Postings from September 2002
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

PERMALINKS: Contrary to the fears of my Aussie blogger friend Jason Soon, I do have permalinks. But, remember, this is a roll-your-own-HTML site (at least until I get it redesigned). So you have to look at the source code to find the anchor tags. Looking for the item on Gore's speech? It's at http://www.dynamist.com/scene.html#vengeance. That's not a truly permanent link, since eventually I'll move items to the archives. But it should be good for at least a couple of weeks. [Posted 9/26.}

VENGEANCE AND OCCUPATION: It's far better to read Al Gore's speech than to watch clips, or even the whole thing, on TV. Reading removes the annoying vocal intonations, thereby giving the argument its due. Reading also reveals that much of the argument, including some important conclusions, is missing.

At the outset, Gore promises "to recommend a specific course of action for our country." That "specific course" appears to be the following:

The president should be authorized to take action to deal with Saddam Hussein as being in material breach of the terms of the truce and therefore a continuing threat to the security of the region. To this should be added that his continued pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is potentially a threat to the vital interests of the United States.

But Congress should also urge the president to make every effort to obtain a fresh demand from the Security Council for prompt, unconditional compliance by Iraq within a definite period of time. If the council will not provide such language, then other choices remain open.

But in any event, the president should be urged to take the time to assemble the broadest possible international support for his course of action.

When I was a young reporter, I would sometimes use "specifics" like that—"every effort," "other choices," "broadest possible." My editor had a term for that sort of writing: "weak and vague." Diplomats may have no other choice, but leaders promising specific recommendations owe their audiences more.

At any rate, those recommendations don't get to the heart of Gore's argument: "that we ought to be focusing our efforts first and foremost against those who attacked us on September 11th and who have thus far gotten away with it....I don't think we should allow anything to diminish our focus on the necessity for avenging the 3,000 Americans who were murdered and dismantling the network of terrorists that we know were responsible for it." (Emphasis added.)

This is a very interesting way of framing the task at hand: not to prevent future attacks on Americans but to avenge the deaths on September 11. Now there's no question that many Americans, myself included, have entertained the desire for vengeance. But the only reason to act on that impulse is to make it clear that future attacks will be costly for the attackers. Vengeance for vengeance's sake is just blood lust. It might feel good, but (leaving aside any humanitarian considerations) it doesn't solve the fundamental problem. Vengeance may even make matters worse, by escalating blood feuds without eliminating threats.

Gore's pooh-poohing of the administration's Iraq policy depends in large measure on his definition of the problem. If you want to prevent further attacks, you have to worry about state-sponsored weapons programs. If you just want to get revenge, you don't.

Revenge aside, Gore's best summary of his agenda is stated in the negative: "President Bush is telling us that America's most urgent requirement of the moment right now is not to redouble our efforts against Al Qaida, not to stabilize the nation of Afghanistan after driving his host government from power, even as Al Qaida members slip back across the border to set up in Afghanistan again."

Before we can look elsewhere for dangers, we should fix Afghanistan and dismantle Al Queda. Right this minute. Everything else is a distraction.

What makes Saddam dangerous is his effort to acquire weapons of mass destruction. What makes terrorists so much more dangerous than they have ever been is the prospect that they may get access to weapons of mass destruction. There isn't just one country that is attempting to get access, nor is there just one terrorist group. We have to recognize that this is a whole new era, and the advances in the technology of destruction require us to think anew.

Think anew! It's worthy of a Dilbert PowerPoint presentation. What new thoughts are we to think? Here's where I get to writing "weak and vague."

As best I can parse his speech, Gore has two real recommendations: 1) We need to have a multinational effort to root out Al Qaeda and, in that effort, we need to smooth relations with Germany. 2) We need to thoroughly occupy, pacify, and control Afghanistan, as we did Japan and Germany after World War II. (Neither of these recommendations is spelled out as clearly as I've just stated them, presumably because clarity implies commitment, which implies risk of contradiction. I doubt that Gore would acknowledge the second interpretation, but it's hard to see how he can escape it.)

Gore is right that we need German cooperation against Al Qaeda, which has major operations based in that country. But German self-interest pretty much guarantees that help. The Germans have no more desire to have their citizens blown up than we do.

And who is Gore kidding about Afghanistan? Contrary to the impression he leaves, we do, of course, still have troops operating there. They just have a small footprint—for very good reason. The Afghans are none too partial to foreign occupation. Under current policy, U.S. troops aren't an occupation force, and they present relatively few targets for terrorist attacks. Follow Gore's nation-building recommendations, and that imperfect, but tolerable, situation would change quickly.

The idea that an invasion of Iraq would distract from the fight against Al Qaeda shows a failure to "think anew." It suggests that wars must be won by deploying tens of thousands of troops, conquering territory, and occupying it. Some wars must indeed be fought that way, but not in Afghanistan if you can help it. And the campaign against Al Qaeda requires different sorts of tactics, including some that look a lot more like law enforcement and intelligence work than military attacks.

