America’s National Pastime: Justice?

US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts surprised just about everyone this week by voting in support of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, and writing the court’s majority opinion that the law is constitutional. Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee, is a notorious conservative whose court has been marked with rulings limiting civil liberties and expanding corporate power, such as the Citizens United decision that corporations are people, among many ignominies.

But thanks to Roberts’ leadership, Obama’s signature accomplishment of his first term, health care reform, which every president since FDR has tried to pass and failed, is the law of the land.

For now. Republicans are already resharpening their attacks and lies about it. And calling Roberts a traitor and calling for his impeachment. The ruling and reactions give both sides, opponents and supporters, another round of arguments pro and con. Sort of like another game in a playoff series. Who will win?

At his confirmation hearings in 2005 Roberts famously compared the job of Supreme Court justice to that of a baseball umpire. “Umpires don’t makes the rules; they apply them….They make sure everybody plays by the rules….And I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat…No one comes to a ball game to see the umpire.” He was trying to reassure the Senate that he would not be an “activist judge,” promoting his own agenda, but instead would judge by the “rules of the game.” A majority of senators was taken by his sports analogy. One of the senators who was not, however, based on Roberts’ previous record, and who voted against him, was Barack Obama.

In an irony of history, 3 years later, when Obama laid his hand on the Bible to be sworn in as President, performed by tradition by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Roberts said (again famously – his words just seem to linger) the wrong words. Obama looked at him curiously, repeated the incorrect words, as Roberts had instructed (“Repeat after me.”). Obama the Constitutional law professor knew they were wrong. Later in a private ceremony the two of them repeated the ceremony, for a few photographers. Just to be safe.

And almost four years after that controversial call, the justice umpire and the President were back in the game, and in a surprising and controversial call, the umpire ruled Obama safe at the plate.

Americans love sports analogies. The readers of this blog are international, and may not understand, let alone care about the American game of baseball, which we fondly call our national pastime. Europeans have told me they are baffled by a game that runs around in a circle, rather than up and down a field, or rink, or court. A game that does not call the ball in or out, but fair or foul. And that is only played here, Latin America and Japan. World Series?

Here in America even we fans are a bit embarrassed (well, some of us are) by the game’s privileged place in lore and law; that same Supreme Court has for over 100 years exempted baseball from monopoly anti-trust laws it applies to other sports. The game is full of scandal (drugs, money, immigration status of players, racism, gambling) and is increasingly becoming a playground for the rich, players, owners and fans; new fancy stadiums, luxury boxes, expensive tickets – don’t get me going.

Baseball is so very very American – conflicted and bloated around money, drugs, race. And doing all you can, legal or not, to win.

And so much fun to watch, to root for your team, to experience the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Case in point, my beloved San Francisco Giants, who have just this week achieved first place in their division atop the hated Los Angeles Dodgers. It gives us a sort of safe excuse to be chauvinists. I don’t need to explain that to European football fans or any sports fan really.

But I am supposed to be writing about the health care decision. I am assuming by the time you read this it’s practically old news. But this past week, really since it passed two years ago and was argued before the high court several months ago, it has dominated US news, been a fighting point between Democratic and Republican candidates for office and was all but written off by most pundits as doomed. The justices’ reactions to oral arguments suggested the conservative majority would win. There was great speculation/hope/fear centered on the one possible swing vote, Justice Kennedy.

So when Roberts ruled and wrote in favor of the universal mandate, that everyone must have health insurance, and that states must take part in assistance for low income folks, and by implication that the other features of the bill were acceptable, such as no denying coverage because of preexisting conditions or putting caps on coverage, it was like the NY Mets improbably winning the 1986 World Series against the Boston Red Sox. (Another intra-city rivalry – guess which team this New York girl was rooting for?)

The intricacies of the bill are as complicated as baseball and I won’t pretend to summarize either fully or completely accurately. Look at the New York Times articles and analysis, or Wikipedia, and of course check out Ed Kilgore’s great analysis; Thursday all day he reacted and marveled and cheered and mourned (at conservative spins and lies) – it’s rich.

Because we Americans love sports analogies, I was not surprised by how many comparisons I read this week between politics and baseball.

In the buildup to the ruling, Robert Reich, UC Berkeley public policy prof. and former Clinton Secretary of Labor was the only one I read who came close to predicting the eventual outcome, and he based his prediction on the issue of trust.

