The Right Wing Rationale VIII: Contradictions of Capitalism

How, some may ask, does a right wing rationale supposedly based upon suspicion of earthly pleasures and sexual freedom tolerate the brand of whorehouse capitalism that seems to have proliferated since the onset of the Reagan/Thatcher counter-revolution? How explain a deregulated mass media that has seen the proliferation of Jerry Springers, infomercials, a torrent of advertising such that the 30 minutes supposedly devoted to network national news barely holds onto 17 of those minutes, the concentration of all media—including print media—in the hands of fewer and fewer corporate owners? How explain the availability of cheap foreign made goods facilitating a buying frenzy of shoddy merchandise? Disinvestment in the infrastructure leaving deteriorating mass transit, school buildings, rusting bridges, neglected parks and common areas? How does the right wing manage, at the same time, to tolerate literally unbelievable rewards for CEOs, sports stars and entertainers who live in hedonistic splendor? How explain the proliferation of sexual enterprises running the gamut from Internet porn to Strippers bars peppering the highways and byways of towns large and small? A methamphetamine epidemic in the West? Legalized gambling? Why, it’s as if George Bailey had never lived and old Mr. Potter was allowed to run Bedford Falls!

The Right Wing Rationale VII: "...rather to have not heard the singing."

“…and then I should wish rather to have not heard the singing.” There is a long tradition in the U.S. of shutting one’s ears to the singing. Many of the spiritual and political descendants of Augustine have mistrusted the sound of music. It is a manifestation which obviously cropped up in the English colonies of North American. A period of two hundred and sixty years separates the Puritans of Salem’s witch hunts (1692) from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attempts to root out the communists then in our midst. The witch hunters of 1692, the communist hunters of 1952 and the Islamo-phobes of the current period all share a zeal and a commitment to demonizing the foe that is all too common on the American political landscape. Always present is the snarl, the curled lip, the ironic wink in response to those suspect of a willingness to compromise with the Devil. Often, the visceral response to political demons goes beyond mere facial expressions and is converted into overt violence. The sanctioning of “extremism in defense of liberty” is all too easily interpreted as license to commit mayhem. Few of the anti-war protesters in 1970 would forget the hatred on the faces of the hard hat contingent who began beating them in the corridors of Wall Street. Similar expressions of hatred have been seen in the faces of Southern white housewives protecting their children from school integration and rabid anti-abortion protesters. And, again, we are often just a dangerous step or two from translating contorted expressions of hatred into violence. Forty-five U.S. marshals were shot by white mobs attempting to keep James Meredith out of the University of Alabama, and there are numerous cases of doctors willing to perform legal abortions being shot at or murdered. When Augustine wrote, the barbarians were at the gate. Always there are new barbarians in the wings. It is always the most dangerous of times, slouching toward Armageddon. As a Bishop, Augustine knew his congregants needed to be kept under control. The devils he wrestled with within were real for him, and he knew they were in the minds and bodies even of the faithful. Appetites, pleasure, concupiscence, were distractions from the path to virtue. Only the elect, the select few, have the discipline to steel themselves from their dangers. In the political discourse of twenty-first century America, modern notions of sexual freedom as it manifests itself in the debates over contraception, abortion, gay marriage resonate with these ancient fears. It may seem a precious argument to some, but those rare occasions in U.S. history when it seemed that ordinary working people could lead lives of comfort—well housed, their medical needs met, organized into unions, empowered—only proved that too much “prosperity” led to Spock babies, sexual promiscuity and anarchy. Better to spend down, pauperize, the resources of the state and make any further attempt to create a welfare state impossible. Who knows when there will ever be a better chance?

Fair Use

FAIR USE NOTICE
This "blog" contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material available in an effort to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go below. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
§ 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

TITLE 17 CHAPTER 1 § 107
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

The Rapture...

and the snarl.

"More moved by the singing..."

The Right Wing Rationale VI: The only thing we have to fear...is our own thoughts.

