Reason Magazine - Staff > Jesse Walker

Other Victorians

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:40:00 EDT

When the 17-year-old daughter of a Republican vice presidential candidate turns out to be pregnant and unwed, our culture-war stereotypes turn inside-out. In 2008, under the appropriate circumstances, a Christian conservative can be more tolerant of teen sex than a liberal Democrat.

"Life happens," said Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), when Bristol Palin's condition was revealed. "We appreciate the fact that the Palins addressed the issue in a straightforward manner and that they are providing loving support to the teenager and her boyfriend," commented the Concerned Women for America. "Being a Christian does not mean you’re perfect," added James Dobson. "Nor does it mean your children are perfect. But it does mean there is forgiveness and restoration when we confess our imperfections to the Lord."

Some on the left have taken the same approach. Most significantly, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) asked his supporters to "back off" from criticizing the Palin family, pointing out that his own mother had been 18 when he was born. But others have plunged gleefully into the so-called scandal. Where conservatives called for tolerance and understanding, the libs said, Where was the girl's mom?

The high-minded approach to this was to bring up the pregnancy in tandem with Gov. Sarah Palin's support for abstinence-only sex ed, thus seeming to reduce the issue to a matter of public policy. The Stranger's Dan Savage, for example, wrote this on Monday:

Yes, ordinary American families face this situation all the time. Fewer would face this situation, however, if we had comprehensive sex education in the United States, and teenagers had access to accurate information about birth control methods and contraceptives were made easily available.

It should be obvious, but apparently isn't, that virtually no one following this story has any idea what Bristol Palin and her boyfriend knew about contraception, nor whether they didn't use birth control at all, used it improperly, or used it properly but it failed. If they didn't use any birth control, we do not know why they made that decision. We do not know whether Sarah Palin (who may oppose teaching about birth control in the government's schools, but is not opposed to contraception) talked with her daughter about birth control; nor do we know what, if anything, Palin's boyfriend's parents imparted to him. We do not even know how Bristol Palin feels about "this situation." In short, we don't have the slightest idea whether comprehensive sex education would have changed the Palin family's lives one iota. I'm no fonder of abstinence education than I am of any other form of social engineering, but the efforts to turn the Palin pregnancy into a school-policy anecdote are absurd.

But at least Savage paid respect to Bristol's autonomy. ("It’s great that Bristol is choosing to keep this baby. As the adoptive parent of a child born to a pair of unwed teenagers, I’m certainly not in favor of abortion in all circumstances.") Move away from the pundits and into the ordinary conversations of Palin's ordinary opponents, and the talk gets uglier.

"Way to go," writes one Boston Globe reader. "Great example for all young girls. Get pregnant at 17." Another adds: "She cant even control her own daughter in her home, and she wants to run the country!! no way!!" At mixx.com: "if Gov. Palin can't control what happens underneath her own house roof and how would she be able 2 run the White House." At Fox News: "if she cant control her daughter AND bring her up proper, she has no business as a Vice President." A blogger called the Homosecular Gaytheist, a handle that might suggest a certain social tolerance, instead calls Bristol "the slutty alcoholic daughter of Sarah Palin" and asks, again, "How will Sarah Palin fare in running the entire country after the inevitable death of John McCain if she can’t even run her own family?" Control, control, control. Foucault would have a field day.

And no, I'm not just cherry-picking obnoxious blog comments. I'm repeating the ones that resemble arguments I've heard out here in the real world, talking to neighbors and eavesdropping in cafés. (Well, not the "slutty alcoholic" bit. That one may be sui generis.) Some of this may just be partisanship gone wild, just as some of the Republican defenses of Bristol Palin would melt away if she were an Obama. But these aren't just hardcore Blue Team cheerleaders talking. They're normal Americans working themselves into high dudgeon because Sarah Palin was an insufficient Sex Cop. It's the same burst of puritanism that greeted the pregnancy of Jamie Lynn Spears. But it's a peculiar sort of puritanism, because it's aimed at young women who plan to keep their babies. Apparently, not everyone approves of the Juno narrative.

It's easy to accuse Palin's Christian defenders of fair-weather tolerance, to suggest that they wouldn't be so sanguine if Bristol, say, decided to raise her child without a father. It's easy and, in many prominent cases, it's probably right. But that isn't the only fair-weather tolerance on display.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

The Yippie Show

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Viewing the trial as a theatrical experience, I had great respect for the judge. He was witty, filled with his own sense of drama, and committed to his role with a furious passion....The part did not call for a Solomon because the law stank. It called for a yippie judge who could play in a real-life political version of "The Flintstones." Julie was our man, and together we made it happen.—Chicago Eight defendant Abbie Hoffman on Judge Julius Hoffman, in Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, 1980

Forty years ago this week, the Democratic Party gathered in Chicago to choose a presidential nominee. Protesters—some violent, most not—gathered there too, to denounce the Vietnam War. By the end of the four-day convention, the city's cops had gone berserk on national television, assaulting demonstrators, reporters, and random bystanders while the network cameras rolled. The police, wrote Mike Royko of the Chicago Sun-Times, "beat people beyond the point of subduing them. They chased them down and left them bleeding." Inside the convention hall, Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut accused the mayor of unleashing "Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago."

According to a report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, the week was an extended police riot. According to a federal grand jury, it was a leftist conspiracy. Eight activists were charged with inciting the chaos; the accused included Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the most public faces of a loose coalition of radicalized hippies called the yippies. The yippies had called for a Festival of Life in the streets and parks of Chicago—an alternative, they said, to the Democrats' Festival of Death. They brought a puckish sort of guerilla theater to the city, nominating a hog called Pigasus for president and threatening to add LSD to the city water supply. (The authorities actually stationed National Guardsmen by the reservoir, just in case the pranksters were serious.) Hoffman and Rubin weren't the only important yipsters, but they were the ringleaders of the gang. After the riots, when the news of the indictments came down, some other notable yippies—satirist Paul Krassner, disc jockey Bob Fass, Fugs founder Ed Sanders—formed a conga line on Hoffman's roof and sang, "We're not indicted! We're not indicted!"

After a three-ring trial, the defendants were eventually acquitted on all charges, though some of them had to appeal the initial verdict before they were completely cleared. The convention and its aftermath had been a victory for the yippies.

It was a victory for their enemies, too. The central story of Chicago wasn't just that cameras captured bloody police violence every evening. It was that the great American TV-viewing public overwhelmingly told pollsters afterwards that they sided with the cops. "That was our shortsightedness," says Krassner. "When we started chanting, 'The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching,' we didn't go to the next step, which was, And how are they gonna feel about it?"

The Polarization Artists

In Nixonland, his insightful study of the period, the historian Rick Perlstein points out that Nixon "welcomed conflict that served him politically. A briefing paper came to the president's desk in the middle of March instructing him to expect increased violence on college campuses that spring. 'Good!' he wrote across the face." Jerry Rubin welcomed the polarization as much as Nixon did. "We yippies must reprint [George] Wallace speeches, get him TV time and open up offices for him all over the country," he wrote in his 1970 book Do it! "He's the best Marxist rabble-rouser in Amerika today. He's our best organizer." And: "To build their myth they exaggerate our myth—they create a Yippie Menace. The menace helps create the reality."

Then there's this remarkable passage:

The right wing is the left wing's best ally.

Who was the first person to call the battles at San Francisco State College "a guerilla war—Vietnam at home"?

SDS?

Fuck no.

Ronnie Reagan!

(I can now reveal a secret. The last time I voted in an election, I cast my free Amerikan vote for the only movie star in the race, Ronnie Prettyboy.)

I doubt it's literally accurate that Rubin voted Reagan for governor, but there's a poetic truth lurking behind the sarcasm. The party of anarchy thrived on repression. The party of law and order thrived on disorder.

Krassner never cared for that sort of thinking—as a stand-up comic, he says, he was "always willing to sacrifice a target" when an unjust leader left office—but he understands it, and occasionally he felt flashes of it himself. I mentioned the memo that made Nixon scrawl Good! He replied with a memory of his own:

When Cronkite came on and reported the Kent State shootings, he said, 'Something has happened that many Americans were afraid would happen,' something like that. It was a moment of horror, but I remember saying to myself, 'Good.' I wasn't glad it happened, I had terrible sympathy for the people who were killed and their families and fellow students. But a month or a couple of weeks before that, in some southern college, some black students got killed. And I thought, Now white people will see that it's their own that are getting it. Now maybe they'll get more involved.

That sort of strategizing doesn't always work out as planned. "The right wing believes so intensely in their own bullshit," Rubin wrote, "that they are too stupid to deceive and govern effectively. Unlike the liberals, they don't know how to divide-and-conquer." It turned out that Nixon and Reagan were adept at dividing and conquering after all. In politics, it's a mistake to assume you're the only one who understands how the media work.

Understanding Media

Forty years ago, the yippies seemed unusual because they fused the political radicalism of the New Left with the long-haired, grass-smoking lifestyle of the counterculture. Today that combination is so familiar that many people don't even realize that the protesters and the hippies initially distrusted each other. What seems most curious about the yippies today is the way they mixed hard left politics with a deep appreciation for pop culture. Abbie Hoffman announced that he wanted to combine the styles of Andy Warhol and Fidel Castro. Jerry Rubin dedicated Do it! not just to his girlfriend but to "Dope, Color TV, and Violent Revolution." Even when praising a form of mass culture that had earned some grudging respect from the late-'60s left—rock 'n' roll—Rubin's list of musicians who "gave us the life/beat and set us free" included not just raucous originals like Jerry Lee Lewis and Bo Diddley but Fabian and Frankie Avalon, commercial confections that most lefty rock intellectuals disdained as insufficiently authentic. In one chapter, Rubin complained that if "the white ideological left" took over, "Rock dancing would be taboo, and miniskirts, Hollywood movies and comic books would be illegal." All this from a self-proclaimed communist whose heroes included Castro, Chairman Mao, and Ho Chi Minh.