These aren't easy problems, which is why Gore's speech is so annoying when you hear him give it in that smug, smarter-than-thou tone of voice. Afghanistan is indeed a mess, and Al Qaeda is indeed still around. But trying the well-known "quagmire" approach wouldn't improve the situation. There may be sound arguments against invading Iraq, but "distraction" from Afghanistan is not one of them.

Contrary to some proclamations, an invasion may very well be a bloody, difficult business, and it certainly will have unknown ripple effects (including, we can hope, some positive ones). An attack on Iraq is necessary, I believe, but I sincerely hope the administration is basing its plans on worst-case assumptions, not cheery optimism. Unlike Gore's rhetoric, real foreign policy doesn't have the option of remaining weak and vague. [Posted 9/26.]

LONG WEEKEND: Like Glenn Reynolds, I'm off to a Liberty Fund conference on Richard Epstein's Principles for a Free Society. Unlike Glenn, I don't expect to use my limited free time to update the site. Blogging will resume next week. [Posted 9/20.]

ECONLIB: In linking to Liberty Fund above, I checked out their Library of Economics and Liberty site, a.k.a. EconLib, for the first time in much too long. The site features accessible, short articles by top-notch scholars. It's full of good stuff—Don Coursey on how Endangered Species Act enforcement implicitly values different species, Bernardo Huberman on "Patterns in the World Wide Web, and much more—and highly recommended. [Posted 9/20.]

BEARING WITNESS, CONT'D: Reader Mitch Townsend writes, in response to the posts below:

I happened across your post just as I was finishing Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies. He says there is no meaning to history, that history as we are taught it is the history of power politics, "the history of international crime and mass murder." He goes on to say that history really cannot be told, for it is the concrete history of every person and "all human hopes, struggles, and sufferings."

I think he would have agreed that a battered briefcase or women's' shoes discarded in flight are every bit as meaningful as historical artifacts as a mausoleum or a triumphal arch. To me, they are if anything more poignant.

[Posted 9/20.]

BLOG CHILDREN: Sometimes abstinence is the best way to reproduce. Reader Tom Brennan writes:

I missed you, Sullivan and Reynolds [When did Reynolds go on hiatus--vp?] so much during your various blog holidays i started my own. It's mostly gay stuff. seemed like enough people were doing good all purpose blogs. Intended to write mostly about the gay left but the fish/barrel thing makes that a little too limiting so it's changing over time. Anyway it's here.

Tom has a fun post on Rosie O'Donnell's magazine-killing tantrum, with emphasis on her new "ThompsonTwins/Human League angular slash bang look" (photo provided). A couple of the other items reminded me of one of my favorite recent headlines, from the lead story in the Dallas Voice, the gay weekly: "Gay Enron Exec Pleads Guilty to Fraud" (or something like that). Now that's equality. [Posted 9/20.]

ANGRY JAPANESE: On Shoutin' Across the Pacific, Ron Campbell has several interesting posts on the Japanese response to official confirmation that North Korea kidnapped numerous Japanese citizens, that most of the kidnapped Japanese have died, and that several are still held prisoner in that country. [Posted 9/19.]

DAVE BARRY: "While I know many smart libertarians, nobody sells it quite as well as Dave Barry," says Ken Layne, and he's got a point. If you haven't read it already, check out this Reason interview with Dave Barry. It's an oldie but a goody. (Don't believe the stuff about me. Glenn Garvin was just trying to kiss up.) [Posted 9/18.]

WARREN ZEVON: I'm the last blogger on the block to mourn Warren Zevon's certain-to-be-fatal lung cancer, but the sentiment is no less sincere. Lots of TFAIE was written to Zevon's compilation album, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, and Steve and I were lucky enough to hear him perform at the L.A. House of Blues a few years back. I recently purchased his new CD, My Ride's Here, on the recommendation of Happy Fun Pundit. (Thanks, guys.) It's interesting that Zevon is so beloved in the blogosphere, since he's hardly a household name. What are the odds? Better than random, that's for sure. It's nerd music, Steve says, and he's probably right. Who else would write, or like, a song like "The Envoy"? (I believe I read somewhere was about Philip Habib, but I'm not sure the timing works out for that to be right).

Nuclear arms in the Middle East.
Israel's attacking the Iraqis.
The Syrians are mad at the Lebanese.
And Baghdad'll do whatever she please.
Looks like another threat to world peace for the envoy.

Things got hot in El Salvador.
The CIA got caught. It couldn't do no more.
He's got diplomatic immunity.
He's got a lethal weapon that nobody sees.
Looks like another threat to world peace for the envoy.
Send the envoy.
Send the envoy.