A line of thought can be followed from Augustine’s Confessions through Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies on to Wagner’s Parsifal and ultimately Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Ironically, it would be wrong to look for the roots of anti-Semitism in Augustine per se. In fact, if anything, Augustine can be seen as a church philosopher who reintroduced the Old Testament God into Christian thought. The resultant tendency within Christianity is a certain mean spiritedness that fifteen hundred years later the nascent U.S. conservative movement would evoke in such utterances as Barry Goldwater’s “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” We are, after all, fighting the Devil. It is just possible that Marx was mistaken when he characterized religion as “the opium of the people”. In its most extreme manifestations, far from having a sedative effect, religion has launched one bloody crusade after another. It may be more accurate to lay any manifestation of drug-induced behavior at capitalism’s door. The right wing seems to find in globalized capitalism a kind of thorazine for the masses. Characterized as essentially schizophrenic by the U.S. right wing, Islamic fundamentalists and revanchist communist leaders in former Soviet states alike are being asked to take the cure at the Thorazine-dosed waters of globalized capitalism. Salman Rushdie, a poster boy for the Islamic bashers, (he was, after all, the victim of a fatwa placed upon him by the Ayatollah Khomeni), looking plump, shiny and affluent as a result of the rewards heaped upon him for his “martyrdom,” told Bill Moyers on PBS television that Islam needed to “modernize.” Mr. Moyers neglected to ask Rushdie what he thought of the U.S. president’s having resorted to a regimen of medieval torture and abnegation of both the Geneva Convention and a right of habeus corpus that goes back to the year 1215 in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Another of the right wing poster boys, in this case, Zbigniew Brzezinski, when asked during an interview on C-Span to comment on the brutality of the regimes that have cropped up in various post-Soviet states, including his own Poland, laughingly concluded that politics in those countries was irrelevant, since they are now rolling in “money, money, money,” and that’s all that really counts. Telegraphing his own deep roots in medieval tradition, Zbigniew caught himself referring to Poland’s “peasantry,” then paused and said, “perhaps I should say ‘farmers’.” In order to truly understand the right wing rationale one must never lose sight of its roots in a tradition of Holy War that, as the example of Augustine makes clear, goes back to the very origins of what historians once unabashedly referred to as the Dark Ages. Without a demon to fight, perhaps it would be more direct to assert without the Devil to fight, the right wing has no driving force. Over the long course of history the devil has worn many disguises—Muslim hordes, Jews, Freemasons, free thinkers, communists, abortionists—but most menacing of all is the devil that lurks within each of us. In Book 33 of the Confessions, Augustine worries that "whenever it happens that I am more moved by the singing than by the thing that is sung, I admit that I have grievously sinned, and then I should wish rather to have not heard the singing".

The Right Wing Rationale: V

Now this brings us to the nub of what is at work in the neo-conservative (or the accompanying Orwellian term, neo-liberal) ideology. In order to deconstruct this phenomenon one has to look at a political and quasi-religious tradition that goes far back in history. Augustine, a founder of the Christian faith and a neo-Pauline master of the Christian realpolitik, who wrote down his ideas as his beloved Roman Empire was about to fall to the invading barbarians, might be a good place to start. It is no accident that Martin Luther, another Master Builder whose influence would ultimately extend to the creation of the Protestant Ethic and the Gospel of Wealth, was an Augustinian monk. But one needs to go back further, to the roots of Augustine’s philosophical writings. Although his City of God would find echoes fifteen hundred years later in Ronald Reagan’s “City on the Hill,” the secret of Augustine’s utopia is that he did not believe it was realizable here on Earth, only in the hereafter. It is from Augustine that we get the concept of the elect, of salvation by grace alone, of a terrestrial life which drives humans to the brink of madness because of (and this was a favorite word) “concupiscence,” that is, human appetites and desires. If we look a bit more deeply into who Augustine was, we find a converted Manichaean, a follower of the philosophy that sees the Evil Empire and the Axis of Evil as ubiquitous. Augustine was also a careful reader of Plotinus, a Platonic idealist. (The late Carl Sagan, in his closing remarks on the televised rendition of Cosmos, stated that all Western philosophy, down to the present day, has been a battle between Plato and Aristotle.) Some may recall R.W. Apple’s surprising first page comments in the New York Times on the event of the destruction of the Berlin Wall, “the most significant event since the revolutions of 1848,” and then, a short time later, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s characterization, again placed on the first page of the Times, of the fall of the Soviet Union as the end of a tradition that went back not merely to 1848, but to the French Revolution and its roots in the Romantic tradition. The all-American Apple and the brooding Russian Solzhenitsyn expressed a shared sense that what was at work in these events was an ongoing political and philosophical battle with a long history. If we look at the other side of this political coin, it also explains how Putin can characterize the fall of the Soviet Union as “the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century,” and a short time later, in an interview with Charlie Rose, find Gorbachev agreeing with Putin’s sentiments. What is at war here, and I would argue what those who see in the present neo-liberal/neo-conservative agenda real dangers need to understand, is an ancient battle of ideas at the center of which is our fundamental definition of human nature. This may seem rather esoteric, but fractals of this ancient debate are with us every day. And I would argue that unless one can see the present conflicts resolved through the sharper focus afforded by an understanding of these longer historical currents, a viable response to the millennial types now running the U.S. hegemon will be long forestalled.