It's not that the yippies swallowed pop culture uncritically. (Hoffman kept a sign attached to the bottom of his TV that said "bullshit.") It's that they saw the mass media's dream-world as another terrain to fight in. Krassner remembers the yippie circle analyzing virtually everything on the tube, even "watching shows like The Smothers Brothers and comparing that with Laugh-In, that Laugh-In was using easy reference jokes about controversial issues, whereas the comedy in The Smothers Brothers really represented how they felt."

Seven years after Chicago, Jerry Rubin turned up on the second episode of Saturday Night Live, pitching a product called Up Against the Wallpaper. Hoffman attacked the sketch as "a major sellout....He was a caricature of Jerry Rubin making fun of the '60s, but he was not pushing a point, an alternative." If you're plotting Rubin's political trajectory, you can mark 1975 as the year he moved to the right of Tommy Smothers.

Trajectories

To fully comprehend the yippies, you have to look at what they did in the '70s and '80s as much as the '60s. Hoffman got arrested on cocaine charges and subsequently spent six years underground. Rubin plunged into the New Age movement and sampled a series of self-improvement techniques. In his 1976 book Growing (Up) At 37, Rubin wrote about his experiences with everything from primal scream therapy to est; in one bizarre section, the man who once preached the life-changing virtues of LSD now waxed poetic about carrot juice.

Meanwhile, out on the lam, Hoffman wrote this in a letter to his wife:

Drugs have no intrinsic value. All communist countries have correctly outlawed them. There are loads of other exhilarating ways to get high. Communist governments have a cultural revolution to achieve that is national in scope. Our task in the U.S. is to build countercultural institutions that make the raising of children breeding grounds for revolution and rebellion against the wishes of the dominant, decadent culture.

His real views revealed at last? A temporary affectation by a man whose underground life had unleashed an identity crisis? Or maybe just a spasm of guilt in the wake of the coke bust? Who knows for sure? When he surfaced in the '80s, Hoffman crusaded against Reagan's drug war, and his passion for the issue certainly seemed sincere then.

By that time, Rubin had come up from the broader cultural underground, getting a job on Wall Street and later arranging networking parties for young professionals at the Palladium. I saw him debate Hoffman in the mid-'80s, when he and his sparring partner toured together as the Yippie vs. Yuppie show. Hoffman was high on the Sandinistas; Rubin preferred Gary Hart. The majority of the audience seemed to think Rubin was a right-wing sellout. Most of the rest thought Hoffman was a dinosaur who hadn't changed with the times.

Neither view was entirely accurate. Rubin insisted that his new self wasn't so distant from his old self, declaring in 1982 that his networking salons came "out of my 1960s organizing experience." He added, "I really don't think that I've become the person or symbol that I preached against in the '60s. I'm not a warmonger or munitions seller or corporate pig." Hoffman, in his own way, was intensely aware of the differences between the decades. In the last book he published before his death, 1987's Steal This Urine Test, he described a 1983 environmental fight in which "our protest song (as it should be in all environmental battles) was 'America the Beautiful.'...[I]t was very hard to sing it during the sixties as we were being shot, clubbed, jailed, and illegally wiretapped by the government. Especially hard while the mob sang all the patriotic songs. Today it seems appropriate." When Hoffman committed suicide in 1989, the Fifth Estate, an anarchist newspaper in Detroit, complained in an otherwise warm obit that his rhetoric had grown suspiciously patriotic in the last decade of his life.

This is what happens when the counterculture spills out of the '60s and sloshes all over society. It takes new forms, from Rubin's New Age capitalism to Hoffman's all-American socialism. I doubt the yuppie networkers at Rubin's Manhattan salons—young professionals hunting for business partners, bedmates, coke connections—thought of themselves as children of the '60s. But they were, just as surely as Hoffman's Springsteenian patriots were creatures of the Reagan era.

Yippies and CREEPs

The official yippie organization, the Youth International Party, kept chugging away in the '70s and afterwards, putting out a paper filled with conspiracy theories and paeans to pot. More recently, its surviving members have opened an archive and performance space in Greenwich Village, dubbed the Yippie Museum and Cafe. Jerry Rubin's favorite uncle was a vaudeville star; now the movement he helped to start has its very own vaudeville venue.

And that, in a roundabout way, leads us to one more parallel between the yippies and the Nixonites. Both were masters of the media-savvy political prank.

In 1967, for example, Hoffman called a press conference to announce the invention of LACE, a drug that made people have sex. Three couples in his apartment demonstrated the imaginary chemical's alleged effects for the onlooking press corps, who went on to report that the protesters were planning to spray their new weapon at cops and National Guardsmen at a demonstration outside the Pentagon. "The function of this was to manipulate the media," says Krassner. "We said we were going to spray them at the Pentagon. Of course this made the local papers, the newsmagazines, and the wire services—and a lot of people became aware of a demonstration that they hadn't heard of before." The possibility of seeing some cops and hippies getting it on, or perhaps getting sprayed themselves, surely swelled the crowds as well.

There are obvious differences between such antics and the dirty tricks deployed by Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President, but there are structural similarities as well, a common interest in cracking open the media and playing with the narratives being projected. In 1972, when Pete McCloskey challenged Nixon in the Republican primaries, a young conservative named Roger Stone made a donation to the insurgent's campaign in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance. (The original plan was to use the Gay Liberation Front, but Stone felt that would be an affront to his masculinity.) According to the Senate Watergate Report, Stone and his confederate Herbert Porter then "drafted an anonymous letter to the Manchester Union Leader and enclosed a photocopy of the receipt."

I called up Stone and asked him about the yippies. "Classic street theater," he replied, with a hint of professional admiration. "The voters or the consumers are getting too much information. You have to cut through that by being provocative. It's what the yippies figured out."

What does that have to do with the Yippie Cafe? Just that Stone, who shares the cafe proprietors' distaste for New York's draconian drug laws, showed up there last month. He brought along a bunch of College Republicans with short haircuts and ill-fitting suits, and he performed a stand-up comedy act cum political rant. Some of the spectators laughed, some heckled, some clapped, some stared.

"I did OK," says Stone. "They said, 'Who are these short-haired guys with you?' I said, 'This is the national committee of the Hitler Youth.'" When Abraham Ribicoff invoked the Nazis in Chicago, all hell broke loose on the convention floor. Forty years later, Stone was greeted with laughter and beer.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

Remixing Television

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Dead on the Fourth of July

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

The first time I met Jesse Helms was in 1981. My fifth grade class had risen early, boarded a bus in North Carolina, and taken a five-hour trek to Washington, where we tried to pack a week's worth of civic tourism into a single day. Zipping through the U.S. Senate, we filed in for a photograph with our state's senior senator.

"So these children are from Raleigh?" Helms said to a staffer.

"No," came the reply. "Chapel Hill."

A hint of a scowl crossed the Republican legislator's face. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me, knowing as I did that he hated my hometown and the liberal-leaning university it contained. When the state was mulling a plan to build a zoo, Helms had cracked that it should just put a fence around Chapel Hill.

That would not be an appropriate comment for this occasion, so our host changed the subject. His eyes scanned the crowd of kids, and apparently they fell on my nametag. Before I understood what was happening, he was shaking my hand. "My name's Jesse, too," he drawled. "Maybe we're related!" I stood there dumbly, surprised and paralyzed; before I knew it, my namesake was gone and we were marching to the next stop on the tour.

One of the class chaperones fell into step beside me. "Thanks," he said, "for not spitting in his face." I got the impression from his tone that a part of him would have liked it if I had spat at the senator. If Jesse Helms hated Chapel Hill, then virtually everyone I knew from Chapel Hill hated Helms right back.

By the '90s that contempt had spread far beyond our city and state. If you asked the average liberal about Helms in 1995, there were two things he was likely to tell you: that the senator was a racist and that the senator was a censor. The evidence for the first charge, if you cared to ask, would be a TV ad he ran in his 1990 campaign, in which a white man crumples a job application after a racial quota keeps him from finding work. The evidence for the second charge would be Helms' crusade against the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal program that funded material he considered obscene.

In other words, the typical Helms-bashers were actually prettifying the picture. The man was a Jim Crow nostalgist who wanted to obliterate the line between church and state, and they were whining about his run-of-the-mill conservative stances on affirmative action and Robert Mapplethorpe. You'd think Helms was just another Republican, notable only for his accent and his ties to the tobacco industry. But he was much more than that. You needn't favor racial preferences or federal art subsidies to find Jesse Helms objectionable.

Helms was, almost literally, a child of the segregationist order. His father was a cop in Monroe, North Carolina; in his recent book Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, the historian William Link writes that the senior Helms "was expected to maintain the racial hierarchy through intimidation and, if necessary, brute force." (Link quotes a black Monroe woman who said the officer used "his power to the fullest, in the wrong way.") The constable's son came to prominence as a defender of that racist regime, but he made those old arguments in a new medium, reading virulent editorials on WRAL-TV in the '60s. "Are civil rights only for Negroes?" he said in one 1963 broadcast. "White women in Washington who have been raped and mugged on the streets in broad daylight have experienced the most revolting sort of violation of their civil rights. The hundreds of others who had their purses snatched last year by Negro hoodlums may understandably insist that their right to walk the street unmolested was violated."