Whenever there's a crisis, the president sends his envoy in.
Guns in Damascus. Oh, oh, Jerusalem.

Nuclear arms in the Middle East.
Israel's attacking the Iraqis.
The Syrians are mad at the Lebanese.
And Baghdad'll do whatever she please.
Looks like another threat to world peace for the envoy.
Send the envoy.
Send the envoy.
Send for me.
Send for me.
Send for me.

[Posted 9/18.]

EASY SITE SUPPORT: Support this site (and my reading habits) by placing your Amazon purchases through this site. I get more if you order a book I've linked to directly, but I get something no matter what you buy, even used stuff, as long as you come from this site. And Amazon just sent word that the cut goes up with the total number of items ordered per quarter. My sincere thanks to the reader who ordered the D-Link AirPlus DI-614+ Wireless 22 Mbps Broadband Router for a whopping $117.95, of which I got $5.90.

Since Amazon frowns on self-generated commissions, I place my own orders at Joanne Jacobs's site. [Posted 9/18.]

BEARING WITNESS, CONT'D: Responding to the post below questioning the WSJ line on the Smithsonian's 9/11 exhibit, reader Maureen Duffy cites her experience at another monument:

Your post brings to mind my visits to Auschwitz and Birkenau several years ago, and how extremely moved I was by my encounter with the quotidian there....

At Auschwitz, I was deeply moved by a display of suitcases and satchels, each one neatly and securely marked with the owner's name and destination: Koslowski - Warszawa; Styczynski - Poznan. These humble objects bore testament to that now-unthinkable whiff of optimism that springs eternal in the human condition.

And I stood for a long, long time in front of a case that held a jumble of shoes, photographs, combs, toys, and other - again quotidian - objects. I saw a smiling pull toy next to a single shoe - obviously someone's "dress-up best." Knowing me, I surely would have packed my best shoes, too.

>> This really happened, said the exhibit, and it happened to people like you. Relics make history tangible and these relics, combined with audio recordings and written notes from visitors, make history human. <<

Precisely. I have gleaned comfort - and perhaps meaning - from the homely and quotidian

Not every important event happens to Great Men. Not every evidence of a crime against humanity is an official document or even a mass grave. [Posted 9/18.]

CONDITIONALLY UNCONDITIONAL: The Iraqis apparently have their own definition of "without conditions," which is, "with conditions." For starters, there's the delay: a 10-day delay just for the meeting on the arrangements, never mind the inspections themselves. More important, the Iraqis' letter leaves wiggle room for conditions: "the Government of the Republic of Iraq reiterates the importance of the commitment of all Member States of the Security Council and the United Nations to respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of Iraq." And, according to Fox News Channel reports (citing British news reports I haven't located online), that "respect" is translating into limiting inspections to military installations.

As the Japanese and the would-be Confederate States can testify, the U.S. government traditionally takes the idea of "unconditional" a bit more literally than the United Nations seems to. [Posted 9/17.]

COST OF WAR: In his Newsweek column, Robert Samuelson does a nice job of working through the economic costs of war with Iraq. War is unlikely to boost the economy, but neither is it likely to do much damage. "The United States has become so wealthy it can wage war almost with pocket change," writes Samuelson. "A war with Iraq would probably cost less than 1 percent of national income (gross domestic product). Americans have grown accustomed to fighting with little economic upset and sacrifice."

Unlike Mark Helprin, and others who act as if the economy hasn't grown in the past 60 years, Samuelson recognizes that it's a good thing—and the mark of a great power—to have the option of waging war without crippling the economy. More foreign policy options, with less domestic pain, are desirable. There's always the danger, of course, of confusing less pain with no pain and trivializing the costs of war. But suggesting that suffering builds national character, as Helprin and other WWII nostalgiacs do, misses the point of Why We Fight. [Posted 9/17.]

BEARING WITNESS: On September 11, I went to the newly opened Smithsonian exhibit, "September 11: Bearing Witness to History." The crowds were quiet, nearly silent, as we filed past display cases of relics—the famous squeegee, shards of airplane, twisted steel beams, rescuers' uniforms and tools—and listened to frantic messages left on answering machines and calmer, though often emotional, recollections recorded for posterity. Among the artifacts, I was for some reason particularly struck by this dust-covered briefcase and its accompanying history:

When the first plane struck the north tower, Lisa Lefler, an Aon Risk Services executive, immediately evacuated her 103rd-floor office in the south tower. In her haste she left her briefcase behind. Seventeen minutes after the north tower was hit the south tower was struck, cutting off the escape path above the 78th floor. Fifty-six minutes later, the entire building collapsed, killing 175 of Lefler's fellow Aon employees.

Several days later, Boyd Harden, a rescue worker at Ground Zero, found the briefcase in the debris and returned it to Lefler.