Chief Justice John Roberts is — or should be — concerned about the steadily declining standing of the court in the public’s mind, along with the growing perception that the justices decide according to partisan politics rather than according to legal principle. The 5-4 decision in Citizen’s United, for example, looked to all the world like a political rather than a legal outcome, with all five Republican appointees finding that restrictions on independent corporate expenditures violate the First Amendment, and all four Democratic appointees finding that such restrictions are reasonably necessary to avoid corruption or the appearance of corruption. Or consider the court’s notorious decision in Bush v. Gore.

The Supreme Court can’t afford to lose public trust. It has no ability to impose its will on the other two branches of government: As Alexander Hamilton once noted, the court has neither the purse (it can’t threaten to withhold funding from the other branches) or the sword (it can’t threaten police or military action). It has only the public’s trust in the court’s own integrity and the logic of its decisions — both of which the public is now doubting, according to polls. As chief justice, Roberts has a particular responsibility to regain the public’s trust.

Any sports team relies on public trust that it is playing fair. Baseball almost lost that trust in 1919 during the Black Sox scandal. Gambling and organized crime figures persuaded 8 Chicago White Sox players to intentionally lose games in the World Series. The drama was played out on the field, in the courts and in new baseball rules; the players were banned for life and the masterminds fined and shunned. The inspiration for the film Field of Dreams, this dark moment also led to the naming of the first Commissioner of baseball, who would oversee standards, rule changes, umpires, fines, labor contracts etc.

Public organizations like sports and courts (they rhyme!) depend on public trust. Some say Roberts’ convoluted argument looks like a last minute switch, influenced by a rash of articles denouncing the partisan court and the plunge in its public support. Some, in his defense, even say he was perhaps “playing the long game”, or “taking one for the team” in order to keep the fan base coming.

Indeed quite a few court watchers and sports fans have rejected Roberts’ comparison of justice to baseball umpire. In a serious, detailed and sort of amusing 2001 law journal article professor Aaron Zelinsky said justices are more like baseball commissioners than umpires:

Neither a Justice nor a Commissioner is a fact-finder searching for a clear right answer to a specific question—for example, was the ball in the strike zone? Rather, both make inherently difficult, controversial, and value-influenced decisions at high levels of abstration; both interact with and modify the rules of their respective systems in order to preserve their respective institutions’ core values, such as fair play and due process. In short, being a Justice and a Commissioneris hard: thre re not always clear right and wrong answers.

This essay illustrates the similarity of Justices and Commissioners through nine paired case studies where Justices and Commissioners have, in their respective capacities, (1) provided guidance, (2) refrained from error correction, (3) undertaken rulemaking, (4) exercised countermajoritarian powers, (5) provided explanations for their decisions, (6) protected the fundamental values of their respective institutions, (7) employed special masters for fact-specific inquiries, (8) decided on statutes of limitations, and (9) exercised finality. This Essay concludes that Chief Justice Roberts had the right sport but the wrong position: Justices are not umpires; they are Commissioners.

Another critic of the umpire analogy, Nan Aron, wrote in 2009:

But, even a cursory look at the chief justice's record shows that every pitch thrown on behalf of business and against consumers is a strike. Every pitch thrown by a prosecutor splits the strike zone, but every pitch thrown by a criminal defendant bounces off the backstop. Every pitch thrown by a minority civil rights claimant bounces in the dirt, but pitches thrown by white civil rights plaintiffs all go right down the middle. Gun owners have unerring aim when targeting John Roberts' strike zone, but environmentalists, despite wearing out their arms, have yet to get one over the plate. And the amazing thing is that observers know how John Roberts will call pitches before they are even thrown. So, the logical conclusion to draw from Republicans' repeated invocation of the John Roberts-as-umpire analogy is that baseball umpires no longer need to look at pitches; they merely need to know who is pitching.