In the 1950s, an alliance emerged between free-marketeers and segregationists. It was not an inevitable union: Jim Crow laws were, in addition to all their other injustices, an intrusive array of restrictions on freedom of contract and freedom of commerce. But the alternatives suggested by the civil rights movement often restrained those freedoms from the other direction, opening space for a coalition that would have seemed much stranger a generation earlier. Thus, in 1964, the Deep South voted for Barry Goldwater, a man who had taken the lead in desegregating his family's department store, the Arizona Air National Guard, and the Phoenix public schools years before the law required any of those institutions to be integrated. He had also voted for federal civil rights bills in 1957 and 1960. But he shared the segregationists' hostility to two provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and that mutual interest allowed conservative activists to create a political realignment.

If Goldwater relied on the votes of racists he despised, then Helms was the other side of the alliance: a segregationist who could speak the language of liberty but never really adopted freedom as a principle. Helms realized early on that it looked better to position yourself as a foe of big government than as a defender of state-created privileges, so he preferred to talk about the new powers the federal government was claiming, not the old powers the state government had exercised for decades. In other words, he learned to talk like Goldwater. But there's little doubt that his sympathies lay with the larger system of legally enforced white supremacy. Helms maintained that the South had no racial problems until the feds "manufactured" them; according to Link, he established quiet ties to the White Citizens' Councils and similar groups.

Helms' anti-statist rhetoric wasn't entirely a pose. As a Raleigh city councilman in the '50s, for example, he led a lonely fight against the federal urban renewal program. But anyone tempted to believe the right-wing direct-mail king Richard Viguerie's eulogy for the senator—sample quote: "It's the free market views, policies, and leadership of President Reagan, Jesse Helms, and Milton Friedman that have led the world to experience the greatest movement out of poverty in history"—should review Helms' record in office. As far as economic policy was concerned, his chief concerns were preserving and extending the trade barriers that protected North Carolina's textile industry and the subsidies that supported North Carolina's tobacco farms.

In social policy, Helms favored anti-porn statutes, "voluntary" school prayer, and—"in the best interest of public health"—sodomy laws. In international affairs, he pushed for U.S. aid to some of the most repellent figures on the world stage, from the Salvadoran death-squad organizer Roberto D'Aubuisson to the Mozambican terror group RENAMO. After the Cold War ended, some critics of American foreign policy hoped that Helms' hatred of the United Nations and nonmilitary foreign aid would transform him into an old-fashioned isolationist who eschewed foreign entanglements. That isn't how it worked out. Over the course of the decade, Helms sponsored bills to tighten the embargo against Cuba and to send $100 million in military aid to Bosnia. After some early dithering, he also came out for expanding NATO into Eastern Europe. By the end of his career, he couldn't even hold the line against the foreign aid he loved to criticize: Under the influence of his buddy Bono, Helms put his weight behind a $200 million assistance package for Africa.

In other words, the man was no more committed to limited government abroad than he was committed to it at home. But he maintained his reputation as a skinflint isolationist. And why not? A good politician knows how to lie, and Helms was an expert politician.

1983: another school, another field trip to Washington, another audience with the man who shares my name. Now a smartassed seventh grader, I set a goal for myself. Tired of receiving mass-produced deceptions via the newspapers and television, I would get a legislator to lie to me personally. I approached the senator. "Excuse me, Mr. Helms," I said in a deferential tone. "My name is Jesse Walker. I don't know if you remember me, but we met a couple years ago on another class trip."

The senator took the bait: "Why, of course I remember you, Jesse." He smiled warmly, looked me straight in the eye, spoke in a confidential tone, and gave me the heartiest handshake I had ever encountered.

It should have been a private moment of triumph. Instead it taught me what a born politician can do. For a second, I forgot the whole plan and believed him.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

Artifact: Hear! Hear the pipes are calling!

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Nothing says “Scotland” like the great Highland bagpipe, that unwieldy contraption of air, tubing, and hide. You can imagine a grieving piper playing “Scotland the Brave” in 1305 as word spreads across the glens of the death of William Wallace, that patriot with the face of Mad Max. You can imagine it, but it’ll be fiction: In his forthcoming book Bagpipes, the historian and musician Hugh Cheape argues that the instrument didn’t exist until the early 19th century.

Rich Scottish expatriates created the Highland Society of London in 1788 to preserve “the martial spirits, language, dress, music and antiquities of the ancient Caledonians.” Preservation was the mother of invention: The society’s annual pageants, The Guardian reports, “helped create the ‘stage Highlander,’ a largely invented character who played bagpipes designed specially for these events. The mythology surrounding the great Highland pipes increased when allegedly authentic pipes linked to great events in Scottish history were given to national museums.”

It wasn’t the first time romantic nationalists would devise their own traditions. But that’s only part of the story. In the two centuries since then, Scots have embraced the instrument. The faux tradition became a real tradition, and the great Highland pipes are now as Scottish as Sean Connery in a kilt.

Note: The tartan kilt is a factitious tradition as well. But Connery, scholars report, has been a part of Scotland forever.

Warcraft on Terror

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Is your game room breeding jihadists? Probably not, but just to be sure the Office of the Director of National Intelligence wants to “study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games.”

In other words, they’ll be watching for security threats in role-playing games like World of Warcraft and virtual worlds like Second Life, where large populations interact pseudonymously. The office’s February report on its data mining activities includes a description of “Reynard,” a foxy “seedling effort” to begin such studies.

What, exactly, would video game terrorism look like? The report is vague, saying only that Reynard would “identify the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms” in such spaces and “then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.” It isn’t clear what behavior would qualify as “suspicious” in online games—many of which, after all, center around sessions in which groups conspire to coordinate attacks on their enemies.

Reynard is of a piece with the office’s larger data mining project, which aims to “discover or locate a predictive pattern or anomaly indicative of terrorist or criminal activity.” Game worlds are just one of many corners of cyberspace being covered. The report acknowledges that “application of results from these research projects may ultimately have implications for privacy and civil liberties,” adding that the office is therefore “also investing in projects that develop privacy protecting technologies.” This attention to individual rights, it declares, is “a unique research effort within the intelligence community.”

The Age of Nixon

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:00:00 EDT

The Central Committee Is in Session

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is holding an open meeting today, giving students of public policy a chance to observe an especially egregious arm of the regulatory state. If you want to see what's wrong with Washington, the FCC is as good a place as any to start looking: Since its birth in 1934, it has manifested three fundamental problems.

The commission is corrupt. I don't just mean the sort of corruption where the chairman loosens his tie, puts his feet up on his desk, and doles out favors to the companies that scratched the right backs—though you'll find plenty of that in the commission's history. Even when the body is being relatively transparent and above-board, it is beholden to politically connected lobbies. The FCC controls an important economic resource. Naturally, important economic interests try their best to influence its decisions.

The most flagrant example of this might be the welcome the commission gave to FM radio. The technology was an enormous leap forward: It allowed stations to broadcast without static, and it allowed more signals to coexist on the spectrum. It also worried RCA, which was investing heavily in the development of television; the company fretted that consumers might not pay for both a new FM radio and a new TV set. RCA didn't control the patent on FM, so it pressured the FCC to favor the other technology. The regulators obliged, and a series of roadblocks appeared in FM's path. The most destructive decision came in 1944, when the commissioners suddenly reassigned the FM broadcasters' portion of the ether to television, instantly rendering every FM receiver obsolete.

Sometimes the benefits of FCC corruption were more narrowly focused. The most infamous illustration might be the case of Lady Bird Johnson, whose broadcasting empire relied on the Washington connections of her husband, future president Lyndon Johnson. The Johnsons got rich off their stations, with the FCC smoothing the way whenever they needed an application approved and throwing up regulatory hurdles when someone threatened their monopoly on Austin's TV market.

Does such winner-picking still go on today? Decide for yourself. The commission intends to auction off some wireless spectrum soon. FCC chief Kevin Martin wants to impose some restrictions on how that spectrum can be used—restrictions that happen to dovetail with the business model of one well-connected startup. The business in question, M2Z, wants to build an ad-supported national broadband network, with additional tiers where consumers can pay extra for speedier connections; last year it asked the commission to grant it the spectrum outright. The regulators refused, and the company promptly sued to overturn the decision. But if the auction goes forward as planned, the commission will have effectively bequeathed the spectrum to the corporation anyway.

You needn't be fond of the incumbent wireless industry—not exactly free-market heroes themselves—to appreciate how inappropriate it is for the government to weigh the scales in any single firm's favor. Those incumbents have protested the plan, leading Martin to take his proposal off the agenda for today's meeting. But that doesn't mean the idea is dead: Martin says he hopes to introduce it next month instead.

Despite this unpleasant history, the FCC believes it is qualified to serve as a moral guardian for the rest of us. Which leads us to problem number two.

The commission is sanctimonious. For seven decades, the nation's scolds and censors have used the FCC as a tool to shape the sounds and images allowed on the airwaves. In 1952, for example, then-commissioner Paul Walker announced with satisfaction that his agency had "surveyed the programming of some of the television stations in operation, and found that some of them had reported no time devoted to broadcasts of a religious nature. We felt in view of this fact that regular renewal of their licenses would not be in the public interest." The stations quickly revised their schedules, and the commission agreed to renew their licenses after all.

