Steve Reads

Before I leave for the UK, I want to recommend that you read The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. In Caro’s telling, which seems unimpeachable and documented out the ass, Moses was an incredibly productive engineer (or rather engineering planner) who brought parks and swimming pools and beauty and Long Island to the people of New York. So they put all their trust in him. So he destroyed block upon block of poor people’s homes to pursue his highway and bridge dreams. When those highways and bridges failed to reduce traffic congestion, and in fact made it worse, he continued to pile on more highways and bridges and destroy more neighborhoods. At no point did he ask neighborhoods what they thought. In Caro’s telling, Moses understood The People as an abstract body, but couldn’t identify with anything as small as a neighborhood. Maybe more to the point, he actually hated the little people, and hated black people. Hence all of his public works in New York disproportionately favor the upper middle class and wealthy, and disproportionately harm Harlem. His first big project — building roads out to Long Island — cut poor farmers’ land in half while dodging around Long Island’s barons’ estates. Every subsequent project destroyed thousands of homes and ignored the voices of those who lived there — even those who pleaded with him not to destroy Third Avenue with the Gowanus Expressway. They told him that if he just moved it one avenue block over, it would go over a largely industrial area. He ignored them and gutted the 3rd Avenue neighborhood within months: the expressway darkened the area underneath it, which made it less safe, which made people leave, which meant that businesses couldn’t continue to thrive, which made more people leave, and so on, until that neighborhood became famous as the home of prostitutes and drug addicts and little else.

The power politics are all inevitable if you understand what Moses was trying to get done. Farmers and the poor have no power. The barons do. To get anything done, Moses had to listen to the latter and could ignore the former. And that’s what he did. The early parts of The Power Broker treat this as a mixed blessing: the book understands that Moses brought New York City’s residents their first access ever to the beaches (beautiful beaches, which Caro sculpted) of Long Island — including Jones Beach, which was Moses’ baby and which Caro describes in lush detail. Every chapter in those early stages of Moses’ career is similarly structured: Benefit followed by Warning Sign followed by Destruction.

As the book progresses, it’s all destruction. Moses’ arrogance fed on his increasing power, which meant that he didn’t have to listen to anyone else. He made it a point to destroy those who injured him even slightly; Caro says that he did so for the sheer sadistic fun of it, when there was absolutely nothing to be gained from it. Caro paints him as a perfect bully: he only ever fought with those who were certain to lose. This included his subordinates, who were fired quickly if they didn’t become yes-men.

And where was the public throughout this? They were hoodwinked. Moses knew how to manipulate the press, so he had them in his pocket for thirty years. The dissenting voices were silenced, and the media never bothered to research Moses’ press releases.

Caro feels the pain of those poor people and their neighborhoods. A more heartfelt, scathingly documented, yet still fair critique of its subject is hard to imagine. And as far as I know, Caro’s biography is the final word on the subject: my limited research suggests that no one has contested Caro’s portrayal. I suspect the same will be true of his Lyndon Johnson biography when it’s completed; it’s hard to imagine anyone beating Caro at this game, unless some hitherto unknown cache of documents comes out after Caro dies. Caro has interviewed most everyone (including Moses himself) who could have had anything to say on the subject.

As with that Johnson bio, Caro artfully skips back and forth between the man himself and the power structure he reveals. In The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Caro wanted to understand how the exercise of legislative power worked — what, specifically, is happening in the back rooms whilst bills are being shaped. In The Power Broker, he has focused on a man for whom power is a drug and a means to an end. While never losing sight of the humans whom Moses destroyed, Caro never takes his eye off the power that made Moses as dangerous as he was.

P.S.: Moses is most famous, perhaps, for having built overpasses on his highways to Long Island 13 feet above the roads below them, so that buses couldn’t get out to the Island. Buses = poor and black people = not Moses’ desired audience.