And finally (I know this is getting obscure, just indulge me; we fans are a little crazy) here’s a great baseball analogy for what Roberts did, that our friend Ed Kilgore turned me on to:

At Ten Miles Square, John Hopkins’ Steven Teles, who’s written an important book on the conservative legal movement, and who predicted a result much like the one the Supreme Court produced, offers his expert take on the significance of Chief Justice John Robert’s position in the ACA decision. His main argument relies on a baseball metaphor:

The best way to understand the difference between Roberts and the dissenters is to think of two pitchers who are throwing to a batter who is crowding the plate. The first pitcher throws at the batter’s head, while the second brushes him back. At least in this decision, Roberts decided to be that second kind of pitcher. Roberts wanted to send a signal to the other branches that there are limits on government, and the ACA was really crowding the plate. But he didn’t want to hit the pitcher and invalidate the whole law. So declaring that the mandate violates the Congress’ power under the commerce clause but upholding it as a tax does what Roberts wanted to do: get Congress to pay closer attention to constitutional norms while not precipitating a bench clearing brawl.

So this fan thanks Commissioner Roberts for making a good call, for resisting the pressures of organized crime (aka the Tea party etc) to throw the game, for exercising judicial restraint and just brushing Obama back rather than beaning him, for actually looking at the strike zone, not just the pitcher, and for giving both teams another chance at the title. Play ball!

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

The American Dream Shared, Temporarily, with 800,000 Young “Aliens”

Barack Obama’s Executive Order this past week is being called “The DREAM Act Lite.”

He announced that certain foreign-born minors, brought by their parents to the US illegally, who have “good moral character,” complete high school or do military service, would be granted temporary US residency and could apply for permanent status. (Currently these and all foreign-born adults who enter the US illegally are very limited in access to work, college, driver’s licenses etc., because they don’t have a Social Security number.)

For ten years Democrats in Congress have tried to pass the DREAM Act; Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors, as part of wider immigration reform.  Republicans have blocked all efforts.

 As of this week, some of those young people could get closer to the American DREAM.

The DREAM Act’s title evokes the nostalgic phrase, “the American Dream,” which Obama himself used as the subtitle for his book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.  Some have cited Obama’s own life story as an example, even proof of, the possibilities inherent in the American Dream.

By which they mean the hopeful conviction that in America anything is possible.  In the words of a dopey jingoistic song from my teeny bopper days; “Only in America, land of opportunity, can a guy without a cent, get a break and maybe grow up to be president.” 

The American Dream myth isn’t just for folks born in other countries, seeking their fortune in the US, with or without papers.  (Don’t get me going on the “Birther” movement that insists Obama wasn’t born in the US – no American Dream for him.)

“The American Dream” pretends to be for everyone, this vague idealistic notion that America offers a universal opportunity for success, upward mobility, prosperity and equality.  The phrase was popularized by historian James Truslow Adams in 1931 (during the Depression, when the dream with distant):

…the American dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

Such varied Americans as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Martin Luther King, Jr., George Carlin, Hunter S. Thompson, John Steinbeck, Langston Hughes, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, Ben Franklin and Barack Obama have all written about the American Dream.

In literature and poetry the Dream is most often noted for its failure, its absence or more nightmarish reality.  The great Jay Gatsby, symbol of the Dream, dies, as do Dream seekers like Steinbeck’s Lennie and the feared and loathed of Thompson’s Las Vegas.

African American poet Langston Hughes wrote “The Dream Deferred” in 1951: 

     What happens to a dream deferred?

     Does it dry up
     like a raisin in the sun?
     Or fester like a sore—
     And then run?
     Does it stink like rotten meat?
     Or crust and sugar over –
     like a syrupy sweet?

     Maybe it just sags
     like a heavy load.

     Or does it explode?

The comedian George Carlin said, “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

But the American Dream does still inspire people to enter the country both legally and illegally.  11.5 million people live in America without documentation.

Announcing the new policy, Obama said that children of illegal immigrants “study in our schools, play in our neighborhoods, befriend out kids, pledge allegiance to our flag….It makes no sense to expel talented young people who are, for all intents and purposes, Americans….This is not amnesty.  This is not immunity.  This is not a path to citizenship.  It’s not a permanent fix.  This is a temporary stopgap measure.”

That’s an expression of his frustration with the rigid opposition/stonewalling by the Republicans of almost anything he promotes.  And he’s certainly looking for Latino support in the election.  So he bypassed the failed legislative efforts, and used the authority of his office to require the Immigration Service to defer for two years the deportation of the 800,000 or so foreign-born people younger than 30 who came to the US before age 16, have lived here continuously for at least five years, are not a security or criminal threat, and are successful students or serve in the military.