The Right Wing Rationale: IV

Much of what the Bush administration has done seems to contradict orthodox conservative principles, particularly its willingness to allow enormous deficits to form. In the past, “deficit spending” was associated with Keynesian economics, while it was Republicans who looked to balanced budgets. Upon closer inspection, however, (not that much closer; it is fairly obvious), this apparent contradiction turns on a crucial difference, namely, Democrats were willing to borrow on the future in order to subsidize social programs or to maintain full employment, while Republican deficits are almost entirely the result of military spending and redistributing tax surpluses to the wealthiest sector of the population. In a return to an almost medieval and feudalistic economic arrangement, the rulers tax the people and then lavishly distribute those tax dollars to the warrior class, the upper class (nobility?) and the churches leaving the mass of the population to engage in the vagaries of the marketplace. (Remember when such people were called “reactionaries”? A perfectly fine word that is crying out to be restored to our political vocabulary.) While there is often a lot of accompanying rhetoric about a rising tide lifting all boats and how money in the hands of the entrepreneurial class is good for the whole economic spectrum, the result is an inarguable degradation in the economic and social conditions of the vast majority of the citizenry. Some see this phenomenon as driven by pure greed and an abuse of power in order to secure ill-gotten gains for as long as possible. And there is no doubt that greed and the maintenance of the prerogatives of power are what it is all about. But lots of folks here in the U.S. have difficulty believing that the old WASP establishment (and their entourage of pious social climbers and a handful of highly visible [two Black secretaries-of-state in a row—and one of them a woman] arriviste ethnics) look themselves in the mirror each morning and say, “Let’s see, what can I do today to feather my nest and guarantee that my power is secure?” The fact is they don’t ask themselves any such question. On the contrary, they see themselves and the work they do as virtuous, all in the name of our old friend, “the greater good.”

The Right Wing Rationale: III

In the U.S., Democrats, liberals and others to the left of the Bush government look on with dismay and outrage as a once prosperous middle class loses more and more of its economic prerogatives and half a trillion dollars is spent on a war that even their side considers a mistake. Half a trillion dollars. Translate that into schools, health care, repair of the infrastructure, affordable housing, a modern transportation system. Surpluses disappear and are replaced by enormous deficits. The rich do not merely get richer, they become obscenely richer. Unionized workers, such as those in the auto industry, are replaced by non-union workers manufacturing automobiles with Japanese names here in the U.S. The Walmart phenomenon of disingenuously labeling workers “associates,” and thereby desensitizing them to their actual position as workers is just one part of a general trend away from unions. Outsourcing has taken away what leverage unions once had. “If you ask for too much,” the owners will threaten, “I’ll just have to close this business and have the work done for a fraction of the labor cost overseas.” More and more workers no longer have access to viable pension plans and are being told that even their social security insurance should be “privatized.” Keynes is dead. Milton Friedman has won. Socialism is dead. Free enterprise has won. And the process is apparently far from over. The policies of the Republican Party make it clear that there is still a way to go. Government must be completely extricated from the lives of the people. Thus, the protection of government lands must go; the regulation of industry, business, the drug industry, the food producers and the media must disappear. “Faith-based initiatives” are the answer to the needs of the poor and disadvantaged states the president who claims Jesus as his hero. More than ever, it is God in Whom We Must Trust. And the counter-revolution is far from over.

The Right Wing Rationale: II

As the counter-revolution continues, we see a dramatic degradation in the quality of life. Cheap goods from China flood the market. While the slick magazines that cater to the ruling class are thick with advertisements for $30,000 wrist-watches (the ones you don’t own but merely take care of for the next generation of the obscenely rich), $500,000 baubles and billion dollar homes, the American masses are induced to drug themselves in a consumer frenzy (when they are not actually drugging themselves) of shoddy merchandise and even shoddier entertainments. Well-meaning missionary of blonde suburban Chicago housewives Oprah Winfrey—in a gesture out of the pages of Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust—gives free cars to everyone in her audience. How America has changed! Where else could a poor, abused little Black girl grow up to give out free cars to white folks like birthday party favors? Seventy-five percent of Black children are born out of wedlock to single mothers who will then listen to themselves abused and degraded by their fatherless sons in a nightmare artistic and cultural phenomenon known as Hip-Hop which sees its practitioners killing one another with abandon while white lawyers and corporations reap enormous profits and shelter themselves completely from the social quagmire they have helped to create in all-white enclaves of the super-rich. A hurricane in New Orleans cracks open a window into the reality of the conditions of millions of Black Americans and their oblivious and uncaring rulers, but there is no longer a Martin Luther King to come to their aid, no Stokely, no Black Panthers to feed the poor, and the neatly clad adherents of Malcolm soon dispersed after his assassination. There is certainly no threat from the brothers making their bling in the rap business. While the descendents of slaves live more sequestered lives than ever before, their white brothers and sisters, living in equal isolation, lose themselves in a methamphetamine haze. For the fortunate few, there are the all-white suburbs, the smell of cut grass, colonial-style shopping malls and the tank-like protection of gas-guzzling SUVs. For the tiny percentage of super rich, there is the even greater isolation from the conditions they have created in sequestered estates and high rise urban luxury. Society magazines now speak not of multi-million dollar spreads, but multi-billion dollar spreads. Out of sight, out of mind. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And so it goes. Could there possibly be a rationale to justify this still evolving social order?