1. “[T]he Report that explains the basis for the resolution that the House Judiciary Committee is voting on this morning, which would recommend that the full House hold Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten in contempt of Congress. It is, by a long stretch, the most comprehensive account yet of the U.S. Attorney scandal, and of Congress’s interests in discovering just how and why the White House removed those officials from office.” (Via Marty Lederman)

2. a report entitled “Congress’s Contempt Power: Law, History, Practice, and Procedure.” (Via another Lederman post)

I’ve printed these up and will take them on the plane with me. I’m going to London, Edinburgh and Inverness tonight with The Babe, and will probably be totally offline (no Internet, no cell) until August 5. Be well, in the meantime.

Mike McConnell’s response about whether he’d mind seeing Americans subjected to the interrogation methods that the president recently authorized (about which: Marty Lederman part 1 and Lederman part 2) has sent me rushing to the library to borrow a copy of Hannah Arendt’s famous report on the “banality of evil”.

Torture in this world is directed by little turtle-like men who push the buttons while others apply the electrodes.

It maybe goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: the worst part about this vagueness on torture is not the torture itself. The Bushies draw some lines — say, first they allow waterboarding — then erase those lines and draw in some more-blurry ones (no waterboarding, maybe, but now denial of sleep). People keep pushing and they keep blurring.

What’s the predictable result? Soldiers and CIA agents will torture because they know their government doesn’t actually care about what they do, and probably won’t punish them for it. Moral vagueness leads directly to torture. We saw what happened at Abu Ghraib after Gonzales and others called the Geneva Conventions “quaint.”

Me, I stand behind the following principle: off the battlefield, nothing can happen to foreigners that couldn’t also happen to Americans. Of course the bureaucrats will fight hard to define “battlefield” as liberally as possible. And of course that definition lets the race to the bottom start as soon as we allow Americans to be tortured. Tightening it up would be good, but I submit that it displays more moral clarity than a president who dislikes torture only when someone’s watching.

I realize that I am not on the politically winning side here. I suspect that most Americans would have no problem torturing foreigners suspected of terrorism. Maybe they’ll eventually have no problem torturing Americans. I can see the political candidate up behind the lectern right now; maybe it’s Mitt Romney, who recently said he’d like to “double Guantánamo”. I can see him saying, “Would you have tortured Tim McVeigh if it meant that we could have saved 168 lives?” I can hear the audience cheering.

That’s how fascism starts. It doesn’t take a dictator, at the beginning. It doesn’t even take a wannabe dictator. It takes a culture that slowly dehumanizes everyone else, with the power to do great evil behind it.

Insert your joke here. Amazon has invited you to.

(Posted at the urging of my man Chris Rugen)

From the Boston Globe:

Line drive kills minor league coach

July 23, 2007

NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Ark. —Tulsa Drillers coach Mike Coolbaugh died Sunday night after being struck in the head by a line drive as he stood in the first-base coach’s box during a Texas League game with the Arkansas Travelers, police said.

I’ve been walking to and from North Station recently, which oddly enough is in the West End of Boston. (Welcome to our fair city.) The West End is a really sad place, and every time I walk through it, a very simple message comes through as clear as day: Boston hated the West End. It’s a desolate field of concrete, with giant, lifeless government buildings slapped atop it.

I’d like to put myself back in the shoes of those who leveled it in the 1950’s, because from 50 years on it just looks like hubris: level the West End, do Jerome Rappaport’s bidding, and expect that you can revitalize a neighborhood while evicting the people who give it life. Somehow the North End escaped that punishment, and now it’s the only neighborhood I’ve seen in Boston which looks like it might have looked 200 years ago. It experienced its own form of hatred in the 50’s, when Interstate 93 cut it off from the rest of the city. It survived, I-93 has gone underground, and it’s gentrified now — all in spite of the city’s best efforts, if Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities is correct.

So much of Boston wears its hatred of cities on its sleeve. It’s not clear to me that the city has really internalized what Jacobs was trying to teach, either.

But now I want to be like Jacobs, which means not only trying to improve the city I love, but focusing on a small enough piece that fixing it is tractable. I think I’m going to start with the Cambridge Public Libraries, which have brought me so much joy since I’ve moved back. I may not be able to fix The Problem Of Cities, but I can certainly help my local library.