The briefcase's survival was less moving than Lefler's own escape, but the artifact stood for the whole story. It was more than a battered satchel.

In a few small rooms, one powerfully displaying photos and telling the photographers' stories, the exhibit re-evoked the emotions of the day and amazingly managed to tell some unfamiliar stories. This really happened, said the exhibit, and it happened to people like you. Relics make history tangible and these relics, combined with audio recordings and written notes from visitors, make history human. Viewing them with the reverential visitors of 9/11 was an apt way to mark the day.

And after that experience, it was a disappointment, though hardly a shock, to read the WSJ "Taste" page's take on the subject. Arts editor Eric Gibson mocked museums for collecting artifacts immediately after the history they represent. In the good old days, an artifact was "a very old object recovered with some effort—often fished out or dug up—that connects us, like an emissary from the past, to a distant event." In Gibson's view, saving a pair of shoes left behind by a woman fleeing the Twin Towers is stupid—"Why should they be preserved?"—even though women's abandoned shoes were noted by everyone who fled that day.

It's a bizarre argument. Artifacts are no less historical if they haven't stayed in the ground for centuries. History is just the present that has passed. Collecting the relics a moment after the event passes simply makes it more likely that the stories will be accurate. The flag that flew over Fort McHenry, inspiring our national anthem, wasn't "recovered with some effort" but preserved, along with the receipts from the flag-maker, by the family of the fort's commander. Does Gibson also object to the Smithsonian's preservation of the Star-Spangled Banner? [Posted 9/17.]

WHAT GREENSPAN KNOWS: Brad DeLong has had several self-deprecating posts recently that say what used to be conventional wisdom and is now downright contrarian: Alan Greenspan understands the U.S. economy better than most of his second-guessers. Here's the most recent:

Greenspan 5, DeLong 2

"You know me," said one senior Federal Reserve policymaker of the 1990s, "and on the inflation-unemployment tradeoff I'm dovey-dovey. I'm not prone to undercount the distributional and productivity benefits from low unemployment. I'm not prone to overweight the costs of moderate inflation. Yet there I was, in the Chairman's [Greenspan's] office, beggin him to raise interest rates. The NAIRU [the unemployment rate at which inflation is steady] couldn't have fallen that far. Potential growth couldn't be that fast. But he would say, 'It doesn't feel like an economy in which inflationary pressures are building'. And he was right.

Whenever we monetary economics types get together, sooner or later the topic of conversation turns to Alan Greenspan. "He's not a God," somebody will say. We will agree that he's not a God. "He has a hard time giving a coherent explanation of why he holds his views," someone else will say. We will agree. Often, after a Greenspan explanation, our only reaction will be, "Huh?"

"But why is his judgment so good? Why is he so right so often?" someone else will say. And we will have no answer. He knows things about how to analyze the modern business cycle that we do not. As I've said before, my personal scorekeeping has Greenspan 5, DeLong 2 on the seven occasions I can think of since 1987 when I've seriously disagreed with his monetary policy—and that's with my scorekeeping.

Like the operation of the Digital Conveyer, the making of monetary policy seems to be more art than science. Yet I do have one wish: I do wish that Alan Greenspan had several good apprentices, people who know how he thinks and how he reaches his judgments. Because this is a powerful piece of social knowledge that he has—but that I cannot think of anyone else who shares.

Unfortunately, it's also the sort of tacit knowledge that isn't easily shared. [Posted 9/17.]

BACK HOME AND SICK: Maybe it was all those infectious disease specialists talking about viruses, but I came home from DC with a horrible head cold that takes at least 50 points off my I.Q. So, since this is a volunteer effort, I'll resume blogging when I recover. In the meantime, check out my latest NYT column, on dynamic programming and football. The column makes reference to this fascinating Times piece on retailers using mathematical models to decide when to put items on sale. [Posted 9/13.]

IN MEMORIAM:

I will be spending September 11 (and 12) in Washington, DC. [Posted 9/11.]

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE: Last year, when this site became less a pundit's page than a communications hub, filtering and posting messages from around the country and across the world, several readers sent me notes about a remarkable posting on Jerry Pournelle's site. Here's one exchange:

Hi Virginia,

Here's an item that you may want to reference in regard to your New Incentives piece this morning on passenger resistance during hijackings.

As the note below reveals, this did happen on flight 93 and could very well have been the reason for the plane not reaching the hijackers' intended target.

The piece is from Jerry Pournelle's site, and I've included the link and full text below.

Best,
Michael Reed

Dear Jerry,

Following is a message which my one of my best friends passed along with permission to distribute to those who might be interested. It fills in the details that I missed in my original conversation with him and attempted to relate to you.

Tom has given me permission to distribute the message - please feel free to post it if you deem it appropriate.

