March 26
Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil, James Bovard (2003)

"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you." That was a popular joke in the 1980s. No one needed to explain the external presumption ("exformation", my sculptor friend would say) that gives it meaning : that government action can be expected to only make things worse.

I remember James Bovard from the Cato Institute in the 1980s. That was when the standard label of Cato as a "libertarian think tank" still made sense. Nowadays, Cato is just conservative, as libertarians have been largely replaced by the sort of "free-market conservatives" who believe in free markets only as long as they advance their own business interests. Bovard still defies categorization. He's neither left-wing nor right-wing, but he's not moderate or centrist either. Even as a libertarian he seems slightly out of step.

It is a sad reality that, in the steady stream of new books on current politics, the ones that get the most attention are the ones that are most partisan. Naturally, I follow the anti-Bush books more closely than the pro-Bush ones. Among those, it seems that the popularity of the book is directly tied to how much easy ammunition it gives to armchair pundits to fire for their side. That in itself is not such a problem. If the arguments are good -- and for some of the popular books they are -- then they deserve the attention. But it also gives focus to equally hard-hitting books filled with cheap shots and sloppy fact-checking, and it puts a premium on being partisan.

It is by this latter test that Terrorism and Tyranny fails to register: it is not presented as a partisan book. Of all the political books, it is possibly the strongest criticism of the Bush administration of all, but because it isn't presented as an anti-Bush book per se, it doesn't show up with recommendations on all the liberal blogs. That's not to say that Bush isn't criticized searingly for the incompetence of his policy. It's just that it's in the overall context of a critique of government policy generally. Bovard blithely skips back and forth across the border of presidential inauguration. In compiling his lists of examples -- the book is replete with lists of examples -- he might note that in April 2001 the CIA did this idiotic thing, and in December 1999 the CIA did that idiotic thing. Unless you've remembered to set your partisan alarm, you won't think to stop and say, "Whoa, wait a minute, that one's not Bush's fault, it's Clinton's fault." Because of the time period the book focuses on, Bush gets by far the larger share of the criticism, but he doesn't have a monopoly. (Reading the blurbs, I see that Bovard has written another book titled "Feeling Your Pain": The Explosion and Abuse of Power in the Clinton-Gore Years.) I'm sure that doesn't score him points with the left partisans.

The essence of the Terrorism and Tyranny -- which I've been dancing around but still haven't declared -- is a study of what the U.S. government has done to respond to the threat of terrorism, both before and after 9/11. (Other reviewers have devoted most of their space to recapping his findings. If you like that sort of thing, here's one, and here's another.) Otherwise, suffice it to say that Bovard shows the government has done very little to thwart terrorist attacks and quite a bit to encourage them, it has used the threat of terrorism as an excuse to expand government power enormously, and along the way there has been a whole lot of lying and ass-covering.

The great strength of the book is that the author devotes very little space to telling you this directly. Rather, he just keeps piling on the evidence. Here a chapter detailing all the ways in which the USA-PATRIOT Act empowers the government to infringe individuals' civil liberties, there a chapter detailing all the petty and false arrests claimed as victories against terrorists. And on and on for what ought to be ad nauseam but is too compelling to nauseate. (What does nauseate is that idiotic acronym, which is short for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.")

Outside of literary classics, I can't recall the last book I've seen with such an abundance of footnotes. (Yet another reviewer writes, "While most writers add a few footnotes to their writing, Bovard adds some first-rate writing to his immaculate set of footnotes.") The main text of the book runs 353 pages. For these there are a total of 2,066 footnotes, more than 200 in some chapters. The notes themselves are fairly short. Only a couple of them run a paragraph. Overwhelmingly, they are a simple source citation, nearly all of them a newspaper or magazine article, government document, or public speech. I say "nearly" only because I haven't checked all 2,066, but skimming through them I don't see anything that couldn't be tracked down in a large library.

The bulk of this book is like what in history we would call a "secondary source". The author has a point of view, to be sure, but rather than presenting his interpretation directly (as in a "tertiary source"), he provides the service of sifting the original documents ("primary sources") and presenting relevant excerpts to the reader in a logical order, with documentation for those who wish to follow-up.

Others might prefer the exciting but unreliable rantings of an author like Michael Moore, but Bovard's style appeals to me greatly. Indeed, where I like him the least is where he departs from this form. Interspersed among the presentation of facts is an occasional smart-ass remark, or an off-color synonym for "said" (isn't there a fancy word for that?) -- on more than one occasion, a statement by a government official is introduced as "'blah blah blah,' so-and-so whined." Whined? Did the guy actually speak with a whiny voice when he said that? This adds nothing, and only makes the quotation look suspect.

