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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Deconstructing Jane

I read this morning that Warren Beatty is “taking credit” for Schwarzenneger’s defeat last week:

Warren Beatty, the veteran Hollywood actor who helped to deliver the first big blow to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political career, said last night that the Terminator star had got his come-uppance for fooling voters.

Four days after California voters rejected a series of reforms put forward by the Republican governor, Beatty boasted that his own high-profile eve-of-poll campaigning had helped to save America from the ripple effect of Mr Schwarzenegger’s “reactionary measures”

He also said,”Actors do not necessarily make good politicians.” That’s certainly true, but you have to wonder sometimes whether actors even make good activists.

I have always had a soft spot for the earnest do-gooding that leads famous entertainers to potentially derail their carefully crafted images by getting involved in partisan politics. It’s much safer to become the spokesperson for a popular cause like literacy or fundraise to find the cure for a dreaded disease. Hollywood executives are notoriously gun shy when it comes to any controversy other than the tittilating “bradnangelina” style tabloid gossip that entertains the masses. If someone becomes too unpopular or controversial he or she can lose work and money. It’s risky.

Beatty was always the most savvy of Hollywood activists. He used his celebrity to glamourize politics and used his activism to make him something more than just a pretty face in Hollywood. The glamor project didn’t do much to help the cause (in fact it probably hurt it), but the political activism actually helped his career immeasurably by giving him the substance and clout to do political projects, something that a good looking playboy would not normally be allowed. I think his contribution to progressive politics was far more substantial in the entertainment arena than in the political arena and ultimately I think that’s where show biz activists can really make a difference. It’s helpful that they raise money and awareness of partisan politics, but if you can make a musical recording, movie or television show that imparts liberal attitudes and philosophy, you have done far more long-lasting good than any rabble rousing speech could ever do. And it’s not something that anyone else can do — use art and pop culture to awaken people’s political instincts. That actually takes talent.

The most famous Hollywood activist, and the one who still creates hysteria on the right is, of course, Jane Fonda. In an era of liberal, even radical, show business activists, she was the living symbol of everything the conformist right hated about the left. Rick Perlstein reviews the new biography of Fonda in this edition of The London Review of Books in which we find that Jane was actually quite a serious, sedulous worker bee rather than a shrieking Commie Diva. But she became a very special, very famous object of ire for very complicated reasons. And she was the focusof some very special government treatment long before she ever went to Hanoi:

Another important detail: opposing the war, at this particular time, was not a radical thing to do. Vietnam was widely recognised across the political spectrum as a disaster.

[…]

The security establishment began its battle against Fonda almost as soon as she started speaking out. Teams of FBI informants reported her every word, combed her speeches for violations of the 1917 Espionage Act, which criminalises incitement to ‘insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty in the military’, and ‘disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government of the United States’. She proved a disappointment. Profanity was not her style. As for incitement, we learn from one informant – a chaplain’s assistant – that she thought it ‘would not help the cause of peace’. He added that nothing she said ‘could be construed to be undermining the US government’.

The government got desperate. At Cleveland airport the FBI arranged for her to be stopped at customs. During her interrogation she pushed aside agents who refused her access to the bathroom, so they arrested her for assaulting an officer. She had in her possession mysterious pills marked B, L and D, so they also charged her with narcotics smuggling – for carrying vitamins to be taken with breakfast, lunch and dinner. Her daughter was followed to kindergarten. (America needed to know: did her school teach ‘an anti-law enforcement attitude’?) They investigated her bank accounts. They tapped their network of friendly media propagandists, like the future Senator Jesse Helms, then a TV editorialist, who supplied an invented quotation that still circulates as part of the Fonda cult’s liturgy. Supposedly asked – it isn’t clear where or by whom – how far America should go to the left, she said, according to Helms: ‘If everyone knew what it meant, we would all be on our knees praying that we would, as soon as possible, be able to live under . . . within a Communist structure.’ A death threat against her was sent to Henry Fonda’s house with a demand for $50,000. He took the letter to the same FBI office that was directing the campaign against his daughter. ‘The FBI files reveal no effort to find the sender of the letter,’ Hershberger remarks.

The campaign appears to have been co-ordinated with the White House, and underway long before Fonda went to Hanoi. Hershberger is an assiduous researcher, but she could have got a better idea of the extent of this co-ordination by studying the Nixon Oval Office tapes at the National Archives. On 2 May 1970, Nixon told his aides that protesters were to be accused of ‘giving aid and comfort to the enemy’. On 9 May, Nixon’s enforcer Chuck Colson told the FBI to send its Fonda files directly to the White House. ‘What Brezhnev and Jane Fonda said got about the same treatment,’ an aide later recalled.