I really had no choice but to read Central Square, given that I live in the Square and have been infatuated with Packer’s writing ever since reading Blood of the Liberals. I can’t recommend Central Square, though. It tries to paint a bleak picture of the world, but dishonestly. Packer would never allow his characters to have an unadorned victory; it wouldn’t square with the message he’s trying to get across. So his methods are fundamentally dishonest.

The story is fairly simple, and all takes place within the confines of Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There’s Eric, a struggling writer, his wife (Ann? The memory for individual character names fades fast), and their soon-to-be-born child. There’s Paula, a therapist seeing an unending stream of patients whom she never feels like she’s helping. There’s Joe, an immigrant from Africa, harassed the moment he lands at Logan. Their lives intertwine in various — forced — ways. It all takes place in the winter, which is incredibly depressing in Boston; Packer wants you to feel the chill in his characters’ bones. That’s part of the dishonesty: Packer would never have allowed Central Square to take place in the spring, which is beautiful in Boston. A moment of beauty for his characters would end their misery for a moment, and Packer will have none of that.

Therapy, in Central Square, comes in for a pretty rigorous beating; if I had to summarize the message of the book, it would be, “Everyone is in therapy of one form or another, so everyone talks and talks and talks and never accomplishes anything.” You can see how Packer’s mind evolved on this point over the next decade: in Blood of the Liberals, he methodically set out to find a liberalism that people could fall in love with; in The Assassins’ Gate, he sympathizes to a degree with anti-war liberals, but he also wanted to see Hussein removed from power. Central Square is a freshman effort at overcoming talk and arriving at action; Blood of the Liberals and Assassins’ Gate are the fully matured voice.

I don’t know who’d read Central Square other than people who live here, by the way. The amount of Central Square life adorning the book is rather impressive, down to the real-life guy who sells you newspapers and says either “Young man! Young man! Can you find it in your heart . . . ” or “Oh my goodness you are beautiful” depending on your gender. I’m pretty sure he’s mostly a Harvard Square fixture, for whatever reason, but he’s just too good a character to leave out.

I’m pretty sure The Onion has never crossed its storylines before, but here’s Jim Anchower picking up Smoove B’s ex-girlfriend. It’s good stuff.

It’s kind of funny to me that I’m still getting the lay of the land in Boston after a nontrivial amount of time here. It took me a year of living here to realize that Downtown Crossing and State Street were really close to one another (so close, in fact, that I think they ought to be connected by an underground passage — thereby allowing T riders to transfer to every subway line at Downtown Crossing/Park Street/State Street). And only once I walked from Kendall Square to North Station, earlier this year, did I realize how close MGH and North Station are.

Today I’m going to 10 Causeway Street to pick up The Babe’s passport (we’re going to Europe on July 25th, and we discovered a little while ago that her passport had gone poof). Using my newfound knowledge of Boston geography, I realized that I could just take the T from Central Square to MGH, then get off and walk 12 minutes to North Station. That would be substantially faster than taking the T all the way to Downtown Crossing, transferring to the orange line, and going 3 stops north to North Station.

Hilariously, the T’s website gives me this error:

(And no, it’s not that there’s some sort of difficulty with the start or end addresses. I’ve used the start address countless times, and I actually selected the destination from a dropdown menu. It’s just that the T’s website needs some repairs.)

All I wanted was an estimate of how soon I’d have to leave. I’ll just assume it takes me 10 minutes to get from here to MGH, though it’ll probably be closer to 5.

There will be more to say as I let it sink in more, but for now I’d just recommend that anyone who has any stake in the Iraq War read The Assassins’ Gate. It is extraordinary. I imagine Packer walking around Iraq and Washington, talking to anyone who will listen. He interviews veterans, exiles from Iraq before the invasion, ordinary citizens, American administrators inside the Green Zone, British soldiers, American soldiers, Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and on and on — everyone except for Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush, it seems. He listens. I suspect that’s why so many people opened up to him.