But these are the exceptions. For the most part, Bovard saves his conclusions for the penultimate and final chapters (the latter is short, like an epilogue), where they belong. Here, he is strong. Not a whole lot of ranting, just a strong summing up of what the preponderance of evidence has already suggested.

Even in the summing up, Bovard still relies heavily on summing-up quotes from others. Here's a paragraph about the FBI which exemplifies the entire book:

I've omitted the four footnotes for that paragraph, one for each quote. The following paragraph cites an example of an FBI agent who was told she would be fired for "tarnishing the image" of the FBI, after publicly revealing that an FBI team had stolen valuable property from the World Trade Center rubble.

Of the many stupid and meaningless phrases that abound in political discourse, perhaps the worst is the "war on terrorism". It's impossible to have an intelligent opinion on this "war" because the phrase makes no sense. Bovard agrees, but as usual he quotes someone else.

A war against al-Qaeda makes sense to me. Although it's not a nation-state, it is an identifiable organization which has not only launched attacks against us but has even made an explicit declaration of war (way back in February 1998, as Bob Kerrey keeps pointing out). Waging war against this group is the logical thing to do. War against Iraq, although mostly misguided in my view, is at least a coherent concept that one can favor or oppose. The exact war aims are somewhat muddled, but at least there's enough to formulate a policy out of. But the "War on Terror"? That doesn't even make sense. I don't even know if I'm for or against it because I can't figure out what the hell it is.

It doesn't help that they keep changing the definition of what a "terrorist" is. Iran is a terrorist state, but China isn't. The Washington DC sniper in February 03 is a terrorist, but the guy who mailed ricin to the Senate in February 04 isn't. (Said sniper, though irreligious, was conveniently named James Allen Muhammad. One is tempted to conclude that the real criterion that defines a terrorist is a Muslim-sounding name, but no, that fails to explain our government's love for Uzbekistan's brutal dictator Islam Karimov.)

Bovard continues:

Most of Bovard's concluding remarks are about his vision of foreign policy. I have no major quarrel with any of them, but I think the more interesting lesson here is in government reform.

Back in the 1980s, the common complaint against the Democratic Party was that its preferred solution to incompetent government was to enlarge it. If a bureaucracy is working inefficiently, give it more money. If officials are doing stupid things, give them more power. Republicans ridiculed this idiotic Democratic thinking, and they were right.

A large part of the "neoliberal" movement of the 1980s was to reject this thinking. The movement never quite took over the Party, but it had some success under Clinton (who was a sort of compromise between the neoliberals and the old school). Instead of just increasing bureaucracy, some attention was paid to fixing it. In various regulatory, entitlement, and fiscal programs, there was an effort to introduce accountability to the system, make use of market-based incentives, refocus policy goals, and improve efficiency. Obviously, government is not entirely fixed, but it was a step in the right direction. (Clinton's welfare reform was particularly successful.)

What is needed now is a similar overhaul on the Republican side of government. It has long been acknowledged that while conservatives profess to hate "big government", the aspects of government that they do like are military, foreign policy, and law enforcement. There's quite a bit of reform going on in the military, I understand, but the federal law enforcement agencies are, as Bovard demonstrates, the clearest example of bloated, inefficient and unaccountable big government today.

Perhaps because law enforcement was never a favorite issue for Democrats, Justice was the department with the worst record under the Clinton administration as well. Republicans criticized the incompetence and abuses of Janet Reno's Justice Department, and they were right. Now is their chance to do something about it, but instead Ashcroft is merely continuing the trend.

Whatever else they may disagree on, there's no real disagreement between Republicans and Democrats that the FBI, CIA, FAA, ATF, etc, ought to be engaged in making American citizens safe from terrorist attacks. The only question is how to go about it. The problem here is neither underfunding nor overregulation. The problem is bureaucatic incompetence. The first step to fixing it is to acknowledge that they've done a shitty job, and the next step is to figure out how to change that. A few on the current 9/11 investigatory panel seem to be pushing in that direction, but most of what we've seen is people protecting their turf, covering their ass, blaming the other guy, and denying there's a problem.

I don't blame the Republicans for failing to prevent 9/11. Both parties were negligent in that regard. But the Republicans are in charge now, so I do blame them for failing to fix the system even after the fact.

As usual, there were a few typos scattered throughout the book, but nothing excessive.

The typeface, although not far out of the ordinary, is distinctive enough that I was conscious of it. It looks like some variety of Garamond, but I don't think it quite matches anything I'm used to. Perhaps it's new. The publisher is Palgrave MacMillan, a British publisher. The colophon tells me that design is by Letra Libre Inc., but there's no mention of the typeface. I can't help noticing that the book fails to use ligatures for "fi" and "fl", and because the "f" has a large hook, it results in the letters colliding unattractively. (The "ft" is OK, because the "t" is so short.) Most readers would probably never notice. I'm not as much a typeface-wonk as my brother, but my own background as a typesetter does make me aware of such things.