Perlstein goes on to ask “why the obsession?” He answers by noting that this happened in 1970 a “moment of maximum danger” just as Nixon was revealed to have expanded the war into Cambodia, and that it was through heretofore loveable figures like Fonda and Dr Spock that the public and, more problematic, soldiers themselves would be turned against the war. This is surely true. Tom Joad’s daughter coming out against the war had to feel threatening. (The blacklist, after all, had only broken 11 years before. This played into their darkest paranoid fantasies about Hollywood.) But I think a great part of it was simple sexism and confused sexual feelings. As Perlstein points out, Barbarella was a favorite GI pin-up girl. As the US showed itself impotent in Southeast Asia, the jerk-off fantasy of millions of young men was basically calling them losers to their faces. I’ve long thought that the irrational anger at Jane Fonda, then and now, has had the character of some sort of primal hatred that cannot be explained by politics alone. I think she’s seen by certain American males as a female praying mantis.

However interesting all this psychological and political deconstruction of the Jane Fonda phenomenon is (and it’s fascinating) what Perlstein nails in this piece is something that is overlooked and terribly important if we are to understand modern politics:

It’s remarkable how many things that we think of as permanent features of American culture can be traced back to specific political operations by the Nixon White House. We now take it as given, for example, that blue-collar voters have always been easy pickings for conservatives appealing to their cultural grievances. But Jefferson Cowie, among others, has shown the extent to which this was the result of a specific political strategy, worked out in response to a specific political problem. Without taking workers’ votes from the Democrats, Nixon would never have been able to achieve the ‘New Majority’ he dreamed of. But to do so by means of economic concessions – previously the only way politicians imagined working-class voters might be wooed – would threaten his business constituency. So Nixon ‘stood the problem on its head’, as Cowie says in Nixon’s Class Struggle (2002), ‘by making workers’ economic interests secondary to an appeal to their allegedly superior moral backbone and patriotic rectitude’. (One part of the strategy was arranging for members of the Teamsters to descend ‘spontaneously’ on protesters carrying Vietcong flags at Nixon appearances. Of course it’s quite possible that the protesters too were hired for the occasion.) It’s not that the potential for that sort of behaviour wasn’t always there. But Nixon had a gift for looking beneath social surfaces to see and exploit subterranean anxieties.

That is the nub of Republican success, whether it was exploiting the sexual anxieties of displaced insecure males in a newly feminized workplace, or convincing conservative evangelical voters that “liberals” were trying to repress their religion and force them to adopt lifestyles they found repugnant. Nixon wasn’t the first dirty politician in American history, but he was the most successful at discerning the churning undercurrent of fear and anger in a rapidly changing society and using his personal brand of dark political arts to exploit it. The conservative movement of Barry Goldwater made a Faustian bargain with the Nixonian black operatives more than 35 years ago. The natural result of that soul selling deal is George W. Bush and Karl Rove.

Until we recognize that the modern Republican Party is the party of Richard Nixon and that the allegedly masterful Rovian vision of a permanent political majority is a rather simple outgrowth of Nixon’s uncanny understanding of how to exploit the dark side of populist fear and loathing, we will continue to be stymied. It won’t be enough to discredit George W. Bush and his cock-up of an administration. They will simply say he wasn’t the “real thing” and move past it like rapacious sharks, doing what they’ve been doing to the last 35 years. We have to come to grips with the fact that they have built their party by wrangling a free-floating resentment and anxiety and turning it into a political formula. It wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t the result of peering into a crystal ball. It was the result of counting the votes available and developing a strategy for getting enough of them to gain power.

And they were very successful at doing it. They are great at campaign politics. The problem is that they built a political machine so captive of business interests and so bereft of pragmatic policy acumen that they are unable to govern. And like the great Godfather of the modern Republican party, their propensity for crude revenge and crippling oppugnancy tripped them up.

I urge you to read Perlstein’s entire review. Jane Fonda is more than gal with a good figure and a good haircut. And she’s more than a radical Hollywood activist, work-out goddess or trophy wife. She’s the quintessential sin-eater who absorbed all the seething animus toward the agents of change in latter 20th century American society. She was the perfect target of Nixon’s seething resentment strategy. It’s a testament to her strange power that they still hate her so, even today.

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Bulletin From The Department Of Miserable Failure, Mideast Democracy Division

Mideast Democracy Summit Ends With No Deal

A U.S.-backed summit meant to promote political freedom and economic change in the Middle East ended Saturday without agreement, a blow to President Bush’s goals for the troubled region.

A draft declaration on democratic and economic principle was shelved after Egypt insisted on language that would have given Arab governments greater control over which democracy groups receive money from a new fund.