A New World Order in a Can

The invention that could truly bring about a new world order is the spray-on contraceptive. The pill, even if it could have survived the propaganda campaign against it, was clearly limited in the protection it offered, that is, it could prevent conception but it did not protect against disease. The latex contraceptive, though it both prevents conception and disease, is universally unpopular and therefore underutilized. Diaphragms and other devices so far introduced all have their limitations. But think about this: a cheap, effective, spray-on medication that would both protect against conception and disease. Sex without fear. Sex without guilt. Truly safe sex. The widespread distribution of freedom in a can would end religious fanaticism, almost instantly provide a check on over-population and change the politics of the world overnight. A New World Order in a Can. Freedom in a Can. A dangerous idea? You bet. It doesn't get more dangerous than this.

Population Control: Sources of the Taboo

A conflation of interest between religious fundamentalists and right wing political extremists has made any rational discussion of the subject of population control almost impossible. There are stories of advocates for population control receiving death threats for expressing their views on the air, a phenomenon all too familiar to those who work in the area of family planning. Urban black populations in the U.S. are told that family planning is a form of covert racism, even genocide. All of the U.S. population was treated to horror stories of enforced sterilization both here and abroad as well as to tales of Chinese women living under the regimen of the “one-birth” policy and being dragged down their village streets for brutally enforced abortions.
An equation has been established and is being promoted even now with growing intensity. That equation is: population control=family planning=abortion=genocide for black, brown and yellow peoples. It is extremely important, I feel, to present a parallel equation that works in tandem with the first: globalization=access to a vast supply of “surplus” labor=non-unionized workers=powerless workers=docile workers=workers oppressed, repressed and depressed, just plain too tired to rebel (or—as a bonus-to sin)=secured low wages=fatter and fatter profits for the rich.

Population Control: Yet Another Taboo Imposed

What predisposed me to being so receptive to the implications of Michael Pollan’s work on the impact of ammonium nitrate fertilizers was a growing awareness of the huge price we are paying for allowing global populations to increase at their current rate. Each new fact about the condition of our environment that emerges from the field and from the laboratory seems more alarming than the last. Currently, we are being told that half the world’s population does not have access to a supply of fresh water. Every zoo in the U.S. has a light display showing the decimation of the world’s tropical forests taking place right before our eyes. Air pollution, water pollution, over-fishing and over-farming, urban sprawl, the misuse of chemicals and anti-biotics in agriculture, the uncontrolled appetite in the developing world for more cars, more industry and therefore even more pollution and misuse of irreplaceable resources are chronicled daily even in the so-called corporate media. One would think, then, that there would be widespread interest in taking steps to check the growth of population and avert a global disaster. The fact is, however, that even a cursory glance at what is available on this subject will soon demonstrate to the inquirer that--since around 1980 and the onset of the Reagan presidency—the term “population control” has been expurgated from rational discourse. It has, in effect, been rendered a taboo subject.

The Haber Effect: III

What distinguishes Fritz Haber’s work from that of Einstein is that the implementation or application of the idea, far from being seen as a human tragedy, is celebrated as a great victory. A recent example of this celebratory tone was published in the New York Times on Saturday’s Op/Ed page (10/14). In a piece by John Tierney titled “The Kids Are All Right,” Tierney ridiculed those who, in the 1960s, tried to warn the world of the dangers of over-population. Now, while the global population has increased from 3.5 billion in 1968, when Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, to its current figure of 6.5 billion, Tierney apparently sees no crisis. Tierney smugly points out that Ehrlich et al. were in error in predicting food riots in the streets within decades of their predictions. We have, by this index, averted the Malthusian catastrophe. If Michael Pollan is right, that catastrophe was averted largely through the application of Haber’s work, that is, enough ammonium nitrate was infused into the earth’s surface to give us more people chow (aka corn) than we ever dreamed of to keep every belly full. Back to that “greater good” notion. In a way, I am surprised that the Times published Tierney’s piece at all. There has for decades now been a conspiracy of silence with regard to population growth. In the years before Paul Ehrlich wrote his book, public service announcements about the dangers of over-population were ubiquitous. When is the last time you saw one of those? Of course, 1968, the year Ehrlich’s work was published, is the year the world ended—at least the world as we knew it once. Hippies, riots, Vietnam, revolution everywhere—and the pill. Good lord, you could have sex and not worry about getting pregnant. Free at last, free at last. Too free, obviously, for some’s taste; some like the Catholic Church, (which had a long history of campaigning against birth control and family planning even before the pill came on the market), and just about any organized group on the planet that saw in freeing men and women from the wages of sin the opening of the door to larger, ever-increasing freedoms. The full panoply of weapons was used in the battle to suppress this dangerous possibility. The Church unleashed its propagandists, used what political power it had, the dangers of the pill were writ large, (and out of all proportion to the actual risks), the poor were told that they were being made sly victims of genocide, China’s one birth policy offered as proof of the totalitarian nature of all such tampering with nature. And then, after millions and millions chowed down on all that corn, we had (to borrow a felicitous metaphor from John Tierney) 13 billion hands to work at sewing machines for the entrepreneurs of the new global empire. Now, no one talks about the dangers of over-population. Or, if they do, it's hard, very hard, to hear what they are saying in the din of all those sewing machines.