Only two words that sent me to the dictionary. (I'll have to read some Bill Buckley to get my vocabulary fix.) In one chapter, "surveil" is used numerous times as a verb. It's easy enough to see what it means, but I was curious how recent a term it might be. Merriam Webster confirms that it's a back-formation and dates it to 1949. The other was "vivify", which Bovard uses twice near the beginning. As expected, if means "give life to". I didn't look it up until much later, so I've forgotten the original context, but I think it was something metaphoric -- like a certain statement is vivified by some certain fact.

11:22:42 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

This is old news now, but that hasn't stopped me before.

In California, one is required to specify a party (or lack of one) when registering to vote. On election day, each voter gets a primary ballot matched to his or her party. Here in Washington, party registration is not required, which I assume means that any voter can vote in any primary.

For this year's presidential primary Washington chose to hold caucuses instead of elections. The last time the state did caucuses (1984, I think), the two parties scheduled them for the same day. This automatically ensured that no one would participate in both, since it would require being in two places at once.

This year, the Democratic caucus was on February 7, and the Republican caucus was on March 9. Since there's no party registration, what's to stop a person from participating in both caucuses? Not much. There is a rule that says you're not supposed to, but having attended both caucuses, I can assure you that no one made any effort to enforce the rule at either one. At the Republican caucus, I declined to participate, but I have no doubt that they would have let me vote if I just signed my name on the sheet. Both parties keep their sign-in sheets, so presumably if I had signed up for both, someone could have eventually tracked it down and disqualified my vote(s), but by then the caucuses would have moved on to the next level. What would they do then, throw out the entire results for my district?

As I related in the first caucus report, I participated in the Democractic caucus and supported Howard Dean. Karen, who also liked Dean, would have come with me, but she was out of town, and there is no provision in caucuses for absentee voting.

Having missed the Democratic caucus, she decided to be a Republican this year. That's really not such a stretch for her. Although she is liberal on many issues and opposes President Bush, she has never been a registered Democrat. In her pre-bohemian days in Nebraska she was not just a Republican, but was active in Republican politics as well ... until religious social conservatives took control of the state party and edged pro-choice Republicans out of all positions of power. (Sort of a microcosm for what is now happening with the Party nationally -- when was the last time you heard from Susan Molinari?)

She's also Republican in temperament. I wasn't really sure what would motivate her to go to the caucus, since I know she'll never support Bush. I imagined some sort of impassioned plea for bringing the Party back to its roots and turning away from the divisiveness of the Bush regime. But that's me thinking like a Democrat. Republicans don't work that way. Or at least these Republicans don't.

Karen told me she just wants to meet people and see what's going on, and that's just what she did. She was graceful and sociable with everyone, deftly mentioning her political background without going into any detail. She quickly identified which individuals were the key players in the local party structure and sought them out. Then she casually mentioned that she was curious to know if there were many pro-choice Republicans in the district and how she might go about finding them. (I realized later that she never actually said that she is pro-choice, which perhaps explains why the one guy's response was carefully non-committal.)

The two things that struck me about the Republican caucus were the same two that struck me at the Democratic caucus, but with one the two parties were alike and the other they were opposite. Where the two were alike was in the absence of partisan rancor. If one judges only from the commentary and debate among television pundits, aspiring political hacks, and bloggers, one would surely conclude that American politics is viciously partisan. At the local level, I've found, that's not the case at all. I saw no partisan nastiness at the Democratic caucus, and none with the Republicans either. There was one young man who spoke animatedly in favor of the war with Iraq and homeland security in a bellicose way which was a turn-off to both Karen and I, but even he was unfailingly polite with none of the nasty talk about liberal traitors and so forth that we hear on the Fox News channel or talk radio.

Where the two caucuses were opposite was in organization. As I reported before, the Democratic caucus was utter chaos, and nobody seemed to know what was going on. With the Republicans, the rules and procedure were written up and carefully followed, even when it seemed almost pointless given the lack of any real work to be done. It reminded me of pedestrians at an empty intersection patiently waiting for the "walk" sign to appear even when there's no traffic in sight.

Did I mention that the Republican caucus was underpopulated? These are the precinct caucuses. The Democratic venue I attended in February housed caucuses for about 12 precincts, out of about 200 in the district, and that was enough to fill a high school cafeteria. The Republican venue was a single classroom in a large church, and it was for half the district. I counted about 50 people in attendance. Given that there must have been about a hundred precincts, that means that at least half of the precincts were not represented at all.

