Reason Magazine - Staff > Tim Cavanaugh

The (Diminishing) Return of Pandering

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In a political season simply oozing hope, change, and historical firsts, here’s something that might actually be encouraging: a widening gulf between promised election-year giveaways and the expressed desires of the populace on the receiving end. Has shameless political pandering become one more item on the long list of services Washington can’t deliver?

This year’s combination of costly interventions and pork-barreling has not deviated from the classical script for Washington largess. If people are paying more than they used to for gas, the tradition goes, the federal government is supposed to get in there and make prices go down, preferably through a gas tax “holiday” like the one proposed by presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and John McCain. If real estate prices are falling and deadbeat mortgagees are being kicked back into the rental economy, the government must stand athwart the market yelling “Stop!” Food prices up? Pass a farm bill extending subsidies for farmers in order to lock in those prices while…uh, giving out food stamps to prevent tortilla riots?

What’s out of character this year is the mounting evidence that American voters are not showing much interest in these quack remedies. As Clinton and McCain treated drivers to both glad-handing and creeping Anglophilia (in America we take gas tax “vacations,” thank you) by offering to lift the 18.4 cent-per-gallon federal gas tax during the summer driving season, voters themselves said no. According to a national Rasmussen Reports poll, a majority of respondents either opposed or weren’t sure about the tax break. The idea never had majority support, and local polling throughout the spring primaries showed even stronger opposition.

Leave aside the case against a federal gasoline tax in the first place. Lifting it this summer as a one-time benefit or stimulus is practically a caricature of the contemptuous solicitousness with which Washington treats ordinary Americans, the equivalent of kissing the booboo of drivers who have seen gas prices nearly double over the past three years. If climate change is your thing, the proposal is particularly galling: A government that was truly serious about reducing carbon emissions, or for that matter curing America’s “addiction” to foreign oil (causes to which McCain and Clinton both pay lip service), would make every effort not to shield consumers from the rising costs of fossil fuels.

Through lack of public support (or common sense), that gas tax vacances ended up going nowhere. The same could not be said, alas, for this year’s pork-larded, $307 billion farm bill, which seemed to gain more traction as it grew less popular. Americans have been against farm subsidies for years, to the tune of 70 to 80 percent opposition. In that stance, they are for once supported by the mainstream media, which generally give negative grades to agricultural subsidies and were strongly opposed to this year’s handout. The bill, ironically if accurately described as “politically popular,” sailed into law, with the House and Senate voting 316-108 and 82-13, respectively—more than enough to override a presidential veto.

In terms of pressing its affections on an unwilling public, however, the farm bill had nothing on the heavily panting mortgage bailout bill—sorry, the Federal Housing Finance Regulatory Reform Act of 2008. This piece of legislation won the hearts of Congress, the presidential candidates, and, after some soul-searching, President Bush himself, while leaving the citizenry strangely unmoved. Throughout the first half of this year, assorted versions of the bill were concocted with the goal of delivering assistance to distressed homeowners, but doing so narrowly enough to avoid infuriating voters. We were told, among other things, that Americans wanted a bill that didn’t bail out banks, reward “speculative” home buyers, or give unfair help to players in the mortgage-backed securities market.

The one version of this wooly tale for which there was actually some evidence: Americans never wanted a mortgage bailout of any kind. In March Rasmussen found that Americans opposed bailing out homeowners by nearly a 2-to-1 margin (53 percent to 29 percent), and were even more strongly opposed to bailouts for lenders. (To be fair, Gallup around the same time managed to get a 56-42 percent majority in support of “having the federal government take steps to prevent people from losing their homes,” with no elaboration of what the steps were—an important data point given the “voluntary” refinancing efforts Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was urging at the time.) In May, during consideration of a mortgage-rescue bill sponsored by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told the L.A. Times that his constituent mail was running “50 to 1: ‘Don’t bail these people out.’ ”

Is McCarthy just another aloof Republican? For his sake I hope not: His district, Bakersfield, ranks eighth nationwide in the number of foreclosure filings per household, according to the foreclosure-tracking company RealtyTrac. Now this great country is not lacking in areas that have been designated “foreclosure epicenters.” Yet even in Bakersfield, which may actually deserve that title, bailout supporters are as rare as hens’ teeth. So who is for this thing?