On the nature of blogs...

It appears that it is in the nature of the blog beast that one can go back and change (edit?) one's blog after having posted it. This feature seems to raise a moral issue. On those occasions when this is done, does the blogger have a responsibility to acknowledge the change? Mistakes--in grammar, style, or, more importantly, facts--are always embarrassing. How convenient to go back and change--more or less surreptitiously--one's original text. I am brought to this juncture because I found in reading over the Smithsonian article on Fritz Haber that has caused me to post quite a few blogs that I had an important fact wrong. Haber's wife did not kill him; she killed herself--still a shocking story, perhaps even more shocking than the mistaken scenario that I posted, particularly when one learns the details. Nevertheless, this is both a confession and an acknowledgement that I went back and changed the post so that my error was no longer there. I am also tempted to state here that I vow never to do that again, that I will instead check my facts carefully, and that I will take the time to patiently proofread my work. Then again, I have quit smoking many times.

The Haber Effect: II

Let's take a second look at the quote from Vaclav Smil. "He estimates that two of every five humans on earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention." (Italics mine.) At current estimates of over 6 billion humans on the planet, that means that we have Haber's invention to thank for the existence of 2.4 billion human beings. Let us, at the outset, stipulate that once a human is born, it is a life to be respected and cared for. On the other hand, is it not now clear that the cost to the planet of maintaining such a large population represents the single greatest threat to our survival? (Let us further stipulate that even if Einstein or Haber had become musicians rather than scientists, others would likely have gotten credit for the scientific breakthroughs with which they are credited.) Now, let's look at another characterization of Haber's work, this time from the on-line encyclopedia, Wikipedia: "The sudden availability of cheap nitrogenous fertilizer is credited with averting a Malthusian catastrophe, or population crisis." This conclusion, it seems to me, is the exact opposite of the truth; rather than averting a Malthusian catastrophe, the use of ammonium nitrate fertilizers has in fact caused a Malthusian catastrophe.

The Haber Effect

"He estimates that two of every five humans on earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention." Thus writes Michael Pollan of Vaclav Smil's conclusions regarding Fritz Haber's work. The moral relationship between scientific invention and the uses to which inventions are put is one most of us are familiar with in the context of Einstein's, and, later, the Los Alamos crowd's more direct contributions to the development of nuclear weapons. Is Einstein to be blamed for the bomb? The end result of the debate for most of us is to conclude, along with the gun lobby, that ideas don't kill people, people do. It is even difficult to blame figures like J. Robert Oppenheimer who worked directly to develop the bomb when one considers the frightening consequences of allowing extremist nation-states sole access to such weaponry. The moral debates around atomic weapons, however, usually share consensus on one essential point, namely, that every effort must be made to avoid their actually being used. Is Einstein's work per se to be considered evil? Few would argue that this is the case. At the same time, the results of Einstein's and the other physicists' ideas make it painfully obvious that with power, comes responsibility. And few can imagine scenarios in which the actual use of nuclear weapons against populations could be characterized as anything other than a human tragedy.

An excerpt from the Smithsonian article...

In his book Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the Transformation of World Food Production, Vaclav Smil pointed out that "there is no way to grow crops and human bodies without nitrogen." Before Haber's invention, the sheer amount of life earth could support—the size of crops and therefore the number of human bodies—was limited by the amount of nitrogen that bacteria and lightning could fix. By 1900, European scientists had recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt. The same recognition by Chinese scientists a few decades later is probably what compelled China's opening to the West: after Nixon's 1972 trip, the first major order the Chinese government placed was for 13 massive fertilizer factories. Without them, China would have starved.This is why it may not be hyperbole to claim, as Smil does, that the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen (Bosch gets the credit for commercializing Haber's idea) is the most important invention of the 20th century. He estimates that two of every five humans on earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention. We can easily imagine a world without computers or electricity, Smil points out, but without synthetic fertilizer billions of people would never have been born. Though, as these numbers suggest, humans may have struck a Faustian bargain with nature when Fritz Haber gave us the power to fix nitrogen.Fritz Haber? No, I'd never heard of him either, even though he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918 for "improving the standards of agriculture and the well-being of mankind." But the reason for his obscurity has less to do with the importance of his work than an ugly twist of his biography, which recalls the dubious links between modern warfare and industrial agriculture: during World War I, Haber threw himself into the German war effort, and his chemistry kept alive Germany's hopes for victory, by allowing it to make bombs from synthetic nitrate. Later, Haber put his genius for chemistry to work developing poison gases—ammonia, then chlorine. (He subsequently developed Zyklon B, the gas used in Hitler's concentration camps.) His wife, a chemist sickened by her husband's contribution to the war effort, used his army pistol to kill herself; Haber died, broken and in flight from Nazi Germany, in a Basel hotel room in 1934.