These days the FCC is less likely to shoehorn something onto a station's schedule, but it's more than willing to slice something off the program. This practice also has a long history. It was the FCC that enforced Spiro Agnew's crusade against "drug lyrics," an especially vague stricture at a time when some fretful listeners managed to detect traces of narcotics in "Puff the Magic Dragon" and "Hey Jude" (for the phrase "let her under your skin"). Agnew himself believed the Beatles song "With a Little Help from My Friends" was a coded message in which "the 'friends' were assorted drugs with such nicknames as 'Mary Jane,' 'Speed' and 'Benny.'" Rock stations suddenly faced much more uncertainty about what they were allowed to play, and worried program directors reined in their DJs, hastening the decline of freeform radio.

More recently, the FCC under Michael Powell and then Kevin Martin has waged war on "indecent" material, stepping up enforcement even before Janet Jackson's infamous nipple slip in 2004 and ramping its penalties still higher since then. Now Martin wants to tell a company that intends to offer a free national wireless network that it'll have to filter out the porn if it wants access to the ether.

The company? M2Z, of course—or, to be precise, whoever wins the auction tailored to M2Z's business model. Don't expect any objections: The smut-free proviso was already present in M2Z's plans. The execs there understand what Washington wants.

And then there's problem number three:

The commission is technocratic. The next time someone tells you central planning is dead, remind him that there is an arm of the federal government that decides in advance how different chunks of the electromagnetic spectrum will be used, and that it also reserves the right to determine which entities will be allowed to use it. It's true the commission has adopted several market "mechanisms" in the last few decades: FCC-approved broadcasters now have the right to sell their licenses to other FCC-approved broadcasters, and spectrum is usually distributed by auction rather than pure fiat. But even an auction can be bent to the planners' will.

For evidence, look—again!—at the M2Z situation. If the auction goes forward according to Martin's reported plans, the bidding won't be open to just any telecom company. Applicants will have to use that spectrum for a particular sort of service. They will even be pushed to adopt a particular business model. There are phrases to describe such an arrangement. "Free market" is not one of them.

But that is how the Federal Communications Commission works. In theory, its job is to manage the nation's spectrum in the public interest. In practice, inevitably, that means its job is to pick and choose among the definitions of "the public interest" offered by rival industry lobbies and moralistic pressure groups. Corruption, sanctimony, and the conceit of central planning: That's the FCC—and Martin's pet auction—in a nutshell.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker is the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press).

The Wire Vs. The Sun

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:41:00 EDT

Artifact: God on the Lawn

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 16 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Behold the Flying Spaghetti Monster, noodle-god of the Pastafarians. In March, He manifested Himself on the lawn of the Cumberland County courthouse in Crossville, Tennessee, where He took the form of a statue built by Ariel and David Safdie.

The monster was created—or revealed?—by Bobby Henderson when Kansas decided to teach “intelligent design” alongside evolution. “I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster,” he wrote to the state board of education in 2005, urging that this theory receive equal time. The joke caught on, especially online.

And now in Crossville. After a chainsaw-carved Moses appeared outside the courthouse in 2006, the American Civil Liberties Union reminded local authorities that allowing “the statue to remain indicates the creation of a public forum for free expression.” More icons followed, including the Safdie siblings’ monster.

Ariel has called their creation “a celebration of our freedom as Americans; a freedom to be different, to express those differences, and to do it amongst neighbors.” That suggests a subtle distinction between her monster and Henderson’s. “She’s not using this as Henderson was—that is, as a device for ridicule,” says religion scholar Luke Johnston. “At least in the public eye, she is portraying it as a tool for pluralism.” The statue was intelligently designed, but the monster it represents may be evolving.

Hogwarts Law School

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Harry Potter gets along with his fans. Some media companies fire off menacing legal threats at the first sign that someone might be doing something unauthorized with one of their characters, but J.K. Rowling and Warner—the author of the Harry Potter books and the studio behind the Harry Potter movies, respectively—have had a generally tolerant attitude toward the amateur fiction, home movies, and online guides created by the boy wizard's fan base.

So some were surprised last fall when Rowling and Warner sued to stop RDR Books from publishing Steven Vander Ark's The Harry Potter Lexicon. The Lexicon is essentially a hard-copy version of Vander Ark's website, which collates information about the Potter series; the site is filled with detailed lists of the peoples, places, spells, and creatures that inhabit Rowling's world. Much of the text was drawn directly from Rowling's books, prompting the novelist to argue that Vander Ark intends to make money by repackaging her words. It's unclear how the courts will rule, but I'm inclined to agree with Columbia Law School's Tim Wu as to how they should rule. Wu wrote in Slate that Rowling "has confused the adaptations of a work, which she does own, with discussion of her work, which she doesn't….Textually, the law gives her sway over any form in which her work may be 'recast, transformed, or adapted.' But she does not own discussion of her work—book reviews, literary criticism, or the fan guides that she's suing."

Yet even if the courts end up agreeing with Wu, Vander Ark has lost a more important battle. The Harry Potter fan community has overwhelmingly sided with Rowling, shunning Vander Ark and denouncing him with such phrases as "arrogant, egotistical, self-absorbed jerk." The reasons for this reaction are complex. In part it reflects the difference between a book sold for profit and a website offered for free. In part it reflects allegations that Vander Ark misled potential contributors into believing his book had Rowling's blessing. In part it simply reflects the fact that fans are predisposed to agree with their favorite authors. The case hasn't been decided yet, but in the court of his peers Vander Ark will be punished—is being punished—either way.

Speaking at the OnCopyright conference in Manhattan on May 1, Wu pointed out just how sharply this cuts against most people's expectations. Ordinarily we assume that the fan norms surrounding intellectual property will be looser than the letter of the law. This time, the law may be more permissive than the fans.

The conference was sponsored by the Copyright Clearance Center, a company that helps guide businesses, universities, and others through the thicket of licenses and permissions required by intellectual property law. There were four panels over the course of the day: one on copyright's collision with technology, one on copyright and society, one on copyright and the arts, and one on copyright and the law. The speakers ranged from industry figures eager to strengthen intellectual property controls to radicals ready to dump some rules into the harbor.

But the most important division on display wasn't the split between the conservatives and the reformers. It was the line that divided the law panel from all the others. The former featured three intelligent attorneys debating how the law should be interpreted and what the law should say. The latter featured artists, journalists, entrepreneurs, activists, and academics grappling with a world where people's behavior is governed much more by tools and norms than by statute books.

Kevin O'Kane, for example, is the man behind redlasso, a service that makes it easier to search for ongoing and recent TV and radio broadcasts, extract the parts you want, and drop them into the context of your choice. You could, for example, find all the references to the word "Myanmar" in the last 12 hours of TV news, pull out the appropriate clips, and add them to an online news commentary. The result, O'Kane hopes, will be an "online media center for bloggers."

There may come a day that CNN or Fox or a local broadcaster in Iowa City decides that this useful tool is a machine for piracy and takes redlasso to court. But you need only visit YouTube, Crooks and Liars, or any video-heavy blog to see that the Web already welcomes such efforts to recycle what used to be perishable content, that this enriches our ability to discuss the issues of the day, and that people across the political spectrum engage in this behavior without pause. If the law thinks they're wrong, then our norms may know something that our laws do not.

Nor did this informal borrowing begin with the Internet. On the arts panel, the novelist Jonathan Lethem spoke about the imitation and appropriation that has always been embedded in creative activities. Every artist begins by copying, he said, and some of the best—he singled out William Shakespeare and Bob Dylan—keep borrowing until the end of their life. This is part of the creative process, he argued, and it should be welcomed rather than banished.

Lethem has covered this territory before. Last year he contributed an article to Harper's called "The Ecstacy of Influence: A Plagiarism"; it not only touted the virtues of quoting and appropriating other people's work, but was itself largely stitched together from other writer's words, a fact revealed at the end of the essay when he listed the texts he had pilfered. It was a clever stunt, but it highlighted something important about creativity: not just the fact that writers draw on other people's work, but the fact that the best writers transmute those influences into something of their own. Lethem's novel Gun, With Occasional Music carries a critic's quote on the cover declaring that it "Marries Chandler's style and Philip K. Dick's vision." It's a good description: The book, a murder mystery that features talking apes and kangaroos, feels like a mash-up of Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled crime writing and Philip K. Dick's surreal science fiction. But it's impossible to imagine either Chandler or Dick producing this particular story. It's part Chandler, part Dick, and all Lethem.

The book also says something about what the world would be like without that free-flowing creative exchange. Where other dystopian novels imagine states that force individuals into a suffocating collective, the totalitarian society in Gun keeps people apart, by limiting the questions they can ask and the memories their minds can contain. The result is a world without communication and a world without a past—a world where every thought is an orphan work.

Not even the most militant copyright maximalists would consider that desirable. But even if they tried to impose such a restrictive regime, they'd be helpless in the face of technologies that make it easy to defy antiquated copyright rules, and in the face of norms that put more gentle restrictions on our behavior. The OnCopyright conference didn't give me the impression that the lawyers were on the verge of fixing America's intellectual property laws. But it did bolster my faith that we'll manage to muddle through anyway.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

Little Brother Is Watching

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:00:00 EDT

The Paranoid Style Is American Politics

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:30:00 EDT

On Tuesday the lesbian assassin of Vince Foster won Pennsylvania's presidential primary. In the larger contest for the Democratic nomination, though, she still lags behind a jihadist sleeper agent who is simultaneously a secret Muslim, a secret Communist, and a secret Republican. Whoever wins their race will go on to face a brainwashed puppet of the Viet Cong, and whoever wins that race will then get on with the modern president's central task: serving the interests of Mexico. It must be true, I read it in my email.