The reaction was predictable, with praise and criticism from all sides.  Some complained  “it doesn’t go far enough” and there was much cynicism about pandering to voters.  Mitt Romney predictably tried every one of his Etch-a-Sketch tactics in response: he ignored Obama’s actions for a couple days, then he criticized it, then he said it wasn’t good enough and Republicans would do something permanent, then he said he would keep the policy for those who serve in the military but would require advanced degrees.  (NY Times columnist Gail Collins interpreted Mitt’s quote, “and if you get an advanced degree here, we want you to stay here…” as “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses bearing Ph.D.’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering or computer science….) Then he said Latinos don’t really even care about immigration; the only thing I, Mitt, will speak of is jobs.  (Except when Mitt does what my friend Ed Kilgore calls “dog whistles” to the right - references in code to the right’s party line on abortion, gay marriage and yes, immigration, while sounding less extreme.)

I am no expert on these issues.  I know we are a nation of immigrants.  My husband figures his Swedish grandfather who jumped ship in San Francisco and became a farmer outside Seattle never got any papers.  We have become too much of a nation of us and them, when we all were them at one point.

I know we are in a recession, but illegal immigrants are only 5% of the labor force, and they take jobs most Americans don’t want to do.  I know we can’t really address immigration questions without reconfiguring our whole system of capitalism and our tragic history of racism.  I am an admirer of the work of Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun Magazine and the Network of Spiritual Progressives.  He writes in the May/June issue of Tikkun:

In my view, every country in the world uses oppressive and sometimes violent means to keep out those whom it does not want, and those wants are almost always based on both capitalist economic rationales (“there is not enough to go around, so don’t let others share it”) and racist feelings toward others (“they don’t deserve what we deserve because they are less valuable or less truly human that we are”). That's no justification for any given country doing so.

Members of my own denomination, the United Church of Christ, and the Unitarian Universalist Association are this week protesting the very strict (and racist) anti-immigrant bill in the state of Arizona that allowed detention if a suspect only looked illegal; the US Supreme Court will rule next week on its constitutionality.  Like many Christians, and the Jewish Lerner, they draw on the Biblical heritage of honoring the stranger and alien in our midst, the equal value of all humans, and the belief that land is owned by God, not humans.

It’s a long hot summer ahead at US border crossings and the desert stretches of illegal entry.  Obama was only able to defer for two years the deportation of that small portion of the 11.5 million illegals.  What if, as Langston Hughes says, the dream deferred doesn’t dry up, like a raisin in the sun, but instead, explodes?

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

Dry and Disputed

Oakland-Berkeley hills fire on October 20, 1991Wildfires are raging across the American West.  By the end of this summer millions of acres and thousands of homes will go up in smoke, not to mention many resident and firefighter deaths.  In much of the West there are only two seasons, wet (winter) and dry (the rest of the year.)   Here in California we won’t see any more rain until November.  Fire season began in May, and we are already on high fire alert.

Some years it doesn’t rain much during the winter either, so with dry grassy hills and low reservoirs, we get dire predictions of a bad fire season.  But even when, like this year, we’ve had a nice rainy winter, we get those same dire predictions, because of all the extra undergrowth and brush.  Every year they say, get ready for fire; we can’t win.

In the past few decades we’ve had some really bad urban fires, Oakland in 1991, San Diego 2007, many deaths, thousands of homes destroyed, fires visible from space.  Both conflagrations were in October, after long dry summers.  They lasted days and days, exacerbated by off shore winds and the close proximity of urban and wilderness areas.

Fire touches most of our lives in some way; many of us have a memory of a neighbor’s house burning down, or an alert adult grabbing the fire extinguisher in the kitchen, or days of threatening smoke in the sky and in our noses as a nearby wildfire burns out of control.  My earliest childhood memory, as a three year old, is of a forest fire in a dry pine forest in Maine.  I remember the crackling trees, the rush to the car, and my mother’s face; scared but trying not to show it to her kids.  We escaped, but a neighbor lost her house.

Wildfires in the American West sort of mimic the American West itself: both are big, out of control, where massive rural and wilderness areas butt up to sprawling urban areas, acres of diseased and dead trees (from climate change, drought, insects, or all of the above), limited water, steep terrain, fierce winds, not enough firefighters, overlapping or contradictory state and federal agency jurisdictions.  That’s the American West: big, rough, dry and disputed.