Sincerely, Art Russell, Major, US Army (Retired)

Message Follows:

Today was a tragedy for all of America and to my family, a very personal one. Lynn and my Niece Liz's husband, Jeremy Glick was on United flight 93 this morning. When the Hijackers took control of flight 93. Jeremy called my niece who in-turn conferenced him to 911. Jeremy relayed to the police what was happening as the hijacking unfolded. As our niece Liz listened, Jeremy told the police there were three Arab terrorists with knives and a large red box that they claimed contained a bomb. Jeremy tracked the second by second details and relayed them to the police by phone. After several minutes of describing the scene, Jeremy and several other passengers decided there was nothing to lose by rushing the hijackers. Although United Flight 93 crashed outside of Pittsburgh, with the loss of all souls. Jeremy and the other patriotic heroes saved the lives of many people on the ground that would have died if the Arab terrorists had been able to complete their heinous mission.

Please offer your prayers for all of those who perished or were injured in this tragic of all days and to our niece Liz Glick and her 2-month-old child, Emerson, who are left without their loving Husband and Father. May we remember Jeremy and the other brave souls as heroes, soldiers and Americans' on United flight 93 whom so gallantry gave their lives to save many others.

Lynn, our four adult children and I are headed to New York to be with our family during this time of great sadness

All of my best,
Tom

Skeptic that I am, I found the report too good to be true. To Michael, I replied, "Thanks. I'm aware of this report but would want independent verification, e.g., by the police who supposedly received this call or even directly by the wife."

We now know it was correct, and that changed everything.

This MSNBC.com account is moving in its reportorial detail. And if you haven't read it already via Glenn Reynolds, Dave Barry's column on Flight 93 is a must read. [Posted 9/11.]

DEFENSE EFFORT: One reason for light posting recently is a trip to speak to a group of people working on a biodefense project. The project isn't classified, but neither is it public, so I can't tell you about it. Suffice it to say, their work is both scientifically and organizationally ambitious. It's hard, but if it succeeds, it will not only strengthen our resilience against biological attacks but also improve the clinical diagnosis and treatment of mundane, non-terrifying infectious diseases. I'm tremendously grateful that someone had the vision and gumption to try it, and I hope it works. (Even if it doesn't, it will advance biomedical knowledge and already has.) My contribution was an after-dinner speech—hardly the front lines of research, medicine, or defense, but I hope it helped a little. [Posted 9/10.]

WHAT WORRIES ME: I ended my speech last night with an idea I've been thinking—and worrying—a lot about recently. In The Future and Its Enemies, I talk about two different sorts of stasists: "reactionaries," who want stability and seek a society that conforms to an unchanging ideal model, usually based in an idealized past, and "technocrats," who want control and seek to centrally regulate and shape social, cultural, or economic evolution. Thinking about Western democracies, particularly the United States, I assumed that reactionaries would need to use technocratic means to reach their aims.

The full reactionary package is a tough sell in contemporary America. Even trade protection, which enjoys support from interest groups that stand to benefit, has proven a consistent loser in presidential campaigns. And few people want to smash their computers, give up off-season fruits and vegetables, turn their backs on modern medicine, move in with their cousins and in-laws, or forgo higher incomes. Even fewer resonate to slogans like "Back to the Pleistocene!"...If exhortation and polemics aren't enough to rally the public to voluntarily adopt your favored form of stasis, government help is available. Ever since the Progressive Era, when Theodore Roosevelt defined the mission of public officials as "to look ahead and plan out the right kind of civilization," technocrats have dominated American politics. And technocrats know how to stop things.

I also assumed that technocrats and reactionaries would believe that their visions are not just more desirable but more pratical than the more decentralized dynamist idea. But it's possible to believe that dynamist means are practical, even if you don't want a dynamist society and, in fact, want to destroy both the institutions and ideals of open, liberal, innovative cultures.

So here's the question: What happens when we find ourselves facing militant reactionaries who, for purely pragmatic reasons, are willing to use adaptable, decentralized organization and technologies against us? Unlike our Cold War adversaries, the militants who want to build an unchanging Islamicist world have no ideological dedication to central planning and control. They're nimble, they're transnational, they're adaptable, they're quick. And our defenses depend in large part on hypertrophied technocratic institutions—sluggish, highly bureaucratic, and driven as much by poltics as pragmatism. If we can't respond by playing to our dynamist strengths, rather than our technocratic weaknesses, we're doomed.

On an optimistic note, at least some people in high places understand this problem all too well. Here's Don Rumsfeld in his NYT interview, which is worth reading in its entirety.

Q. Let me try one out on you then, if I could, speaking about Al Qaeda and terror networks. In some ways they're a virtual enemy in that they have leaders and they have budgets and they have command and control and they can wreak terrible damage and they're like a country with an army - but they don't have a country, they don't have headquarters, they are a virtual enemy. What you do in this building, what the military does, is completely real and solid. What are some of the new things you think this building and this military have to learn to do to fight an enemy that's a virtual enemy?