There's a persistant political myth that paranoia is only a feature of the fringe, something common among alienated radicals and reactionaries but rare in the great American center. In fact, paranoia has been ubiquitous across the political spectrum. You can find it in nearly every faction and movement at every point in American history, not least among those establishment figures who think they're immune to conspiracy theories. (The most lurid and destructive tales of Waco were not told by militiamen after the raid was over. They were told by the media and the government while the siege was underway.)

In The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, the historian Bernard Bailyn showed that the worldview of the patriots who would soon revolt against England included a strong belief, in the words of one colonist, that "a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty." At the same time, Bailyn notes, British administrators "were as convinced as were the leaders of the Revolutionary movement that they were themselves the victims of conspriatorial designs." Colonial governors such as Thomas Hutchinson—a man John Adams accused of "junto conspiracy"—believed, in Bailyn's words, that "the root of all the trouble in the colonies was the maneuvering of a secret, power-hungry cabal that professed loyalty to England while assiduously working to destroy the bonds of authority."

After independence was won, the victorious patriots quickly found plots in their own ranks. If you didn't think the Jeffersonians were Jacobin pawns of the Illuminati, you probably fretted that the Federalists were conspiring to establish a monarchy. Nor did the hunt for subversive cabals end with the death of the revolutionary generation. The historian David Brion Davis has pointed out that the lead-up to the Civil War can be viewed as a clash between two conspiracy theories, one featuring a fearsome network of abolitionists and the other a hungry Slave Power.

And no, these passions haven't limited themselves to periods as violent as the war for American independence and the war between the states. It's telling that the 1990s, a time of relative peace and prosperity, were also a golden age of both frankly fictional and purportedly true tales of conspiracy. There are many reasons for this, including the not-unsubstantial fact that even at its most peaceful, America is still riven with conflicts. But there is also the possibility that peace breeds nightmares just as surely as strife does. The anthropologist David Graeber has argued that "it's the most peaceful societies which are also the most haunted, in their imaginative constructions of the cosmos, by constant specters of perennial war." The Piaroa Indians of Venezuala, for example, "are famous for their peaceableness," but "they inhabit a cosmos of endless invisible war, in which wizards are engaged in fending off the attacks of insane, predatory gods and all deaths are caused by spiritual murder and have to be avenged by the magical massacre of whole (distant, unknown) communities." Many bloggers with comfortable lives spend their spare time in a similar subterranean world.

Why all the paranoia? In part, of course, it's because there really are conspiracies out there. Power does attract the power-hungry. No, Hillary Clinton did not murder Ron Brown—but her explanations for her good fortune trading cattle futures do not bear close scrutiny. John McCain is not a deep-cover Manchurian Candidate, but he was a charter member of the Keating Five. Barack Obama is not a closet Islamist, but there are legitimate questions about his ties to the corrupt developer Tony Rezko. If politics is the art of compromise, then politicians will inevitably be compromised.

It also is often in a movement's interest to paint the opposition in the darkest possible colors, even when the stakes are small and even when the allegations involved are not completely true or relevant. More importantly, it is natural for the members of a movement to find such suspicions believable and to conjure up such theories themselves. It's always easy to think the worst about people outside your group, especially if they're already consciously working against your goals. This tendency becomes even stronger when a hierarchy is involved. The lower orders are inevitably suspicious of the elite, and the elite are always worried about the proles.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that one poll showed 15 percent of voters believing that Barack Obama is a Muslim. It shouldn't be a surprise that the stories anti-McCain conservatives used to whisper, that perhaps he collaborated with his captors in Vietnam, are now surfacing on the left as well. If Hillary Clinton somehow manages to take the Democratic nomination—an outcome that would probably require a conspiracy itself—you shouldn't be surprised when all the stories you heard about her in the '90s come roaring back, be they plausible or nuts.

Above all, you shouldn't be surprised when you hear these tales not just from that creepy-looking fellow manning the LaRouche booth near the bus stop but from ordinary, middle-class relatives and neighbors with ordinary, middle-class views. Welcome to America. Paranoia is a part of the political process.

The New Franklin Roosevelts

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

FDR lives!

Last night Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the speaker of the House of Representatives and the majority leader of the Senate, received the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Distinguished Public Service Award at a dinner dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the New Deal. The organizers praised the politicians for "the parallels to be drawn between their present leadership and the New Deal period, when so much important and progressive legislation was pioneered with the cooperation of Congress."

It might sound odd coming from a libertarian, but I wish the Pelosi-Reid Democrats had more in common with Franklin Roosevelt. Not the Franklin Roosevelt who occupied the White House from 1933 to 1945, but the Franklin Roosevelt who aspired to the White House in the election of 1932. The Democratic platform of that year is a remarkable document, considering the way the party's candidate went on to govern. It isn't a libertarian manifesto—it endorses several subsidies and regulations—but it hardly embraces the enormous expansion in federal power that FDR would achieve. The very first plank calls for "an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus, and eliminating extravagance to accomplish a saving of not less than twenty-five per cent in the cost of the Federal Government." (It also asks "the states to make a zealous effort to achieve a proportionate result.") Subsequent planks demand a balanced budget, a low tariff, the repeal of Prohibition, "a sound currency to be preserved at all hazards," "no interference in the internal affairs of other nations," and "the removal of government from all fields of private enterprise except where necessary to develop public works and natural resources in the common interest." The document concludes with a quote from Andrew Jackson: "equal rights to all; special privilege to none." It sounds more like Ron Paul than Pelosi.

FDR's campaign reflected that platform. He accused Herbert Hoover of "reckless and extravagant spending," and he further denounced the Republican incumbent for believing "we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible." Even when he called for interventions in the economy, he generally couched his words in the old liberals' language of equal treatment rather than the new liberals' vision of enlightened central planning. In his famous Forgotten Man speech of April 1932—itself a sustained allusion to an essay by the pro-market sociologist William Graham Sumner—the Democratic candidate pointed to the wave of foreclosures sweeping the nation. Noting that Hoover had created a "two billion dollar fund...put at the disposal of the big banks, the railroads and the corporations of the Nation," FDR averred that the government should "provide at least as much assistance to the little fellow as it is now giving to the large banks and corporations."

Once in office, the new administration did indeed repeal Prohibition, and it eventually lowered some trade barriers as well. The rest of Roosevelt's anti-statist rhetoric resembles his actual policies about as closely as the last seven years reflect George W. Bush's promises to give us a smaller federal government and a "humble foreign policy." In 1932, a classical liberal could easily conclude that Roosevelt was closer to his views than Hoover, an old progressive who had displayed a lifelong love of central planning and government-enforced cartels, a man who bragged during the campaign that he had responded to the Depression with "the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic." Among other things, President Hoover had jacked up spending, installed agricultural price-support programs, pressured businesses to follow Washington's wage dictates, and created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But by the time a cerebral hemorrhage cut short FDR's fourth term, the federal bureaucracy's power had grown so enormously that Hoover was widely remembered as the last apostle of laissez faire.

Seventy-six years after Roosevelt's first presidential victory, we're again faced with the task of weighing a candidate's campaign promises and wondering what, if anything, they tell us about how the politician would actually govern. This isn't simply a matter of avoiding ill-informed projection, though both Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) have a talent for attracting supporters whose views are diametrically opposed to the stated opinions of their candidate. Nor is it just a matter of sussing out dishonesty, though that's obviously a part of the equation as well: Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) has lied brazenly about everything from NAFTA to Tuzla, and it's hard to believe she's being upfront about her views on Iraq.

The truth is, would-be presidents don't always care about the issues that turn out to be most important. How did Bush flip his foreign policy views so easily? By not having strong convictions on global affairs in the first place, allowing neoconservative advisers to fill the void after the 9/11 attacks. It's easy to imagine, say, John McCain doing something similar during an economic crisis, given that he has already radically reinvented his economic philosophy twice in the last decade, shifting leftwards in 2000 and back to the right in 2008.

Come 2012, President Obama might be explaining why he is sending more troops to Tehran; or President McCain could be preparing emergency legislation to nationalize the banks. If so, our leader's former self will join Bush the humble non-interventionist and Roosevelt the budget hawk on the fringes of the nation's memory. A candidate's campaign persona: There's the true Forgotten Man.

Jesse Walker is the managing editor of reason and the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America.

Citizen Lockdown

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:54:00 EST

“For some months,” the document begins, “representatives of the FBI and of the Department of Justice have been formulating a plan of action for an emergency situation wherein it would be necessary to apprehend and detain persons who are potentially dangerous to the internal security of the country.” If the U.S. faced a rebellion, an invasion (real or threatened), or an “attack upon United States troops in legally occupied territory,” the government would suspend habeas corpus and detain everyone on an index that “contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States.”

It sounds like the ramblings of a paranoid crank. And that’s exactly what it is, except the crank in question was J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in a 1950 letter to the White House. The proposed plan was very real, and the letter describing it was declassified in December. It can be found in the latest volume of The Foreign Relations of the United States, a series published by the U.S. State Department, and it can be downloaded at state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/truman/c24687.htm.

There’s no evidence that the Truman White House took Hoover’s proposal seriously. Interestingly, a decade earlier, when the previous president supported a different plan to round up Americans without regard for due process, Hoover had argued for their civil liberties. Those internees were Japanese Americans imprisoned during World War II, and Hoover’s protests were ignored.