Dry and disputed: water and land use policy.  Fires remind us of these huge issues facing the West.

Western land use politics is all about water.  There’s not enough of it.  Agriculture, fishing, dams, canals, development, energy – it all comes down to water.  That’s a whole other column, about water politics.  But when fire shows up, the land succumbs easily.  Open and dry, much of the land in the West actually needs fire; fire germinates seeds, enriches land, and smaller more frequent fires prevent larger more dangerous ones.  Since earliest times humans have not suppressed fire but rather set small controlled burns for the benefit of the land.  But just as the West seems to be losing any control over the stresses of population and development, so huge fires now often rage out of control in the dry and stressed landscape.

Historically, something like only 2% of Western land had easy access to water, before widespread irrigation and development in the last century. John Wesley Powell, who in 1869 was the first to lead an expedition down the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon, tried later to convince Congress, when he became head of the US Geological Survey, to limit agriculture in the West, because of water issues.  Instead of the standard 40 acre, square land grants, he advocated large land grants and regional boundaries defined by watersheds, instead of arbitrary land rectangles, and encouraged conservation and low impact grazing.  But the railroads, who wielded incredible power in the development of the West, wanted settlers, and towns, which meant agriculture.  Money and power and politics form the battlefield for the very limited water of the West.

Lake PowellI learned about Powell’s failed efforts for a fair and rational Western water policy in a book about him, Beyond the 100^th Meridian by Wallace Stegner, often called the “Dean of US Western Writers,” a novelist and environmentalist who likewise advocated for land and water stewardship.  Stegner, like his soul brothers John Muir and David Brower, was active in the Sierra Club, the national conservation organization founded by Muir in the West.  A water fight they did win was to stop the 1966 proposed damming of the Grand Canyon to provide more water for the West, especially Los Angeles.  When dam supporters said the lake would help tourists get closer to the canyon walls, Stegner and others asked “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get closer to the ceiling?”  Powell would detest the fact that a stretch of the Colorado River near the Grand Canyon actually was finally dammed and the huge lake named after him.

I found Stegner’s great book in the National Park bookstore at Bryce Canyon in Utah, on a road trip with my about-to-go-college daughter to the Grand Canyon, as well as Bryce and Zion National Parks in Utah. As we drove and camped and hiked through California, Arizona, Utah and Nevada, we saw lots of land, a few fires, and not much water.

Graham Ross, Mako Voelkel, David Zimmerman, Steve Stücky, and Colin Gipson—“the Tassajara Five”—posed for this portrait after facing the flames for six straight hours. Photo by Mako VoelkelI read another great book about fire and water this past week.  Probably deserves its own column also.  Fire Monks is the true tale of the Tassajara Zen Monastery in the Big Sur Wilderness and how in 2008, when a wildfire burned over 150,000 acres, and raged through the monastery lands, five monks refused to evacuate and used their Buddhist training, mindfulness, flexibility and some fire smarts to save the place.  I’ll just have to end with the cool picture of the five fire monks (do look at all the pictures).

Clear the brush around your house!  And watch out for fire!

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

A Helluva Town

An ode to a great day in New York City.

January 1, 2005 was my daughter Norah’s 18^th birthday.   We asked her “Where would you like to spend it?”  And she said, “New York City.”

She had visited New York several times already.  My father, her grandfather, lived there for 30 years, until he retired out here to California near me.  We had visited him when he lived in Brooklyn Heights and worked on Wall Street.  We had been to museums and shows and the top of the Empire State Building. 

My husband is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister and over the years we had found a relatively cheap place to stay in NYC, a sort of funky bed and breakfast that the midtown UU church runs.  They converted a turn of the century brownstone into apartments with high ceilings and big windows overlooking 35^th and Park.  The flats are named after famous Unitarians or wishful thinking Unitarians; one earlier year we stayed in the Beatrix Potter apartment; lots of stuffed bunnies.  The place is near the Empire State Building, which is great when traveling with jet lagged little kids up at midnight – the ESB is open then too.

In 2004, having secured the Walt Whitman apartment, the next question was tickets to a show.  Even from distant California we had heard of “Avenue Q”, the iconoclastic Sesame Street knockoff with full frontal puppet nudity and songs like “It Sucks to Be Me.”  Cool mother that I am I suggested that. (One summer in college I lived in a horrible 5^th floor walk-up, Lower East Side cockroached apartment on Avenue D.  Only in that part of town are there lettered streets, and D is as far as it goes.  That’s part of the joke – Avenue Q.)