That would be, first, the media, which have repeatedly expressed shock at the “surprising amount of opposition” to a mortgage rescue (The New York Times, in December), hoped that the housing crisis might “overcome bailout resistance in both parties and the public” (financial columnist Lou Barnes, in March), and puzzled over the “curious coalition opposed to a state rescue for mortgage borrowers” (Financial Times, in April). And second, the politicians: As of this writing, some version of the bailout plan appears likely to reach the president’s desk and receive his signature.

The American majority, on this handout and others, appears to hold very different views. Unfortunately, that distributed sense of fiscal responsibility doesn’t count for much against the concentrated strength of lobbyists, media buttinskis, and politicians who don’t want to get fired for not looking busy. But hey, a guy can dream. I mean, it’s not possible for democratically elected officials to go on thwarting the will of the people forever, is it?

Tim Cavanaugh is Web editor of the L.A. Times’s editorial pages.

Classical Gasbags

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Getting Serious About "Getting Serious"

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

I want to call la migra on my neighbors.

It's not just that I hate the other tenants in my building, or that I want to see some upfront constituent service from noted blackface authority Julie L. Myers, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

It's not only that I think I might get better treatment from my prick landlord if several units in the building were forcibly emptied. I'm not even sure how well calling in a raid from ICE would work: I have good reason to believe that the only family in the building I like is out of status.

It's just nice to share the popular feeling of being personally burdened by the invasion across our southern border. My fellow supporters of unrestricted immigration, who spend all their time being chauffeured between undocumented-nanny-cleaned mansions and illegal-janitor-tended Ivory Towers, forget the degree to which immigration-restriction pressure is driven by a feeling of injustice, in particular by suspicions of condescension and neglect from aloof authorities. That people in power refuse to get serious about illegal immigration is the essential premise of all immigration foment. That feeling gels in a sense that even when public officials do get serious about illegal immigration, they're really winking at the audience. And public officials don't do a whole lot to correct that impression.

Here's Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff giving a recent assessment of his efforts to seal the U.S.-Mexico border: "To me, the most important thing we're doing at the border is showing the American people that if we make a judgment that we need to do something and we promise to do it, we'll do it."

If you're passionate about stopping illegal entry into the United States, it's hard not to see that statement as a condescension: Chertoff's stated concern isn't catching illegal immigrants at the border; it's showing the American people that he wants to catch illegal immigrants at the border.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) specializes in the language of convincing voters and understanding their concerns. If, as is statistically likely, you augment your opposition to immigration with opposition to free trade, these clumsy attempts to validate your feelings can seem insultingly false: Who is able to believe Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) really opposes NAFTA when she's swilling down Canadian whiskey?

Sure, you could argue that restrictionists deserve no better. After all, when you go to a doctor for an imaginary malady, you should expect to be treated with a placebo.

But not all the complaints are as petty as my beef with my neighbors. In Los Angeles, the March murder of 17-year-old high school football star Jamiel Shaw has opened an off-topic but revealing controversy over a Los Angeles Police Department rule governing how officers are supposed to deal with illegal immigrants.

Pedro Espinoza, Shaw's accused killer, is an illegal immigrant who was released from county jail shortly before the murder, despite procedures that were supposed to have him referred to federal authorities and (presumably) deported. For various reasons (among them, that Espinoza was arrested by Culver City cops), the case doesn't bear on the LAPD's "Special Order 40," which was promulgated in 1979 by then-chief Daryl Gates and advises cops not to initiate inquiries about immigration status in most cases. But that hasn't stopped a fiery debate on the rule. That debate isn't strictly logic-based, but it expresses a general sense that local authorities don't want to bring any power to bear on crooks who flout their indifference to the laws of the land—and a detailed look at procedures suggests there is some validity in that view.

LAPD Chief William Bratton may be the most politically astute cop on the planet, but with his accurate, dismissive comments about the controversy, he's playing into the hawks' sense that nobody takes their concerns seriously. If you're that way inclined, you can draw a pretty compelling picture of a city where officialdom fiddles while illegals murder Stanford-hopeful athletes, slaughter interesting filmmakers, and ethnically cleanse the local black population. That kind of argument by anecdote is always cheap, but in this case it has a special piquancy. It's in the nature of all immigration to create concentrated costs and distributed benefits, and if you're the person who got beaten up by pandilleros or sent home from an overcrowded emergency room, you enjoy extra credibility on this issue.