The Haber Gallery

This is Herr Haber (second from the left) with some canisters of poison gas.

A note to the readers

While I am asssembling my notes for future blogs on Fritz Haber, let me take this opportunity to point out that it is important that everyone watch: Judicial Proceeding Slave Reparations Case Oral ArgumentU.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit to be broadcast on C-Span at 7:00 pm tomorrow, Saturday, October 14th. If this country is ever going to get turned around, there is no doubt in my mind that a prerequisite for change is the payment--long overdue--for the labor extorted from those peoples who, against their will, were brought to these shores. It took almost a century for the U.S. to roll back the post-reconstruction neo-slave state laws that dominated the South. Ultimately, the other shoe must drop. Forty acres and a mule? Not nearly enough.____________________________________________As for Fritz, I am planning on posting highlights from the Smithsonian article as well as a bibliography. Interested readers can profit from "googling" Fritz Haber. Check the "images" and "scholar" search engines as well as the general site. And, while I am at this, allow me to anticipate myself. I have come to believe that there are certain macro issues that cry out for more attention, for far more public awareness. Primary among these is the issue of overpopulation. Remember when there was so much concern regarding overpopulation that it was the subject of televised PSAs, or public service announcements, in the 1950s? Whatever became of that concern? If, when the world population was a mere 3 billion, there was so much attention given to the problem, why has the issue disappeared from the public view when the planet now has 10 billion people? Embedded in Fritz Haber's largely suppressed story are important clues to why this has occurred.

Fritz Haber

Study this face carefully.

How Stubbing One's Toe Can Change One's Life Forever

So, there I am visiting my doctor’s office after having (yet again) stubbed my toe on a stone planter in the hall of my apartment. After flipping through copies of People and Golf Digest, I finally come upon the July 2006 edition of Smithsonian magazine. It will be a longer wait than I anticipated, and I am sent off to another building to get the toe X-rayed, and thus I have the kind of time with a magazine that leads one down literary paths one does not ordinarily take. After reading every word of the articles on Egyptian artifacts and the like, I find myself reading a piece titled “What’s Eating America”. At first, it seems like yet another expose on how our techno-food is killing us, but, as I read on, my eyes widen and my pulse quickens as I learn one shocking fact after another about the life and work of one Fritz Haber. The revelations about this man’s life and work have an impact upon me comparable only to the impact of having learned where babies really come from when I was a little boy. Now, I consider myself (or did up until reading that article) a fairly well-educated man. The gaps left in my knowledge of how the world works, (left by hard-working Catholic nuns, public school teachers and the professors at a college for the working classes), I believed I had largely filled through my own, independent inquiries and through serendipitous encounters with a few key individuals. Then, born yesterday, I find this article in a doctor's waiting room. There, seen in the above photograph standing next to Einstein, (up until now the leading 20th century candidate for ill-starred sorcerer’s apprentice [unless, of course, one believes the rumors that he plagiarized his relativity theory from his talented shiksa girlfriend]), is Fritz Haber, inventor of ammonium nitrate and a variety of poison gases, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1918, collaborator with the Nazis, left a widower when his first wife takes his service revolver and kills herself out of despair over his work. Fritz, the inventor of Zyklon B, was Jewish. His work has brought the world closer to the brink of human extinction than any mere nuclear device ever could. Why hadn't I known of this man before? Why doesn't everyone know about this guy? Run, do not walk to this link, and stay tuned to this blog for more: www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2006/july/presence.php?page=2

A Mascot for a New Party

One of my regular correspondents, (in the name of full transparency, my brother, Joe), suggested that the blogs I have posted argue for the formation of a new political party. His early contribution to the movement is the suggestion that we adopt the beaver as our mascot. I pointed out that the beaver is a traditional icon of the City of New York as well as City University, (some will recall the beavers immortalized in mosaics at various subway stations), but, hey, all the more reason to go with it. Now all we need is a name for the party, a platform and members. If you have visited this site before, you know that an early draft of the platform must include a call for the U.S. to adopt the parliamentary system, thereby ending the imperial presidency and opening opportunities for smaller political parties to form that truly reflect the political diversity of our nation. More details later. Suggestions are of course always welcome.