The Assassins’ Gate and Blood of the Liberals have this in common: they are deeply interested in the facts on the ground. More than most, Packer seems free of theoretical precommitments. In Blood of the Liberals, he wanted to understand why liberals kept losing elections — after spending years with churchgoers and the homeless. In The Assassins’ Gate, he wants to give Bush, the Pentagon, war protesters and ordinary Iraqis their due. He genuinely wants to know what motivates these people. He’s looking, it seems to me, for a politics that grabs hold of us viscerally. His Democratic party wouldn’t care just abstractly about human rights; it would be on the ground helping ordinary Iraqis rebuild their lives. He has harsh words for the conservatives who let ideology guide their bombing, and he has equally harsh words for liberals who reflexively opposed the war without understanding why Hussein was more than just an ordinary bad man.

Just an amazing book. Please go read it.

Sandy Levinson has an excellent post up on Balkinization with that title, on how counter-majoritarian 20th- and 21st-century American government is, and how much it stands in the way of the House and Senate actually accomplishing anything. The executive branch has taken on more and more power since FDR; Levinson rightly asks how long it will take before a demagogic president steals the rest of it away. (Along the way, he gives great praise to Elena Kagan’s “Presidential Administration”, which apparently defends the Clinton administration’s arrogation. It’s on the to-read queue.)

A few little observations:

1. Lawyers, by training, pay attention to the processes that enable institutions to exist. Few people do. Levinson’s post is a great example of turning a lawyerly eye to why the U.S. government works the way it does. If it fails, it fails because of a corruption in its processes, and that’s what we should look to repair. If the presidency is corrupt and on its way to a dictatorship, it’s not because of Bush or Clinton or any other individual; it’s that way because its institutions allow it to be so.
2. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century is a great reminder that there was a time when people doubted democracy’s capacity to fix our ills. It only takes the right crisis to tip a teetering democracy over into the abyss.

I think I had others, but that will do for now.

One of the many insights in Assassins’ Gate is that the American military rejected from very early on the idea that there could be a guerilla war in Iraq. The military is simply not prepared to fight an unconventional war; apparently anyone who suggested that Iraq might be structurally similar to Vietnam didn’t make it very far up the hierarchy. Packer interviews Marine Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, whose book The Sling and the Stone is apparently one of the few attempts within the military to understand the kind of war that we keep losing. There are very few instances of a superpower winning one of these wars; among them is the British in Malaya, which it took them ten years to win. No one in the U.S. military was pleased to hear the suggestion that Iraq might take ten years — not when the ideology from the beginning said that the war would be over within a few weeks.

I’m reminded of this today, when I see that Tony Snow says 2/3 of al Qaeda’s leaders have been killed or captured. Hands raised if you suspect al Qaeda doesn’t actually have a well-defined leadership, except maybe at the very top. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if al Qaeda were one of the decentralized guerilla organizations that the U.S. government and military just can’t wrap their heads around.

I was going to include a long excerpt from The Assassins’ Gate, but I think it’ll be easiest just to suggest that you go to its Search-Inside-the-Book page and search for “Sadr’s uncle”. One of the two links should be on page 263. Click on 263, scroll to the bottom of the page, and read from the bottom paragraph through the bottom of page 264. Contained in that single page is more factual background about Iraq than the U.S. media (outside of George Packer) has seen fit to provide in all the years of the Iraq War.

I’m in New York City right now, having taken the bus here and having awoken at some ludicrously early hour after a terrible night of sleep. What I wanted above all else was a good cup of coffee. I did a bit of googling, specifically on CoffeeGeek (which has carved out a nice niche among those who are looking for artisanal espresso in cities they’re visiting), and found that they recommended the Cupcake Café on 9th Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets. It’s a negligible walk from the Port Authority terminal. The coffee is delicious: smooth, complex, and rich. Highly recommended.

Jack Balkin has a great post up about the importance of making Bush follow the law near the end of his term. Balkin claims that we’re in the third stage of the Bush administration, where it tries to cover up for the illegalities of its first two stages and ensure that future executive branches have the kind of expansive power that Bush has been trying so hard to cement. Once again he reminds us that if the Iraq War had gone better, the dictatorial presidency would have flown through easily. Had history been slightly different, we’d be well on our way to one-man rule. Balkin says that if we want to ensure that we stay on the path of rule by law rather than by man, we would do well to bring the Bushies to justice before January 20, 2009.