[snip]

The White House had hoped the conference would showcase political progress in a part of the world long dominated by monarchies and single-party rule, and spread goodwill for the U.S.

[snip]

The disappointing outcome at the conference followed a rocky summit a week ago in Argentina, when Bush got a cold shoulder from some Latin American leaders, failed to win consensus on a free trading bloc for the Western Hemisphere and endured biting criticism from anti-U.S. protesters and Venezuela’s leftist president, Hugo Chavez.

This is Rice’s failure, as well as Bush’s. Something to remember as the myth of Condi the Competent remains uncontested in the msm.

International Relations Is A Prime Habitat For Struthio Camelus*

Kevin Drum links to this post by Abu Aardvark:

The dominant theoretical trends in the international relations field have been strikingly absent from the mountains of paper expended on analysis of al-Qaeda, Islamism, and the war on terror. Most of the dominant theoretical approaches were not so much wrong as irrelevant.

[SNIP]

But is that true? Has IR theory been irrelevant to the debates? To find out, I just spent a few hours looking at the contents of the last four years of the six leading journals for International Relations theory (International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies – see the end of the post for discussion of these choices), along with the American Political Science Review. I used an exceedingly loose definition of “about al-Qaeda” – i.e. I included everything about terrorism and counter-terrorism, even if it barely touched at all on al-Qaeda or Islamism itself; and I included review essays, even if they did not include any original research.

The results were even more striking than I expected. All told, these seven journals published 796 articles between 2002-2005. I found a total of 25 articles dealing even loosely with al-Qaeda, Islamism, or terrorism. That’s just over 3% of the articles. Now, there’s lots of important stuff out there in the world, and there’s no reason for the whole field to be following the headlines, but still… 3%?

[SNIP]

One obvious objection [to the methodology used in the review of IR literature] would be that I excluded policy-oriented journals such as Foreign Affairs, International Security, and The Washington Quarterly, which do tend to publish much more on the topic. I did that intentionally, because that best captures the prestige value within the field of International Relations. The policy journals are generally undervalued within the International Relations profession, to the extent that many top Political Science Departments wouldn’t even consider a Foreign Affairs publication suitable for a tenure file. In other words, the fact that there is a lot more on Islamism and al-Qaeda in those journals only strengthens my claim – even though political scientists have a lot to say on the subject, they can’t or don’t say it in the most prestigious, theory oriented journals.

Oh, and I didn’t even say anything about the quality of those 25 articles… all I’ll say is that of them, I would count about 7 of them as actually useful in any meaningful way…

Hmm.

Now, the good Aardvark also makes the point that the reason that al Qaeda has been ignored is that the theoretical paradigms which prevail in International Relations, like “realism,” “idealism,” “liberalism,” and “constructivism” are not terribly conducive to analysing a non-state Islamist super-terrorist organization. Who knew?

Adherence to any ideological position, especially ones as crude as “realism,” “idealism,” “isolationism,” or “Jacksonianism” is a mistake. In fact this kind of terminology obscures the necessary complexity of decision making in foreign affairs.

Far more sophisticated and flexible models within which to discuss foreign affairs decision making are desperately needed.

I suppose I should make these recent thoughts apply in a more general way to the American foreign policy/international relations discourse:

[While liberal interventionists] have been discussing ever so “reasonably” how best to adjust the “calculus” of America’s Manifest Destiny so “we” will continue to be a force of good in the world, they have, almost to a person, demonstrated their profound inability merely to look outside their own goddamn windows and respond with simple human decency and commonsense to the real world. And once again, they’ve demonstrated how alarmingly limited American foreign policy discourse has become.

In any event, I’m glad I’m not the only one to notice how poorly adjusted to reality most American intellectual debate on the world has become. And I’m very glad this is being quantified by scholars like AA.

[UPDATE: An interesting reference in the comments to the field of comparative politics jogged my memory regarding another bete noire that hounds my thoughts, namely the lack of a truly compelling translation of either the Qu’ran or the hadith. I would assume that since this is the case (or was, the last time I checked), many other texts of vital importance to undertstanding the various Islams are also unavailable, or available only in bad editions (the assertion that the Qu’ran can never be translated is a religious belief, not an intellectual claim, and must not be permitted to stand in the way of making the fundamental documents of Islam available to non-Muslims in the best possible way). Now even if one assumes that the finest scholars are honest and they actually can read the Qu’ran in the original – not an entirely warranted assumption – the lack of a good English Qu’ran translation is as telling a symbol as I can imagine of the epidemic level of stultifying mediocrity that permeates international studies regarding Islam, Islamism, and related areas of politics and culture in the Middle East and other states where Islamic belief wields enormous influence.