My husband was uninterested in gay puppets seeking their life purpose, so he got a ticket to a revival of “Wonderful Town,” the Leonard Bernstein, Comden and Green 1953 hit, originally starring Rosalind Russell.  This time around it was Brooke Shields as one of the sisters who come from Ohio to find their fortune in New York.  (I just now asked him if I remembered right; he said yes, wistfully, such a great seat….) 

The particular great day in New York I have in mind is Dec. 31, 2004, the day before her birthday.  Being born on New Year’s Day means your birthday is often part of New Year’s Eve celebrations, or in the US, every one wants to watch American football games and the Rose Bowl parade on TV. 

New York has, of course, a great New Year’s Eve tradition, the lighted crystal ball dropping in Times Square; a million people gather each year to drink and wait in the cold for the countdown to New Year’s on the midtown streets where all the Broadway theaters are.  One previous New Years’ Eve we all went to see “Lion King” and could barely get out of the theater at 11:30, the streets were so packed with drunken revelers.

So I think they outlawed New Year’s Eve evening Broadway shows, but kept the matinees.  All three of us loved our shows about this very city, New York. (Slightly different take, Wonderful Town and Avenue Q, but great music.  New York inspires great music.)

We met up about 5, just getting dark and crowds already gathering.  We happily walked and sang back to the Unitarians, following the illuminated Empire State Building landmark in the sky.  The “people may ride in a hole in the ground” but that day too many people were riding the subway IN to Times Square to get into that underground craziness.   We had other plans – we’d done the Times Square thing that earlier Lion King vacation.  No, we’d read they had fireworks at the foot of Manhattan, over the Statue of Liberty.

A cake!  It was her birthday the next day.  The apartment had a kitchen, but look, here’s a bakery, still open New Year’s Eve.  On a sterile, business type block near Penn Station, a Puerto Rican bakery, almost industrial, no little tables or lattes, just folks baking away, for New Year’s parties? On the kind of whim you really only have on vacation we went it, asked if they could write Happy Birthday Norah on the cake in the window and Ay Caramba! we took it home.

But it was only 7 or so now, that horrible wait for midnight thing of New Year’s Eve.  We had a sort of dreary expensive dinner at a famous NY Restaurant, some chef we had heard of, we were all tired and a little sullen.  Oh well, that’s New York too, tired and sullen and expensive sometimes.

So odd to get into a Wall Street bound train at 10:30 PM, not jammed with stock brokers, just happy dates going to parties or the fireworks.  It actually was a warm clear evening.  We walked through the empty downtown streets, so quiet and dark after the Times Square madness. 

We hadn’t been to this part of the city since the terrorist attacks of 911.  Even in the dark we could feel the absent twin towers.  We came upon a memorial, a huge piece of granite from one of the towers that had been blasted from the explosion and landed on this street and stood there in its stark memory.

We weren’t quite sure where the fireworks would be, but we just kept walking south through the deserted financial district, looking for people.  Finally we got to Battery Park (“The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down”) and there were maybe 300 people, happily sprawled on the benches by old Civil War Fort Cinton, looking out to the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn, Staten Island, New Jersey.  Other folks were in boats in the harbor.  We waited.

Soon the fireworks started.  Fantastic.  They went on and on and on.  I’m the kind of person, at the end of a fireworks show, I usually say – that’s it?  That night it felt like they would never end. 

I’m not a big rah-rah patriot, but seeing all those colors and lights, those rockets red glare, framing the statue that symbolizes something about our country, a goddess of hope that is the first thing many immigrants have seen, her lamp lifted beside the golden door, thinking about my very New York day – I was happy, maybe a little proud, to be an American.

We took the subway back to our place and ate the cake – it was now her birthday.

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

Question: How Many Deaths Will It Take Till He Knows?

The answer, my friend, is the title of this column, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a 1962 Bob Dylan classic.  This week Dylan, age 71, received from President Obama the highest civilian honor in our country, the Medal of Freedom, given for "meritourious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States or to world peace or to cultural or other significant endeavors."

Congratulations, Bob! Cute pictures of Barack and Bob: doesn't Bob look sort of like Moammar Gadhafi?