A representative passage from The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq:

Ibrahim’s father, standing next to the bed [in the Ibn Rushd Teaching Psychiatric Hospital], said that his son’s deterioration had begun as a teenager dring the first Gulf War, when he was left alone at home during allied bombing. In 1996, Ibrahim tried to run against Saddam for president; he made it halfway to the palace before his father caught up with him and saved his life by dragging him home. Ibrahim’s condition had worn out the whole family. Four days before the start of the recent war, his delusions had flared up again and he’d been hospitalized until the fall of Baghdad. Ibrahim believed in one world government, led by the Americans. They had demonstrated their fairness by protecting the Jews, he said, seeming happier the more he talked. They had earned the right to be the world’s policeman and rule with justice. This was a minority view in Iraq; I never heard it outside the Ibn Rushd Teaching Psychiatric Hospital.

In the general ward, a wary-looking middle-aged man with rotten teeth sat smoking on a bed. He was Nabil Rahim, a Shiite follower of the martyred Ayatollah Mohamed Baqr al-Sadr, the uncle of Moqtada al-Sadr and founder of the Islamist Dawa Party. In 1980, after being forced to watch his sister gang-raped and killed by interrogators, Sadr had nails hammered into his skull. “It’s no use now,” Rahim said. “Mohamed al-Sadr is gone, his knowledge is gone. I want to live, that’s all. I want to live.”

Packer is our Virgil. This is the Iraq that the U.S. chose to inherit, and he’s going to show it to us. The Assassins’ Gate is 400 pages of quiet interviews, punctuated by glimpses of hell.

My goodness, I love George Packer.

if we can no longer distinguish between Al Qaeda operatives and Iraqis who have risked their lives for the U.S. over a period of years, then we are already helpless to protect ourselves against terrorists. If admitting Muslims is a threat to our body politic, then our social fabric is already too weak to be mended. If the shame of allowing our Iraqi friends to be slaughtered before the eyes of the world is worth whatever security benefits might come from keeping them out, then we have already abandoned our leadership role and should simply tell our allies to stop counting on us.

One of the odder contradictions in Republican thought is this one:

1. Government is inherently inefficient and corrupt, and yet
2. The military is a ruthlessly efficient killing machine that deserves a lot of money.

I just realized one place where this has come out most egregiously:

1. Immediately after the Katrina disaster, Bill O’Reilly and others told us that the government’s atrocious response had taught us a lesson: we can never rely on the government to help us out. They will always mess up, so we always have to rely on ourselves.

2. The Iraq War, by any measure, has been a disaster. Reading The Assassins’ Gate, I’m now realizing how this disaster worked at a more detailed level. Among other things, bureaucratic infighting between State and DoD doomed any government-building efforts from the start.

So why aren’t Republicans up in front telling us that we could expect nothing better from our government? I mean, I know the answer (anyone caught denying the military a dollar can expect a swift kick and a very long swim), but I’d be curious how the official party line squares this particular circle.

I just discovered Skype, which I realize makes me rather late to the party. But dang, this thing is cool.

I actually discovered it maybe a couple years ago, but it didn’t work out-of-the-box with Linux yet; I remember trying for a full evening to get my mic working with it. Now it Just Works: download it for Linux, install it, log in, and call. I’m very impressed.

I rediscovered it because I need to call the UK tomorrow, and the alternative would be to buy a calling card. That seems rather antediluvian. Skype is what all the cool kids are doing.

If you want to Skype me, I’m “SteveLaniel”. I don’t yet have SkypeIn, but that may come soon.

Tags, as used by services like del.icio.us and Flickr, are cool, but weren’t they outdated to begin with? I’m unlikely to tag a document with a given word unless that word appears in the document, which suggests that just indexing all the words in the document would be a more-efficient means of tagging. Modify full-text indexing in the expected ways — strip out very common words, or only index unusual ones — and you’ve probably got something that’s much better than tagging.

It’s an empirical question whether searching against tags yields more relevant results than searching against full text, but surely Google is evidence that full-text indexing is useful.