On "Constitutional Crisis": Part V

The history of the U.S. presidency since the end of World War II seems incontrovertibly to argue for its replacement as an institution if democratic norms compatible with the realities of twenty-first century politics are to be created. The U.S. need a parliamentary system that would encourage a multiplicity of parties; it needs a democratically elected prime minister. The imperial presidency represents a danger both domestically and in terms of our relationships with other nations. Take this morning's news as an example. President Bush's response to the detonation of an underground nuclear device by North Korea included statements to the effect that "the United States is committed to diplomacy," and that the detonation was "a provocative act." Only a child could take such rhetoric seriously coming from the head of state who recklessly baited the North Koreans by citing them as part of the axis of evil, issued policy statements that reserved our right to pre-emptively attack our enemies, and then proved that his government was willing to do so by fabricating intelligence as a rationale for an illegal invasion of Iraq. The imperial presidency invites Alice in Wonderland rhetorical inversion delivered with sublime arrogance. No head of state liable to the standards of transparency, of "open covenants openly arrive at," would dare such disingenuous rhetoric.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Well, now that Kim Jong Il has detonated a bomb in an underground test, it seems inevitable that all hell will break loose--at least on a rhetorical level. Were there not real perils to humanity in this kind of power game, the sequence leading to the event would be the stuff of a black comedy. The neo-conservative cabal that took over the reigns of U.S. government, (which, as I pointed out earlier was, even before 9/11, clearly determined to go to war somewhere), early on sabotaged any hope of peace on the Korean peninsula by labelling North Korea part of the "axis of evil." This, in spite of the fact that during the Clinton years, North and South Korea seemed to be moving closer to rapprochement, if not actual reunification. The "Sunshine Policy" seemed to be working. Trade agreements had begun, family members were reunited, movement across the DMZ had begun. Kim Dae Jung was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the fifty year old bifurcation of the peninsula. The axis of evil speech, in combination with the almost insane saber-rattling of the U.S. statement of its security policies which put forth a policy of pre-emptive war, put a rapid end to any hopes for an end to conflict in that part of the world. Why, if our new, post Cold War enemy had been identified as Islamic terrorists, the cabal decided to throw into the political stew the regimes in Pyongyang and Havana is only a mystery if we look for rational behavior from the cabal. If a declared enemy of the U.S. had any doubt about our capacity for violating international law and invading and occupying a declared enemy state, all such doubts ended after the invasion of Iraq. It was only a question of time before Kim Jong Il would puff up his feathers and brandish the only weapon the U.S. seems to respect. As this political time bomb ticks away, the ticking in Tehran seems to get louder and louder. The existence of nuclear weapons anywhere represents a threat to humanity. But this is not what drives U.S. policy. The Bush administration in fact has torn up its own treaty commitments with regard to proliferation, and has perversely shown a willingness to dangerously augment the Indian nuclear arsenal--an arsenal that came close to being somewhat depleted in a recent conflict with India's erstwhile brothers in Pakistan. We seem only interested in not allowing nuclear weapons to proliferate in any but our client states. If there were a list of responses to the question, "Why do they hate us?", an admittedly disingenuous parlor game in any case, probably only second to the maltreatment of the Palestinians would be Israel's hardly secret possession of over two hundred nuclear warheads. More fundamentally, "proliferation" is an interesting concept. Whatever happened to "disarmament," a word and a concept that seems to have disappeared from the dictionary of U.S. policy. In the absence of a threat from a counter-balancing super power, why does the U.S. need a nuclear arsenal at all? Imagine how the 21st century might have begun had the U.S. celebrated the end of the Cold War by announcing its commitment to the total abolition of nuclear warfare.

On "Constitutional Crisis": Part IV

There are those who argue that until the modern period, the presidency was essentially ceremonial in nature. Others point to how close the independent confederation formed after the American revolution came to crowning George Washington, effectively exchanging one King George for another. Washington is often depicted as nobly turning aside the crown, sparing the newly forming nation a monarchy. Here in the "new" world, in the western hemisphere, we see many nations ruled by presidents elected to terms of office. I will argue here that, ironically, it is in the old world once ruled by absolute monarchs--kings, caesars, tzars and kaisers--that representative democracy became more highly evolved. Perhaps it is precisely because the old nation states knew intimately the dangers of absolutism that they took care to prevent its re-emergence. It is here, in the Americas, that ruling classes--often seated precariously atop empires large and small populated by surly native populations, imported slaves, indentured servants, adventurers and arrivistes--took special care to secure their own safety. A parliamentary democracy composed of such constituents would be dangerous, first of all, and secondly, (given the low opinion of white Christians for their lessers), to give the notion that such populations could rule intelligently, with any dignity at all, would not only be irresponsible, but laughable. The U.S. presidency thus evolved into a role partly ceremonial, partly that of a colonial administrator and partly that of a war chief. It has proven itself to be, from the perspective of those who continue to look to government for democratic norms, a tragic failure. Its further impact, since parliamentary advantages have been abandoned in favor of what is essentially a system of serial monarchy, is to have encouraged an extra-constitutional two-party system, hitched to the failed star of a flawed presidency, which has been less and less friendly toward actual political diversity and has evolved into an institutional party representing only one segment of the society it is mandated to represent--the monied class, large corporations and a military-industrial complex which looks more and more like a permanent government.