Speaking of many many deaths, I read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy in May.  I’d never read it before.

Got me thinking about war novels.  My impression was that I hadn’t read very many, the same way I don’t go to war movies – too painful, too scary, too violent, too depressing, too insistent that I deal with the world when I’d rather ignore it.  Why spend money and time on that?

But reading on Wikipedia about war novels, I realized that in high school and college and sometimes just because a book is getting a lot of buzz, I’ve read quite a few war novels.

I’m curious to hear from readers what war novels you’ve read, recommend, admire. (Wikipedia defines it as: a novel in which the primary action takes place in a field of armed combat, or in a domestic setting (or home front) where the characters are preoccupied with the preparations for, or recovery from, war.  Yeah, I know, Wikipedia is limited; just bear with me on this….)

War novels I’ve read include: The Iliad, The Aeneid, The Book of Revelation, Beowulf, Shakespeare, Dante, War and Peace, The Red Badge of Courage, Mrs. Dalloway, Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms), Solzyhenitsyn, Slaughterhouse Five, The Quiet American, Catch-22, Cold Mountain, Sophie’s Choice, Atonement, John le Carre, The English Patient.

Oh whoops, this is supposed to be a column about America.  Well, that’s a list of what this particular American has read….but I wonder; do people from different countries write and read different kinds of war fiction?

Tolstoy has a funny quote about different nationalities.  It’s in a section where he is commenting on the difference in military leadership style of the German and Russian generals of his side’s army; he dislikes the Germans.

A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally both in mind and body irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world and therefore, as an Englishman, always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does to believe that anything can be known. The German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth -- science -- which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.

Tolstoy reminds us that war is not a science, or a machine, but a human force and tragedy.  And that self-assurance of any nationality does not win wars.  He particularly defends the head of the Russian forces, General Kutuzov, who was apparently much criticized for not fighting Napoleon’s army more aggressively.  Tolstoy paints a picture of a wise old man of war who knew the folly of overreach and the wisdom of restraint.  By retreating he actually won, while Napoleon, by advancing, lost.  It’s sort of the Zen of war.  Tolstoy says, “The strongest of all warriors are these two – Time and Patience.”

For the first 900 pages or so of War and Peace I was struck by the difference between the war scenes (Battles of Austerlitz, Borodino, the retreat from Moscow) and the peace scenes (salons in St. Petersburg, opera in Moscow, farms and children.)  I wondered if Tolstoy had read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, where Elizabeth was Prejudice and Darcy Pride (or was it the other way around?) Was Tolstoy contrasting men/public/battle (war) and women/domestic/emotions/art (peace?)

Then I realized war was in most scenes (conflict, pride, regret, debt) and so was peace (hope, love, future, God.)  Maybe every novel has something to do with war?  Harry Potter, Wind in the Willows, Agatha Christie – are these war novels?  Is war simply part of the human experience? 

On this past Memorial Day weekend our US Department of Defense announced the beginning of a 13-year commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the disastrous Vietnam War.

The unusually ambitious project that started on Monday was authorized by Congress and will be carried out by the Defense Department through 2025, tracking the progress of a war that began with a relative handful of advisers before escalating to more than 500,000 American troops. By the time the last troops left in a negotiated withdrawal followed by the famous helicopter evacuation from the roof of the embassy in Saigon in 1975, more than 58,000 were dead.

The first phase of the commemoration, through 2014, will be devoted to recruiting partners and support. Organizers envision tens of thousands of commemoration events across the country from 2014 to 2017. Then until 2025, they plan to work to sustain the effort through oral histories, forums, seminars and the like (see the New York Times).

I wonder if these commemoration events will include the role of the anti-war movement in ending that war.  Like maybe a performance of Dylan singing “Blowin’ in the Wind?”

Asked about the song’s meaning, Dylan said in an interview in Sing Out! Magazine in 1962:

There ain’t too much I can say about this song except that the answer is blowing in the wind. It ain’t in no book or movie or TV show or discussion group. Man, it’s in the wind – and it’s blowing in the wind. Too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is but oh I won’t believe that. I still say it’s in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper it’s got to come down some  ...But the only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down so not too many people get to see and know . . . and then it flies away. I still say that some of the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they see wrong and know it’s wrong. I’m only 21 years old and I know that there’s been too many   . . . You people over 21, you’re older and smarter.

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter