kept their integrity in this regard, and resisted taking the low but easy road.

Reading the article, I waxed nostalgiac for those pre-9/11 concerns that we all knew and loved. It’s all about things like the OJ trial, and Janet Cooke’s bogus Washington Post story about the imaginary 8-year-old heroin addict. No international repercussions are even dreamt about, no terrorists or Islamofascists waiting in the wings to pounce on any story (although, of course, they were there all the time).

My impression is that the use of anonymous sources seems to be something like alcohol–seductive and habit-forming. In that 1994 article, everyone keeps talking about going on the wagon and curbing the practice, but very few have actually done so. Apparently it’s too enticing to give up, for so many reasons–getting a sensational story, beating the competition, laziness, habit.

Is there any hope, short of Mr. Neuharth coming out of retirement? Well, in 2003 a group of eighteen well-known journalists were brought together by Poynter to make recommendations about improving journalism. They came up with this set of extremely sensible-seeming rules for the use of anonymous sources. If followed, they would eliminate a lot of trouble:

Ӣ Anonymous sources should be encouraged to go on the record.

”¢ We should weigh the source’s reliability and disclose to readers the source’s potential biases.

Ӣ The more specific we can be in describing the source in the story, the better.

Ӣ Anonymous sources should not be used for personal attacks, accusations of illegal activity, or merely to add color.

Ӣ The source must have first-hand knowledge.

Ӣ Journalists should not lie in a story to protect a source.

I don’t know why these guidelines haven’t been widely adopted. I guess the bottom line is that journalists have become far too addicted to the easy fix that anonymous sources provide them.

Like all addictions, this calls for a 12-step program, right? I even have a name for it: ASA, Anonymous Sourcers Anonymous.