Some immigration hawks really are driven by an honest sense of law and order, and fear of crime is particularly susceptible to anecdotal support (except when crime-rate statistics overwhelmingly argue against that fear, which, in L.A., they don't). It's an interesting paradox. Nearly all trends are going the way the restrictionists want. Some researchers say that border crossings peaked back in 2000. In any case, the current economy stinks, dampening the attraction of the U.S. for prospective border jumpers. Tougher enforcement has made the border quieter, while even professional immigration hawks applaud the superior "tone" of a nation with fewer migrants. In L.A., it's likely that Special Order 40 will be modified, possibly in ways that would allow cops to use gang members' illegal immigration status against them.

Yet the rhetoric about immigration remains as passionate and hysterical as ever. And so government officials respond to the hysteria, but since they know in their hearts that the immigration crisis is a solution in search of a problem, they do so with a vain, affected quality that reveals the very condescension restrictionists find so infuriating.

In the end, immigration hawks will never be happy because what they really want is somebody to say "I feel your pain"—and mean it.

Tim Cavanaugh is opinion Web editor at The Los Angeles Times.

Rant: Not Ready for Sub-Prime Players

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Tue, 08 May 2007 12:05:00 EDT

Even cave-dwelling, 15-year-fixed-rate-paying troglodytes were close to hysteria this spring, spooked by speculation that the debacle in the sub-prime mortgage industry, which had already sunk industry leaders like Ownit and AmeriQuest, was on the verge of torpedoing the entire American economy. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) proposed a bailout of the multi-billion-dollar industry. Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton called for a “foreclosure timeout.” A bill aiming to stop “predatory lending” practices is still moving through the Senate.

Strangely, though, homebuyers in Southern California, the epicenter of the sub-prime quake, don’t seem to have heard the news. Actual closing prices continued to climb throughout the industry crash.

The sub-prime meltdown comes in a context of debt panic—specifically, of other-people’s-debt panic. Liberal economists, values conservatives, and hug-the-middle moderates are in full agreement on this one: Poor people’s access to debt is driving them to fiscal ruination or worse. James D. Scurlock’s celebrated documentary Maxed Out collects horror stories—including youngsters driven to suicide by credit card debt—to prove the thesis that “banks and credit card companies are setting their customers up to fail.” Anya Kamenetz, author of Generation Debt, envisions debt-ridden young professionals as the new serfs. (The hard-luck bio on Kamenetz’ website includes the Dickensian detail that she “graduated from Yale seven months after the 9/11 attacks.”) Ambitious politicians and math-unencumbered reporters are in hot pursuit of the culprits: predatory lenders, indifferent regulators, Madison Avenue captains of consciousness—everybody except people who borrow large sums of money with no intention of paying it back.

The conventional wisdom used to say the poor didn’t have enough access to debt. One of the earliest products of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was the Home Owners Refinancing Act, which provided mortgage money to more than a million borrowers over a three-year period. Harry Truman’s record shows a consistent effort to expand the amount of debt available to willing borrowers.

My favorite artifact of the period’s pro-lending mood is Fredric March’s great “collateral” speech from the 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives. March, playing a rising bank middle manager who has just returned to his job after serving as an Army NCO in the Pacific, reads a rambling riot act to a banquet of porcine small-town bankers who have criticized him for providing loans to bad-credit-risk veterans. If we’d fought like bankers, seeking collateral for every risk and a guarantee on every expenditure, we’d have lost the war, he argues.

We can dispute the wisdom of federally guaranteed loans and mortgage purchasing, but it’s notable that the new economy March wanted helped to create one of the greatest booms in the country’s history: the postwar suburbanization of America, which is now derided by our own bien pensant classes, who claim there’s too much ready credit out there. The difference now is that it’s coming from the market rather than a package of government guarantees, from an industry that expanded to fill a demand and is now contracting as the demand shrinks.

In a sane world, we’d say this is a market behaving as it should, and marvel at an economy where so many people who were once locked into the renters market have gotten a chance at homeownership. Some of them have blown their chance by exhibiting the same kind of behavior that made them bad credit risks in the first place. But most have not. In fact, about nine out of every 10 sub-prime borrowers are still making their payments.