44 Years of 3-Minute Poems

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Ray Davies: Not Like Everybody Else, by Thomas M. Kitts, New York: Routledge, 302 pages, $19.95

When the Kinks recorded The Village Green Preservation Society in 1968, the north London quartet was not trying to create a commercial failure. Quite the opposite. But surely they must have realized that the year of the street riot was not a propitious time to greet the rock world with couplets like "We are the Office Block Persecution Affinity/God save little shops, china cups, and virginity." They sang those lines with genuine enthusiasm, even if it's a sure bet that no one in the band was a virgin at the time.

The song—the sprightly, catchy title track of a nearly perfect album—had been composed by Ray Davies, one of rock's greatest lyricists. It was not a tribute to virginity so much as a tribute to the idea of virginity and of everything else praised in this romantic English anthem: village greens, the George Cross, strawberry jam, draught beer, "the old ways." The record recalls a more rooted existence, but its list of artifacts worth saving draws on pop culture as much as pastoral life: "We are the Sherlock Holmes English Speaking Vernacular/Help save Fu Manchu, Moriarty, and Dracula." There is even a shout-out to Donald Duck, who's about as English as Donald Trump.

The album sold less than 500,000 copies. Four years earlier, the Kinks had been one of the most popular bands in the West, climbing the American and British charts with two brash, loud rock songs, "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night." Indeed, as Thomas M. Kitts points out in this intelligent study, The Kinks "were ranked with the Rolling Stones, both only second to the Beatles." There was an enormous stylistic gap between the quiet nostalgia of Village Green and the Kinks' earlier, noisier explosions of adolescent lust and frustration—and that contrast only begins to hint at the band's range. In their first decade as a recording unit, the Kinks experimented with trad jazz, musical theater, Indian raga, and New Orleans funk. Above all, they delved into the English music-hall tradition, with its vaudevillian showmanship, singalong melodies, working-class sympathies, and epicene moments of burlesque.

The constant thread was a willful refusal to follow pop fashions. The Kinks were happy to set trends: The early singles paved the way for punk rock, heavy metal, and grunge, while the band's later, quieter character studies ("Rosie Won't You Please Come Home," "Two Sisters," "Autumn Almanac") and satires of modern British life ("A Well Respected Man," "Dedicated Follower of Fashion," "Sunny Afternoon") would have a strong impact on other English artists. Yet even when no one was imitating them, the Kinks kept doing their own thing, recording well-crafted but poor-selling LPs like Village Green and, in 1971, Muswell Hillbillies, a jazz and country-flavored concept album about the injustice of urban renewal programs. By the mid-'70s, the band had evolved into a touring troupe that staged Brechtian rock musicals. There were plenty of rock operas in that era, but there was a big gulf between the bombast of Tommy or Jesus Christ, Superstar and Kinksian efforts like Preservation, a witty if tangled three-disc story about a socialist revolution that becomes a puritanical, totalitarian nightmare.

The group took another turn in 1976, when they signed with a new label, Arista, and tried to work within the genres that happened to be popular at the moment, from new wave to metallic hard rock. Davies even dabbled in disco. He was still drawn to the theater, but he generally expressed this interest outside the Kinks (co-writing the musicals Chorus Girls and 80 Days) or channeled it into directing music videos. The band became enormously popular in America again, though not in the UK. For the most part, the Kinks' new records succeeded artistically as well as commercially, at least until they left Arista for MCA in the mid-'80s. In the '90s they finally disbanded. Ray and his brother Dave—the group's lead guitarist and an important architect of its sound—have since enjoyed low-profile but impressive solo careers.

Muswell Hillbillies is my favorite Kinks record, but The Village Green Preservation Society stands out for being so tenaciously removed from its time. Inspired by Dylan Thomas's play Under Milk Wood, the album describes the colorful inhabitants of an unnamed English town. The title track, that toe-tapping ode to Donald Duck and virgins, presents itself as a love letter to the past, but the singer knew very well that the place he was romanticizing wasn't lost so much as imaginary. Kitts quotes Davies' description of the village as "a fantasy world that I can retreat to. ... It was my own Wizard of Oz land."

Davies' other retreat was a very real place: Muswell Hill, the London suburb where he was raised. The heart of the young Davies' world was the front room of his family home. "After the pubs closed at 11:00 pm," Kitts writes, Davies' father "would invite his drinking cronies to join his extended family and children's friends for an after-hours party in what would be the family's overcrowded front room, which, in those largely pre-television days, held the family's old upright piano, the most important piece of furniture in the Davies's home, and a 78 r.p.m. wind-up gramophone." The parties featured rowdy performances of pop hits and music-hall standards, with Davies's father doing a drunken impersonation of Cab Calloway. As Kitts notes, "The influence of these parties on the Kinks, particularly the campy Kinks of the early to mid-1970s, is remarkable. Whether consciously or not, it seemed as if Ray was trying to recreate the Saturday night parties of his family's home—complete with chaos, beer, and singalongs."

In theory, there is a wide gap between the camp aesthetic, with its love of artifice and role-playing, and the traditionalist outlook, with its focus on the permanent things. Yet the Kinks at their campiest were the Kinks at their most rooted. Susan Sontag famously wrote that the camp worldview "sees everything in quotation marks." Davies does too: "Everybody's a dreamer, and everybody's a star/And everybody's in showbiz, it doesn't matter who you are," he sang in "Celluloid Heroes." But usually he's yelling for someone to tear those quotation marks down, even as he suspects that life as a quotation might have its own numb pleasures ("I wish my life was a nonstop Hollywood movie show/A fantasy world of celluloid villains and heroes/Because celluloid heroes never feel any pain/And celluloid heroes never really die").

Davies—one of the few pop figures with a strong cult following among both gays and conservatives—does not simply combine camp with traditionalism. He is at once the alienated individualist and the communitarian populist, a man who praises both the misfit and the ordinary rituals that everybody enjoys ("I like my football on a Saturday/Roast beef on Sundays, all right/I go to Blackpool for my holidays/Sit in the open sunlight"). Village Green, like Under Milk Wood, wove those strands together by populating Davies's village with eccentrics; by celebrating their individuality, he celebrated their small community as well. Muswell Hillbillies is a darker album, but it takes the same approach, mixing songs about the bizarre characters on Muswell Hill with angry jeremiads at the authorities that bulldoze homes and neighborhoods.

Politically, this outlook translates into an intense distrust both for large corporations and for the state. Like many rock stars, Davies has written songs attacking venal Big Business. Unlike most rock stars, he has written songs attacking domestic government bureaucracies ("I was born in a welfare state/Ruled by bureaucracy/Controlled by civil servants/And people dressed in gray"). And he may, depending on how you interpret Neil Young's "Union Man," be the only rocker ever to devote a song to attacking unions. Davies doesn't dislike organized labor per se, but he had a bad experience with a printers' union in his teens, and in the mid-'60s his band was barred from touring America for several years because the musicians' union refused to issue the required work permits. He retaliated with 1970's "Get Back in Line": "But that union man's got such a hold on me/He's the man who decides if I live or I die, if I starve or I eat/Then he walks up to me and the sun begins to shine/And he walks right back and I know that I've got to get back in the line."

There are several books about the Kinks already, but these are mostly written by rock journalists. Kitts, by contrast, is a professor of literature at St. John's University in New York. He gives Davies's lyrics serious scrutiny without neglecting to consider the ways they are amplified, undercut, or elaborated by the music. He also looks beyond Davies's recorded output to consider the singer's experiments in film, fiction, and theater. I have my occasional disagreements with his conclusions, but that is inevitable. The depth and breadth of the study are worlds away from the typical pop-star biography and more in line with the other academic work Routledge publishes.

That said, one strength of Davies' best work is that it is pop, even when it's resolutely ignoring the rest of the pop universe. "The Village Green Preservation Society" may be the most un-1968 song of 1968. It is also one of the most infectious recordings of the last 40 years. Davies could have been a full-time filmmaker, poet, or novelist; we should be grateful that he chose to do most of his work within the confines of the three-minute pop song instead.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker is the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press). This article originally appeared in The American Conservative.

The Wire vs. The Sun

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:30:00 EDT

The fifth and final season of The Wire concluded Sunday night. Until this year critics were nearly unanimous in their praise for the Baltimore-based HBO series, but the last 10 episodes provoked furious debates between the program's defenders and detractors. The chief cause of the ferment was the show's critique of the newspaper where Wire creator David Simon began his career: the Baltimore Sun.

I'm not going to join the argument about the season's artistic merit—not here, anyway. I do have a few thoughts about the substance of Simon's criticisms. I might not have a front-row seat at the paper, but I'm not squinting from the back row either: I subscribe to The Sun, my wife is a reporter there, and our circle of friends includes several current and former Sun staffers, some of whom had cameos on The Wire this year. (Disclaimer: What follows are my own opinions. They are not necessarily shared by anyone who happens to be married to me.)

Here is Simon's critique, conveniently summarized in an essay for the March Esquire:

[W]hen the Chicago Tribune Company buys Times Mirror and more buyouts follow, the tipping point will be reached. Instead of a news report so essential to the high-end readers that they might—even amid the turmoil of the Internet—still charge for their product online and off, American newspapers will soon be offering a shell of themselves in a market unwilling to pay for such and then, in desperation, giving the product away for free. The window will close; newspapers will not be getting better, stronger, more comprehensive. Not ever again.