In large part the underattendance was due to the fact that there was no actual contest between presidential candidates. The rest is due to the fact that Seattle in general, and this chunk of Seattle in particular, is overwhelmingly liberal. (When I lived in Oakland, my representative in Congress was Barbara Lee. You'd think I could hardly avoid moving somewhere less liberal, but I managed to land in the district of Jim McDermott, so it's a close call.)

The local Republicans kept a sense of humor about their minority status. When the chairman of the meeting -- duly nominated and elected according to the rules -- made mention of contacting other Republicans in one's precinct, he added "if you can find any", and everyone laughed good-naturedly. In the discussion about electing delegates -- and by discussion, I mean the chairman explaining the procedure, something that never happened at the Democratic caucus -- it was taken for granted that each election would be a formality, since most precincts had a constituency of one. The guy at the registration desk interjected to note that one precinct had "three or four" attendees, which meant one of them might not get to be a delegate. They laughed at that, too.

About half of the precincts had a PCO -- which I now know stands for "precinct committee officer" -- already assigned, but not all of them were in attendance. Our precinct was one of the PCO-less ones, so Karen, as the sole representative in attendance, was able to unanimously elect herself not only delegate to the district convention but PCO as well. The guy in charge of the district (DCO?) is supposed to get her a list of registered voters in our precinct. I think she means to walk the neighborhood and meet them all. Karen is a natural poltician. She likes that sort of thing.

Among the forms she was asked to fill out was a questionnaire with a list of Republican hot-button issues -- taxes, war on terror, abortion, etc. She was supposed to choose and rank the three issues which were most important to her. She chose abortion as number one (as I knew she would), but had to put a note in the margin saying "pro-choice". I don't know what the Republicans in the home office (or wherever it goes) will make of that.

Another form she was supposed to sign as condition for being a delegate included a pledge that after the primary was over she would "do no harm" to any Republican candidate. That gave us pause for a moment. If it were me, I'm not sure I would have signed it, but Karen decided she was OK with it. I can't imagine the Democratic Party requiring delegates to sign something like that. Sure, we too want party unity, but I think too many liberals would balk at anything that looks like a loyalty oath. This year at least, party unity shouldn't be a problem for Democrats. We have George W Bush to thank for that.

The Republican attendees were about 75% male, in contrast to the Democrats who were about 50-50. Some were dressed in suits, but there were plenty of others in ordinary Pacific Northwest attire. Most conspicuously dressed up were a couple of boyish-looking young men with a neat haircut, a white shirt, and a tie. They looked very young and very earnest, eager to serve but not quite sure what they're supposed to do -- the same impression I get from the Mormon "elders" I occasionally see. (I spotted a pair of them at the Shoreline Library just today.)

The church classroom was not purged of religious content, and there were various Christian references on the walls and chalkboards. If it were Democrats surely someone would have objected, but none of the Republicans seemed to mind (or if they did, they were too polite to say so).

Another thing that never could have happened in a gathering of Democrats: The very first action when the official meeting began (exactly on the clock) was that the guy in front led us all in the pledge of allegiance. I must be a true Democrat at heart, because as soon as this was announced little alarms went off in my head. But when I looked around, everyone else -- including Karen -- was standing up and putting their hands over their hearts as if this were a perfectly normal thing to do. So I figured what the hell, and I stood up and recited along, even the "under God" part. (I don't know if it's because of my years as a professional church singer or just because I'm a very ecumenical non-believer, but it doesn't bother me at all to voice religious words for the sake of ceremony.)

Some of my liberal friends grouse about how Republicans have commandeered the flag to be their own partisan symbol so that any display of the flag today implies right-wing hawkishness. Sometimes I wonder if the right didn't steal the flag at all but merely got it by default as liberals all ran away from it. I think it's true that showing the flag today tends to imply a conservative view, but I wonder if that wouldn't quickly change back if liberals would simply start carrying flags and saying the pledge again.

A few weeks after the Democratic caucus, I encountered Lara on the street with her husband John. (It's a small neighborhood.) I told them of my retrospective thoughts on our precinct caucus, as described in the previous report. Turns out they had similar thoughts. John -- who was with the Dean group but would have switched to Edwards, just as his wife started with the Edwards group and readily switched to Dean -- told me that he made a concerted effort to find the two Edwards voters who had switched to Kerry, but they had disappeared as soon as their votes were changed. He intimated that he suspected the PCO of foul play. That may be, but there's no reason to assume she falsified anyone's vote. It's just as possible that she coaxed those two into agreeing to the change and then sent them away before they could be coaxed back.

8:22:35 PM  [permalink]  comment []