On "Constitutional Crisis": Part III

"To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water." So reads Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. As any beginning student of the document knows, there is nothing in the constitution that gives the President any such rights. The article gives those rights solely to the legislative branch. As Commander-in-Chief of the armed services, it is the President's role to execute the will of the people as expressed by their elected representatives. Nevertheless, ever since President Eisenhower left office in 1961 warning the nation in his farewell address of a military-industrial complex, we have seen, with only a brief interlude, a succession of presidencies mortally compromised by the abuse of constitutional power. Eisenhower's immediate successor, John F. Kennedy, is assassinated. His assassination is linked--by Americans of all political stripes--to the C.I.A.'s Bay of Pigs invasion. Lyndon Johnson is virtually hounded out of office for his conduct of the war in Vietnam, and chooses not to run for a second term. Richard Nixon, on the brink of impeachment, is forced to resign after a long list of crimes related to his attempts to "neutralize" opposition to the same war as well as covert operations in Laos and Cambodia. Ronald Reagan, with the complicity of the sitting Vice-President and former C.I.A. director, George Bush, would have been impeached for the Iran/Contra debacle, perhaps the most egregious abuse of presidential power yet to come to light, were it not for the belief among the nation's elder statesmen that the nation could not bear the stresses upon the system of another Watergate. Bill Clinton is impeached. The last of these episodes seems to have nothing to do with foreign adventures, (although some would question a la "wag the dog" whether that was entirely true), and may in fact have been a form of delayed Republican retribution for the bloodbath of Watergate. Thus, from 1961 until the end of the twentieth century, the U.S. saw a succession of failed presidencies. The final tally: one assassination, one impeachment, one resignation, and two impeachments which should have taken place. There were only two exceptions--Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, essentially interim caretaker presidents. At the end of this trail of tears there appears on the scene a man who would remove what little doubt remained that the American presidency had evolved into an extra-constitutional invention. For only the second time in U.S. history, a president would be chosen by the electoral college. (The first instance, the election of Rutherford B. Hayes, saw a deal brokered in which the occupying forces of the U.S. Army were withdrawn from the defeated Southern states. The result was the end of "reconstruction" and the institution of a regimen of state terror toward the freed slaves which would continue unchecked for nearly a century.) After days of dark comedy involving "hanging chads," and allegations of rigging at the ballot boxes, a conservative Supreme Court gave a conservative favorite son, a man whose profoundest dream was to be baseball commissioner some day, the gift of the American presidency. The will of the majority of the American people had been successfully thwarted.

On "Constitutional Crisis": Part II

If a constitutional crisis means anything at all, it means an action or actions taken by a branch of government which calls into question the very coherence of the constitution, its actual viablility as a document. In other words, a constitution is truly in crisis not merely when there are forces that violate its words or its spirit; that happens all the time. A true crisis tests the value of the document itself. Why "crisis?" Because certain actions render the Constitution (as Sam Goldwyn once observed of verbal contracts) not worth the paper it is written on. Theoretically as well as practically, the litmus test of whether a true constitutional crisis exists is the existence of a citizenry ready--and determined--to rewrite the document. Now the extreme form that such a movement would take is a call for a constitutional convention, a phenomenon that both left and right in this country have always feared. But the founders, a sophisticated group who understood the real danger of inflexibility, created an intermediate protocol, namely, the offering an amendment to the constitution. In fact, as we saw in the aftermath of the Civil War, a series of amendments may be necessary. To some extent, these amendments may be seen as designed to preserve and maintain the state. During periods of severe crisis, however, their actual role may go so far as to redefine the state.

On "Constitutional Crisis"

Ultimately, the Bush administration may do our nation a great favor. By governing in such a manner that its behavior has, in one instance after another, elicited the reaction that we are being pushed toward a constitutional crisis, we may be forced to actually come to terms with what that phrase actually means. The manipulators of the language and their various propaganda outlets have so abused the meaning of what language means that one symptom of this abuse is numbness. i.e., we become inured to the real impact of certain terms. They do this, of course, to attain their objectives without risking any real accountability. ("Golly," says the President, "unless you guys give your blessing to torture, ignoring international law, and the tenets of our constitution, they'll charge us as war criminals!") That is an unbelievable utterance from the head of a nation that considers itself the world's greatest democracy. Let's step back from the political debate for a while and give the term constitutional crisis a fresh look.