A. The first thing it has to do, as always, is to acknowledge the fact. Once having done that, recognize that in addition to the other things that it always has done, or needs to do, for deterrence and defense, those things haven't disappeared; we also have to begin to develop the ability to live in the world that you've described.

You do that by recognizing that the world's changed, understanding the ways it's changed and the way those changes disadvantage you as a country, and then providing leadership in this institution so that down through the building and the establishment there is an understanding that we need to organize, train and equip to live in that world.

Business as usual won't do it.

There are a lot of implications of that change and one of them is the need for being swift on your feet, and big institutions aren't swift on their feet. They're ponderous and clumsy and slow. Powerful over time, but not deft.

One thing about the world you described is that it learns every day. It goes to school on you. It watches how you're behaving and then alters and adjusts at relatively little cost, relatively little time, relatively little training to those incremental changes we make in how we do things.

And our changes tend to be slower, more costly and visible. Their changes can be cheaper, quicker and for a period—a longer period than in our case - but for a period, invisible.

I'm glad Rumsfeld is Defense secretary, not just because he's smart, quick-witted, and as articulate as George Bush is tongue-tied, but because he knows that the difficult long-term challenge of defense transformation is his most important job. [Posted 9/11.]

OOPS: I somehow cut the population of Norway in half in the item below. Reader Kirk Parker points me to this site, where the population is roughly the size of Dallas's. Actually, nobody can agree on how big Dallas is. The estimates I saw ranged from about 3.5 million to 4.5 million, but reader Roger Chaillet points to this estimate of 5.6 million. It's a big town, and getting bigger every day (though not quite as fast as it was during the telecom boom). [Posted 9/7.]

SOUTHERN LIBERALS, CONT'D: I'm shocked at how interested people are in this topic. It's pretty much exhausted, but I wanted to get in one last post on the subject. My friend Charles Oliver has several interesting posts on the subject. He thinks "this entire discussion is pointless." I'm a huge fan of Charles's, but he's wrong. He thinks the question is why some southerners in Big Media are liberal, as though all southerners should be conservative. If we were talking about a random sample of 40-somethings, Charles would be right.

But the discussion started as an inquiry by Andrew Sullivan and readers into why particular individuals of a certain age and background adopt certain positions vehemently and seemingly without a lot of thought, much less tolerance for other viewpoints. That people like Howell Raines and Tom Wicker were "southern liberals" when that meant something very specific is relevant to understanding their positions today—although, as Midge Decter points out, some of them were safely ensconced in New York, where their positions required no social or professional bravery, let alone the physical courage of civil rights activists (as opposed to civil rights supporters, who weren't in physical danger but could face social and professional ostracism).

Still, people should read Charles's posts. He has a southern background that is completely unrepresented in Big Media. If you want real diversity in the newsroom, hire Charles. [Posted 9/6.]

INTERESTING POINT: Andrew Sullivan posts a long and interesting excerpt from a piece Midge Decter wrote reflecting on her experiences working with southern boys who moved north. This sentence caught my eye: "What Wicker was really saying here was that, given where and how he grew up, to have discovered that Negroes were human made him a better man than those who had never doubted the proposition in the first place." Score one for Decter. And let's consider a slight rewrite, "What [insert your favorite New York intellectual of a certain age here] was really saying here was that, given where and how he grew up, to have discovered that communism was evil made him a better man than those who had never doubted the proposition in the first place." [Posted 9/5.]

SOUTHERN LIBERALS CONT'D.: Glenn Reynolds has a roundup of blog and letter commentary on the issue of liberal southerners in Big Media, and Mickey Kaus has added some smart thoughts on the subject, including the gentle note that Andrew Sullivan "doesn't quite understand America yet."

Via Glenn, I read Geitner Simmons's excellent item on southern liberals and newspapering. All I could say was, "Why didn't I think of that? I must be an idiot." It's hugely obvious, but we all missed it. My Little Rock-born mother raised me on tales of the 1957 bravery of Harry Ashmore and the Arkansas Gazette, a paper that didn't make Simmons's list but could have. (For those to whom it is not already obvious, I was raised a southern liberal and, despite the widespread belief that I'm a woman of the right, I still essentially am one. Like my father, however, I'm inclined to a liberalism of the classical variety.)

And now for a brief selection from my reader mail, which was overwhelmingly and gratifyingly positive. James Ingram writes:

Bless you, my child. You have it exactly right.

Howell Raines is a pain is the ass, to be sure. But he grew up in a place where to speak out against spitting on little (black) girls on their way to a (white) school was to risk ostracism as a dangerous radical. Indeed, within the memory of persons now living, including perhaps Mr. Raines, it was a rare Southern newspaper that would editorialize against lynching and not uncommon for one to editorialize in support of the practice.