In Baltimore, the response will be to drop beats, to abandon the pretense of actually covering the city in detail, to regard institutional memory and the need to look at the city’s problems systemically as, well, quaint. The newsroom culture will instead emphasize impact.

No longer would the journalism be rooted in the organic work of reporters sent into the streets to learn new things and then pull smart, balanced stories through the keyhole. Impact means prizes. Now you pick a target and, to the exclusion of all complexity, you hammer on that target, story after story. Most especially, you write additional accounts highlighting the "impact" that The Sun's coverage has achieved—covering your own coverage—the better to show that the newspaper has effected change.

Note that this is not the familiar liberal narrative of newspaper decline. In the standard story, like Simon's story, short-sighted media companies cut the meat out of powerful papers. But in the usual account, those "impact" stories are the missing meat and the editors who assign them—in The Sun's case, John Carroll and Bill Marimow—are the heroes standing up for journalistic "excellence."

For Simon, by contrast, Carroll and Marimow are a central part of the problem. Their stand-ins on his show are sanctimonious blowhards; their prize-hungry journalism is a substitute for the real thing. Their quest for "impact" brings to mind Ivan Illich's opening to Deschooling Society, with its disdain for the confusion of "process" with "substance," its ire at a world where "Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve those ends." It's the same problem The Wire decries in policework and schooling, where decaying bureaucracies defend their performance by jacking up meaningless statistics.

I don't agree with all of Simon's take. It's hard to believe, for example, that many papers could have kept themselves relevant while hiding their best online material behind a pay wall. And the focus on cutbacks qua cutbacks seems off. The problem with The Sun isn't that it's cutting back; it's that it's so thoughtless about where it cuts. The Wire made a big deal about The Sun's disappearing international bureaus. (Eight years ago, it had outposts in five foreign countries. Now it has none.) But I would be happy to see the paper bring its overseas correspondents home if it would reinvest those resources in covering the city.

Instead, The Sun—which managed to find the money for an expensive redesign hated by virtually every reader in the metro area—no longer maintains a beat for each of the city's major regions. Now it has just one reporter covering urban neighborhoods. It has been closing its suburban offices, eliminating its Carroll County bureau last year and losing its Baltimore County base last month. (The former county is growing rapidly, and half or more of the paper's readers live in the latter.) When the Baltimore County staff moved to the paper's downtown headquarters, a company spokesperson told the local alt-weekly that the reporters are "not in their office most of the time anyway. They can go out to Glen Burnie or Reisterstown from here just as quick as they could from Towson."

For those of you who don't live around here: It is extremely unlikely that a Baltimore County reporter will have to cover anything in Glen Burnie, since Glen Burnie is in Anne Arundel County. To get from the old Baltimore County office in Towson to Glen Burnie, you must first move around or across an obscure little burg called the City of Baltimore. The fact that it is possible to be a spokeswoman for The Sun without knowing this speaks volumes.

This rupture between the paper and the region it covers is at the heart of Simon's critique, and it's here that I agree with him the most. It's striking how much of The Sun's coverage of Baltimore—especially, but not exclusively, the blacker, poorer parts of Baltimore—are written as though the subject is an alien landscape. But it shouldn't be surprising.

There are basically two ways to get hired at The Sun. The standard method is to learn your craft at a series of smaller papers around the country. The other approach is to come directly to the paper from an elite university. The Sun has found a lot of fine journalists through these routes (especially the first one). But there used to be a third road to the paper: from the city itself, getting started as a copy boy or some other low-level position and gradually working your way up the ladder.

It's valuable to have a number of Baltimore-bred correspondents who developed their skills and discovered their city at the same time. They have accumulated a wealth of local knowledge that can't easily be replaced. Not only is this now essentially closed as a path to the paper, but the reporters who entered the building this way, along with other experienced hands, have been leaving as the newspaper hires cheaper but greener outsiders to replace them. There are solid reasons not to staff a newspaper only with native talent, but there are solid reasons as well to make sure they're part of the mix—perhaps even for a special local outreach effort to find the next generation of copy boys made good. But that isn't part of the professional culture of old-media journalism, at The Sun or anywhere else.

This isn't intended as a nostalgic argument for bygone days. In some ways American journalism is better than it has ever been: There are more outlets to choose from, more ways to start an outlet of your own, more eyes monitoring the outlets' output for errors, omissions, and lies. The larger mediasphere has grown more open to outside voices, even if specific channels like The Sun have grown more insular and removed. For many topics, though not nearly enough, this means not just more commentary but more actual reporting.

But that makes it all the more important that a paper respond to that competition by doing the things an urban newspaper is best suited to do. And that means intimate, collaborative coverage of a city by people who know it well. The major problem with The Sun is that it doesn't seem to know what to do with the knowledge it has stored within its walls, and that it doesn't seem to have noticed how much of that knowledge has already slipped out its doors.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

With His Ballot in His Hand

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EST

Like no other Democratic candidate in this presidential campaign, Barack Obama has had an affinity for fan-launched viral videos, from a cutting spoof of Apple's famous 1984 ad to a star-studded singalong to a stump speech. But the most interesting Obama clip circulating online right now might be "Viva Obama!," a musical tribute cooked up by the Chicago-based marketing company Nueva Vista Media and performed by a California mariachi band. Aimed at Latino voters in Tuesday's Texas primary, the video features a Spanish-language testimonial to the junior senator from Illinois.

Translated into English, the song begins:

To the candidate who is Barack Obama
I sing this corrido with all my soul
He was born humble without pretension
He began in the streets of Chicago
Working to achieve a vision
To protect the working people
And bring us all together in this great nation
Viva Obama! Viva Obama!

The anthropologist Margaret Dorsey has listened to lots of lyrics like these—though this is the first time she's heard someone combine a corrido, a specific kind of ballad frequently used in South Texas political campaigns, with Mexican mariachi music. "This is insane," she laughs as she hears the song over the phone. "I can't wait to listen to it at home. It sounds like a wonderful example of cultural hybridity and innovation."

Dorsey has spent a lifetime surrounded by borderlands politics and borderlands music. The daughter of a now-retired Texas judge, she attended her first rally when she was five. More recently, she spent several years researching and writing Pachangas (2006), an intriguing study of the intersection between music, marketing, and politics along the Texas-Mexico border. It focuses on the pachanga, a local institution whose forms range from family barbeques with musical entertainment to choreographed commercial spectacles sponsored by Budweiser, Ace Hardware, and other multinational firms. She did her fieldwork in and near Hidalgo County, a rapidly growing border county that contains over 700,000 people.

Dorsey, 34, is now a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. I interviewed her in late February, just a few days before the Texas presidential primary. We began by exploring the deep roots of Obama's campaign corrido.

reason: When did the corrido originate as a form?

Margaret Dorsey: The corrido of the Texas-Mexico borderland area comes out of a context of intercultural contact and conflict, specifically between Anglo and Mexicano populations. Américo Paredes [author of With His Pistol in His Hand, the classic study of the subject] points to the time period around 1900 to 1920, when you see the real emergence and innovation of this form in the region.

reason: What is the literal translation of "corrido"?

Dorsey: Literally, correr means "to run"; it's about a flow. But the best translation in English is really "ballad," or "border ballad."

The quintessential corrido, the ur-text, is "El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez." Paredes found many, many iterations of this song. It's never exactly the same: People change the places a little, and they play with it. But it follows the corrido form in terms of its rhyme scheme. There is a corrido melody, and it follows that. And the text tells the story of an upright man fighting for the right cause against a system that is not upright.

This is important, too: A corrido is based in reality. It's a legend, but it's based on historical fact. It's extrapolated from this wonderful story of what happened to this fellow.

reason: And what did happen to him?

Dorsey: In a nutshell, it's the story of an upright Mexicano fighting the unjust rinches, or Texas Rangers. It's a very long story, but the short version is they come on his property and try to arrest his brother, a shooting match breaks out, people are killed, and then he flees and Rangers chase him all over the state. Once they meet up, Cortez is put in jail. He is tried in several counties in rural Texas, and finally President Lincoln's daughter intercedes to have him freed.

reason: So it's a classic outlaw ballad, then.

Dorsey: It is. You can talk about this in relation to European balladry traditions. You can talk about this in relation to the Robin Hood story. It's connected to both Mexican and U.S. folk forms. In terms of Spanish balladry traditions, Paredes argues that it builds upon the romance form.

reason: It's interesting that this form that's identified with celebrating the righteous outlaw would evolve into something celebrating the outsider politician.

Dorsey: It makes a lot of sense, right? In my book I talk about [Judge Edward] Aparicio [subject of a popular campaign corrido, "The Song of the Judge"]. He was the politician from Washington state running for office in Hidalgo County in South Texas. And who was he running against? The political machinery. So you can see how those valences work.

You can see it with Obama, too. Bill Clinton was just stumping for Hillary Clinton in Corpus. There was not a strong turnout. There weren't many people there. And -- this fits perfectly with the corrido -- who was standing on stage with Bill Clinton? All of the political establishment, all of these elected officials. Then Hillary Clinton spoke at University of Texas-Brownsville, and from what I could see, she did not have a huge turnout.

Obama had a rally around the same time at University of Texas-Pan American, in Edinburg. At that rally, people arrived six hours ahead of time so that they could be close to Obama.

reason: But is a university typical? A campus would probably be stronger territory for Obama.