One can only hope that truly excellent scholars, like Juan Cole who is well-known in the blogosphere, soon become the rule. But right now, they are not only exceptional, but the rare exception.]

*You can look up Struthio camelus here, and so endeth my dabbling in Latin. For now.

Habeas Corpus Est Mortuus?

(Latin freaks: Is that right?)

I blogged about this last night when I first read Jeralyn’s shocking post but Blogger ate it. Anyway, the attack on habeas corpus is extremely serious in more ways than I can count, so go read TalkLeft’s latest and it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to write your congresscritters and point out that habeas corpus is, you know, kind of a bedrock principle for civilized jurisprudence.

Author of Upcoming “Hillary Equals Hitler” Book Hired By LA Times

Robert Scheer replaced by ignorant slimeball:

The Los Angeles Times announced a major shake-up of its op-ed page today. Gone are cartoonist Michael Ramirez and liberal columnist Robert Scheer.

In their place, you won’t find any committed progressives like Scheer. Instead, L.A. Times editors chose National Review contributing editor and “Liberal Fascism” author Jonah Goldberg. Below, some of our favorite Jonah jems, coming to a “liberal media” near you:

On McCarthy’s wisdom:

What makes McCarthyism so hard to discuss is that McCarthy behaved like a jerk, but he was also right. [False: McCarthyism is easy to discuss: It’s bad. False: McCarthy behaved far worse than a jerk knows how to behave. False: he was also wrong. ]

Banning books:

Now, I’m not in favor of pulling Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn from libraries, but let’s at least give a small nod to the fact that some material actually can be banned from libraries without the sky falling. [Note to librarians: Mr. Goldberg is not suggesting you ban his own book. That would be…censorship.]

[SNIP]

In praise of “The Bell Curve”:

[Charles Murray crunches] the numbers with the sort of élan and sophistication we’ve come to expect from the author of “Losing Ground” and coauthor of “The Bell Curve.” [Ah yes, I can see Dr. Murray right now, elegantly crunching those numbers with one hand, swirling a snifter of rare brandy in the other, all the while his colored valet anxiously hovers over the great man, ready to light a superb Cuban cigar for him when his master so signals. The height of sophisticated élan.]

[SNIP]

And, of course, Goldberg’s explanation for why he can’t be troubled with serving in Iraq:

As for why my sorry a** isn’t in the kill zone, lots of people think this is a searingly pertinent question. No answer I could give — I’m 35 years old, my family couldn’t afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter, my a** is, er, sorry, are a few — ever seem to suffice. [“I’m a hypocrite” would, in fact, cover it, Jonah]

Slanted Much?

The new Fox poll has Bush down to 36%. They can’t lie about the numbers. But you have to read the story they’ve written about them to get the full flavor of how difficult it is for them to grapple with the fact that their hero is a big, fat failure:

Another way to assess if Iraq has been worthwhile is whether it has prevented attacks in the United States. One quarter of Americans (24 percent) think homeland security measures have prevented new Al Qaeda attacks from happening since Sept. 11, and about one in seven (16 percent) think the military action in Iraq has prevented them. Another 19 percent think it is because no new attacks were planned and 26 percent think it is a combination of factors.

I suspect that the 16 percent of people who believe that the war in Iraq has prevented attacks by Al Qaeda are all regular FOX viewers. Nobody else has bought that line in some time.

.

Open Letter To Pat Robertson’s Mescaline Supplier

To Whom It May Concern,

It’s time to stop supplying Reverend Pat Robertson with hallucinogens. He clearly has tripped out once too often and it’s kind of giving the phrase “zonked totally out of your mind” a bad rap:

On today’s 700 Club, Rev. Pat Robertson took the opportunity to strongly rebuke voters in Dover, PA who removed from office school board members who supported teaching faith-based “intelligent design” and instead elected Democrats who opposed bringing up the possibility of a Creator in the school system’s science curriculum.

Rev. Robertson warned the people of Dover that God might forsake the town because of the vote.

“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover. If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for His help because he might not be there.”

via Pharyngula

The Final Throes

Suicide Bomber Kills at Least 29 in Crowded Baghdad Restaurant

A man wearing a suicide bomb belt walked into a bustling breakfast restaurant in the heart of the capital this morning and blew himself up, killing at least 29 people and wounding 30, many of them police officers, officials said.

Al Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility for the attack, according to a group that tracks Islamic militant postings. The attack was the most lethal in the capital in two months, and came a day after three suicide bombings killed 57 people in Amman, Jordan, in a coordinated attack also claimed by Al Qaeda.

It was the worst strike in a day of violence in Iraq that left at least 35 dead and more than 50 people wounded. Police officials also found 27 corpses in the southern city of Kut.