My dad told me that when he was a young intern in Georgia hospital in the 1930's an orderly (orderly was a black job in this segragated hospital) was accused of rape by a white woman. None of the house staff, who knew the man believed the accusation. Perhaps he was guilty, perhaps not. It did not make much difference since he did not survive his arrest. Few black men did in such circumstances. It is the kind of thing that makes a lasting impression.

That's the most on point piece I've seen in a long time. I became one in the 1970s for exactly that reason. But when I left George Wallace, Lester Maddox and Ross Barnett for the national Democrats I found George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey.

Thank God for Ronald Reagan. A lot of us were saved from permanent knee-jerk liberalism because we thought it through. You could be against segregation without being a fool on fiscal and economic issues.

And then there's this unusual reading, courtesy of one p84269317@yahoo.com, who headlines it, "Asking to be fired from NYT?"

I can only guess so, since saying that your boss reflexively takes any position labeled "liberal" is tantamount to calling him mindless or stupid, and wouldn't any employer fire an employee in a heartbeat if the latter declared such a thing and trumpeted it to whole world?

"Hey, listen everybody! My boss is an unthinking, reflexive idiot!"

Sometimes you say interesting things, so I'm disappointed that you've taken up lame Maureen Dowd-like psychologizing and ad hominem attacks instead of debating your opponents on the merit of their ideas.

I'm sure the type you draw exists, but to broaden that to the sweeping generalization of your last paragraph is particularly dumb, and you provide no evidence at all that it applies to Raines, other than that he's a southern liberal of that generation. Case closed!

Even more offensive is your statement that people who stay home and are small-town intellectuals looking down on the locals are hicks. I doubt you'd reflexively denigrate the intellectualism of a provincial metropolitan who stays home by calling her a hick. I'm sure your red state colleagues will love that suggestion that small-town people should naturally give way to the superiority of big-city folk! And is the self-righteous superiority of certain intellectuals more objectionable than the self-righteous superiority of anti-intellectuals like Dubya?

Despite the unusual spin of the reading, Mr./Ms. p84269317 raises an interesting point about provincialism. Yes, indeed, I do find it everywhere, including in big cities. There is no American more provincial than a Manhattanite, except possibly a Bostonian.

But "small-town intellectuals" are a specific breed, and not every intellectual who lives in a small town qualifies. The pathology develops among people who feel so alienated from and besieged by the culture around them that they lose interest in knowing anything nuanced about it or about related ideas. They come to believe not only that the local culture is entirely bad but that everyone outside it who shares anything with it (politics, religion, taste in music, art, or fashion, etc.) is bad and that everyone outside it who disagrees with it is good. Small-town intellectuals thus develop a mentality every bit as provincial as the hicks they scorn, sometimes more so.

The small-town liberal intellectual is akin to the embattled conservative intellectual in the big, liberal city, who can't tell (or won't acknowledge) the difference between Jacob Weisberg and Noam Chomsky. Come to think of it, with an ideological and fashion makeover, Ann Coulter would make a great small-town intellectual.

For the record, I am not and never have been a Times employee and hence have no "boss" there (and if I did, it wouldn't be Raines but a much lower-down business section editor) and also no knowledge of the place's internal politics, of either the ideological or organizational variety. All I know is what I read in the paper.

Finally (a response mostly to unpublished letters), Dallas is not a small town. It's a city with more than a million people within its very narrow city limits and around 4 million in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. It's not a world capital like my beloved L.A., but stick it in Europe and it could pass for a small country. It's nearly twice the size of Norway. [Posted 9/5.]

SOUTHERN HYPER-LIBERALS: Beginning with his bete noire, Howell Raines, Andrew Sullivan has been on a tear about the preponderance of annoying southern liberals in Big Media. But he and his correspondents (or at least the ones he quotes) seem to think these people are aggressively liberal because they're afraid their lefty colleagues will think they're hicks. The implication is that they aren't really liberal; they're just defensive. That's not it at all. If they wanted to avoid being thought hicks, they could have stayed home and been small-town intellectuals (a special sort of hick) looking down on the locals.

They're aggressively liberal because their thinking was formed by the civil rights movement, when local conservatives were really, really bad. I am not being ironic when I say that. Unless you were a southern liberal when being "liberal" meant being in the very small minority that believed in ending segregation and treating black people as equals, it is hard to imagine how Manichean the divide was and, in these journalists' minds, still is. (Nowadays, the civil rights movement is like the French resistance. Everybody supported it. But everybody didn't.) They see the conflict as civilization vs. barbarism. Also, if you've lived where evangelical Christians are in the aggressive and overwhelming majority, and you don't share their views, they're a lot more likely to give you the creeps. The same can be said of small-minded self-described liberals when they're in the aggressive and overwhelming majority.