Dorsey: Well, I was watching the news, and they were interviewing some young people who had come from Rio Grande City, which is an hour away. Obama's bringing in lots of young people, and when you talk to political scientists who study Latinos in the U.S., you can see it's clearly falling along the lines of young, educated, cosmopolitan Mexicanos overwhelmingly supporting Obama. For Hillary Clinton, it's middle-aged Mexicanos.

reason: There's also the idea that someone like Alonzo Cantu, who was reported to be bundling contributions for Hillary, also has the sort of turnout machine that can bus people in to vote for her -- people who might not be as politically engaged on the national scene but know who their patrons are. Do you buy that argument?

Dorsey: I think people who make that argument are discounting the ability of individuals to make their own choices.

reason: The most recent poll numbers I've seen have Obama ahead statewide but with Clinton holding the lead in the border country.

Dorsey: That's pretty much what I've been seeing, too. I haven't seen any surveys that have Obama ahead in the region. What people have told me is that in places like the Austin area his backing is much stronger, but when you get into South Texas there's a much more even split. Even families are split.

We're just going to have to see. I don't think anyone knows. I'm not a predictor.

reason: You mentioned Hillary Clinton's rally in Brownsville. I thought it was interesting that the Brownsville Herald headline called it a "presidential pachanga." Later in the article, the reporter said the rally had "the feel of a political pachanga."

First of all, how would you define a political pachanga?

Dorsey: There are different types of pachangas. You have corporate pachangas, you have family pachangas, and you have political pachangas.

When you look at the political pachangas, specifically in Hidalgo County, you see various iterations of it. You see old-style pachangas, which are still in practice, which are all men, typically out in the country on a little ranch. There's live music, the men cook the food, they're talking politics, and they're organizing people to run for office.

Another kind arose with women taking an explicit role in politics: the dance-hall style pachanga. You find that in small towns and cities. It'll be in a dance hall, usually a family-owned dance hall. It'll have food—traditional Mexican-style entrees, but also served with white bread and things like that. It involves usually a conjunto band. Conjunto bands play various genres of music, including corridos and including dance music. They always have an accordion and a bajo sexto, which is a kind of guitar, and a vocalist.

These rallies involve a pretty set format. You usually have some prayers, the showing of the colors of the flag, patriotic gestures, introduction of the candidate, then the candidate's speech. And then everyone leaves. It almost feels like going to mass, it's almost that regimented. People dance beforehand and afterwards.

The third kind is a novel combination. It's moving more toward a spectacle format, so it has a much more visual orientation, easier to broadcast on TV.

reason: What's the relationship between a political pachanga and the sort of rally Hillary had in Brownsville?

Dorsey: I can't comment on it, because I wasn't there and I didn't talk to anyone who went to her event. The images I have just aren't clear enough.

reason: I found another report about the Clintons going to pachangas back in the '90s. Those were actual pachangas that do fit the term?

Dorsey: They do. Bill Clinton is and was a strong presence in this area. You go into restaurants, and you see signs with the owner shaking Bill Clinton's hand, saying this was Bill Clinton's favorite restaurant. I remember a couple of years ago Hillary Clinton was down in the Valley raising money. So they have maintained their presence in that area for a long time. I never heard about Barack Obama going down to the Rio Grande Valley and drawing in the big money people and raising money the way Hillary has.

reason: I want to read a couple of quotes from your book. First: "Scholars have tracked the work of people, particularly upper-class conservatives in power, who use terms like 'boss,' 'patrón,' and 'machine' in conjunction with politics to describe all that is bad in U.S. politics. Usually such discourse functions to disenfranchise poor citizens (who tend to be darker and immigrant), keeping them as far removed from the political system as possible." The other one is earlier in the book: "With the final fall of bosses like [James B.] Wells, who saw Mexicanos as political capital, and with the rise of reformist candidates, politics reverted to strict racial segregation and a systematic disenfranchisement of Mexicano voters. The texture of politics in South Texas shifted from one of pistol whipping and brow beating—coercing Mexicanos to vote a certain way—to excluding them from the process altogether."

At the surface, grassroots democratic reform seems to be opposed to that kind of machine politics. On the other hand, there's this history of people using "reform" as a way of cutting out the lower rungs.

Dorsey: Usually that's been how people are disenfranchised. When I was doing my fieldwork down there, you still heard Republicans using that rhetoric. The Republicans would use this talk of transparency. And Barack Obama also talks about transparency in his speeches, though that doesn't necessarily mean that the valences are the same.

This is why the story of Aparicio is so important. Block-walking [visiting voters door to door] and grassroots politics are very important to this area. It's very important for people to get to know the candidates, for people to have personal contact with the candidates. The corrido, the music, can often work to facilitate that.

So you do have this very complicated relationship between personal contact and people looking at voters, especially people of color, as a "herd" to be marshaled to vote one way.

reason: How does Obama's rhetoric fit into that? The period of disenfranchisement that you're talking about was the Progressive Era, which is associated with liberal reform.

Dorsey: Right. Martha Menchaca, who's at UT-Austin, is writing a book about this period in Texas politics. And she agrees that these analyses of "machine," "boss" politics where you have people voting in herds is highly problematic. She's an anthropologist writing a historical study that's going to add a lot of complexity to our understanding of that.

With Obama, it's just hard to tell. I realize that's not really a fair answer, but I think we'll be better positioned to answer that question in the general election. Because the general election will be Republicans vs. Democrats, and that's when you tend to see that rhetoric used more clearly, because it tends to be Republicans using that kind of talk against people of color, who tend to vote Democratic. Republicans are already talking about Obama the same way: He's part of "the machine from Chicago."

reason: A lot of people wouldn't talk to you on the record about political pachangas. Do you feel that reticence was justified?

Dorsey: If one feels afraid or threatened to speak about it, certainly it's justified. It's not my place to tell them they should feel safe or unsafe. Politics is still physical in Hidalgo County. The day Barack Obama spoke in Edinburg, the local TV station reported the sheriff going out to a site where people were campaigning for a state rep race -- the campaign workers were having clashes. People were afraid it was going to turn into a fistfight.

Politics in South Texas is still very personal. It's still very family-based for a lot of people. You still hear stories about there being brawls at the polls. That's not everywhere at all times, but it still happens.

At the pachangas themselves, I write about the politiqueras, the ward-heelers, and some people affiliate their role with a type of coercion in getting people out to vote.

reason: Your book talks about the corporate pachangas converging with the political pachangas. When did that start to happen?

Dorsey: I didn't put a date on that. But companies like Budweiser putting on these huge pachangas has been around now for at least a decade. One important fact that I highlight in my book is that right at the time when you expect the candidates to be busy at their own pachangas, Budweiser hosts this huge event and all of the political players are there.

Those events aren't just people from the lower Rio Grande Valley. They bring in people from all over South Texas.

reason: You had a quote in the book about the changing meaning of the term "crossover." A marketer you interviewed, Robert Peña, flipped the word on its head—instead of talking about Tejano stars and the like crossing over to the mass market, he said that advertisers need "to cross over into the Hispanic marketplace." So instead of the outsiders crossing over to the mainstream, the people who are seeking the consumers cross over to the consumers' niche.

You seem ambivalent about that process, but I think it demonstrates a really interesting mutual influence between the local population and the transnational companies.

Dorsey: And we're seeing this today in these political campaigns. You see that in that webpage you sent me: "Viva Obama!" Hillary Clinton is doing it, too. I think Robert Peña was showing some foresight.

We have this wonderful Obama corrido, this hybrid kind of mixture. At the same time, both Obama and Clinton voted in favor of the fence—what people along the border call the wall. And that is highly unpopular in these places.

reason: How do they address that issue when they're in South Texas? It's not just immigrants who are upset—property owners are having their land taken.

Dorsey: Hillary Clinton said at the debate that when she spoke at the University of Texas-Brownsville the previous night, she learned that the president's plan would go right through the campus of the University of Texas. She said there was a "smart way" and a "dumb way" to protect the border and that this was clearly "absurd." And she said it had to be "reviewed" and that she would "listen to the people who live along the border." But then, after she says that, she talks about "smart fencing" and using technology.

So while they're stumping, people from inside the Beltway are finally hearing what people on the border have been saying forever. It doesn't matter if you're Republican or Democrat, if your skin is light or dark, if your first language is English or Spanish—almost everyone is against the wall. So people like Hillary are saying that we're going to build it in spots, but first we have to listen to the people. She's trying to do both.

Obama's not that much different. He even said, in this debate, that they "almost entirely agree." Obama has three talking points on immigration, and he does a good job in sticking to those three points. But one thing he's added—and Hillary Clinton has mentioned this too—is that we need to work with Mexico and the governments of Central America to fix their economies so that we don't have as many people coming in. Then he shifts attention to—this is his number—the "12 million undocumented workers" in the U.S.

reason: How did you get drawn into this world? Was this around you already, or did you decide as an academic that you wanted to take a closer look?

Dorsey: I was raised in Texas politics. When I went to grad school I was interested in studying the relationship between music and politics, but I didn't know where they came together. I was constantly going back and forth between studying music and studying politics, and the convergence just wasn't there. Then, in 1998, I was reading the Corpus Christi paper, and I saw this photo of Bush stumping with [Tejano star] Emilio Navaira. And he just swept the largely Mexicano counties, the first time a Republican had done that since Reconstruction. That's what brought it all together.

Jesse Walker is managing editor of reason.

The Traditionalist Counterculture

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 07:49:00 EST

In the web journal First Principles, reason managing editor Jesse Walker takes a look at "crunchy cons," National Review conservatives, the Summer of Love, and "the libertarian and traditionalist wings of the hippie movement."

Read all about it here.