In other words, southern liberals in Big Media are liberals because they think that's the side of good, and they're self-righteous about it because they've seen southern conservatism at its worst. The problem is that they're surrounded by people who think all things "liberal" are good and true, and they haven't adjusted their political categories in 30 or 40 years. Label a position "liberal," and they'll take it—aggressively. Here's to liberalizing trade! (Come to think of it, the NYT is pretty much for liberalizing trade...) [Posted 9/4.]

COLLEGE VS. PRISON: Iain Murray of TechCentral Station has an important piece debunking the common claim, made most recently by the Justice Policy Institute, that there are more African-American men in prison than in college. For some reason, advocacy groups believe that portraying black men as dangerous criminals is good for race relations.

Groups like JPI are worried about the effects of the drug war, as am I. But they're still feeding stereotypes, and Murray makes a convincing case that they're doing it with bad statistics. Here's the core of it:

[I]t is misleading to compare the number of African American men who are incarcerated with the simple number of college students. It is a simple fact that a man can go to prison at any age, but is far more likely to be in college between the ages of 18 and 24 than at any other time in his life. The more meaningful comparison here is to look at how many men of college age are enrolled in college or under custodial supervision. When the figures are broken down by age, a much different picture emerges, one that is much less helpful to the Justice Policy Institute's case. There were 469,000 African American males between the ages of 18 and 24 who were enrolled in college in 2000, compared to 180,000 in prison or jail. An African American male of college age is therefore over two and a half times as likely to be in college than in prison. That is a significant difference....

Moreover, by focusing on the respective numbers of African American males in college as opposed to prison or jail, the study ignores the huge differential in the numbers for females. There are 747,000 African American women aged 18-24 enrolled in college, but only 9,000 in prison or jail. Less than a decade ago, in 1994, there were only 561,000 African American women enrolled in college. That represents a 33 percent increase in only 6 years, despite the relative reductions in State education expenditure highlighted by the Justice Policy Institute. It also means that there is a total of 1,216,000 young African Americans in college, as opposed to 189,000 in custody. That is a huge disparity which should be very good news.

In a completely different context—incomes of various ethnic groups—something Thomas Sowell wrote long ago taught me the first rule of looking at statistics comparing groups of people: Always correct for age. Young people are poorer (and also more likely to commit crimes) than older people. In this case, the trick is to think about age within the group. Not everybody is college-age, and prison sentences can last longer than four years. [Posted 9/4.]

MODERNITY AND MALARIA: The link no longer goes to the right column, but Chris Matthews's description of his recent bout with malaria is worth excerpting:

I had the species of malaria, falciparum, which is the most aggressive. It kills you either by clogging up the arteries to your brain or by simply killing enough blood cells to cause extreme anemia.

Parasites had taken over 4 percent to 5 percent of my blood cells. A pathologist at Sibley told my wife Kathleen that he'd never seen so many parasites on one slide.

With all those rioting bugs racing through my brain, no wonder I was delirious.

The bottom line is that I'm a very lucky fellow. I had great doctors. I was given quinine, antibiotics and that wonderful intravenous that kept running fluid into me. I was in an air-conditioned hospital so nice they call it "Club Sib."

I kept thinking, especially in those early days in intensive care, what it's like getting malaria for the average African. You're lying in some hut. It's 105 degrees. You're running a temperature almost that high. You have no quinine, no drugs whatsoever and no clean water. You just lie there sweating and delirious until the lights go out.

[Posted 9/4.]

THANKS: Thanks to everyone who sent emails of support while I was on hiatus—and to those of you who amazingly even threw money in my Amazon and PayPal tip jars while I wasn't posting—and to those of us who've sent me notes congratulating me on finishing the book. Of course, the book isn't really finished. I've still got lots of revisions to do, footnotes to check, and an introduction to write.

Also, thanks to all of you who've helped me with the research, by sending links to articles in your local papers (and elsewhere) and answering questions about things like Christmas lights and wardrobe sizes. It's been great to be able to tap your diverse knowledge. The book is much better than it could have been without your help.

Posts will come in dribs and drabs over the next day or so. I've got a couple of longish pieces I want to write, and that will take time. I've also got a whole bunch of broken links to fix or remove, and the blog links could use an update. And it's time to start thinking about redesigning Dynamist.com to transform it from a TFAIE-oriented site to a more general site that includes a section for The Age of Look and Feel. If you're a web designer looking for work, drop me a note with some ideas, prices, etc. [Posted 9/4.]

WATCH THIS SPACE: My book, now known as The Age of Look and Feel, has electronically flown to my editor in New York. Blogging will resume tomorrow (or maybe late tonight). [Posted 9/3.]