So our grandparents solved the not-enough-credit crisis, and Sens. Clinton and Dodd are well on the way to solving the too-much-credit crisis. What will they think of next? Whatever it is, there will be plenty of deadbeats, politicians, and people who can’t do math to cry that the sky is falling, even if home prices are not.

Tim Cavanaugh is an editor at the Los Angeles Times.

Discuss this article online.

Battle of the Blogosphere: Cavanaugh vs. Gillespie

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Fri, 18 May 2007 12:21:00 EDT

Over at the website Jewcy, reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie and former Web Editor Tim Cavanaugh (now with The Los Angeles Times) engage in three days of peace, love, and misunderstanding about political blogs, the passing of Jerry Falwell, the GOP debates, and much, much more.

Read Day One here.

Read Day Two here.

Read Day Three here.

Discuss this article online.

We the Living Dead

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 14:48:00 EST

Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, by Annalee Newitz, Durham: Duke University Press, 183 pages, $21.95

Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, by Jamie Russell, Surrey: FAB Press, 309 pages, $29.95

The Dominion of the Dead, by Robert Pogue Harrison, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 159 pages, $14

The zombiephiles—that odd cohort of nerds, video game addicts, and mullet-headed grindhouse nostalgists who have made the flesh-eating zombie a central figure of modern culture—know all about chewed kidneys, shambling ghouls, moldering flesh, barricaded doors, deserted streets, and the all-important bullet to the brain. But most of all, fans of the rich, vibrant zombie narrative of the late 20th and early 21st centuries know about politics.

Ever since George Romero’s genre-creating Night of the Living Dead in 1968, and especially since Romero’s overtly political 1978 masterpiece Dawn of the Dead, highbrow revolutionary theorizing has stalked this graveyard of lowbrow pleasures. In his 1979 study The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, the esteemed cineaste Robin Wood declared that the zombie’s cannibalism “represents the ultimate in possessiveness, hence the logical end of human relations under capitalism.” J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 1983 study Midnight Movies called Night of the Living Dead “a remarkable vision of the late sixties, offering the most literal possible depiction of America devouring itself.” In a later reappraisal, a Village Voice critic explained that “the zombie carnage seemed a grotesque echo of the conflict then raging in Vietnam.”

The film historian Sumiko Higashi went completely around the bend in a 1990 essay, declaring, “There are no Vietnamese in Night of the Living Dead.…They constitute an absent presence whose significance can be understood if narrative is construed.” As subsequent genre pictures, trailing titles like Zombi 2 and Zombie Flesh Eaters 3, ate their way through America’s VCRs, Wood elaborated his original claims, averring in his 1986 book Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan that the living dead “represent, on a metaphorical level, the whole dead weight of patriarchal consumer capitalism, from whose habits of behavior and desire not even Hare Krishnas and nuns…are exempt.” Take a bite out of that.

Two recent books belong to different strains of this wonderful critical tradition. Annalee Newitz’s Pretend We’re Dead, an unapologetically Marxist survey of horror films as studies in labor theory and racial politics, celebrates not only the poor zombie but also the mad scientist (cruelly alienated from the means of intellectual production) and the identity-stealing alien invader (a commodifier of family-cultural norms). Jamie Russell’s Book of the Dead is more of a fan encyclopedia, but it too makes impressive claims about how Dawn of the Dead “offers us a glimpse of a universe in which all spiritual values have been replaced by our awareness of the material realities of the corporeal and consumerism.”

Such readings can be silly and overdetermined, but they’re mostly right. From Night of the Living Dead to Homecoming (in which dead Iraq war veterans return from the grave to vote against the war), the zombie movie has been among the most consistently political forms in American popular culture. The politics tend to lean left, but zombie entertainment approaches a level of discontent more elemental than mere anti-capitalism or shopping mall burlesque. Apocalyptic and piously disdainful of the carnal realities of human life, zombie cinema is a shocking, uproarious meditation on the nature of death—on what, if anything, we owe to the dead.

Russell’s book helpfully explains that the word zombie didn’t appear in the English language until 1889 (in a Harper’s article on voodoo by Lafcadio Hearn) and did not attain currency until the 1920s, propelled by the Haitian-adventure writings of William Seabrook. Hearn and Seabrook made strong efforts to jazz up the vague tales they’d heard in the Caribbean about resurrected dead people working as plantation slaves. Thus, from the start, the reanimated stiff was a modern phenomenon, a figure of Western exoticism as much as an authentic island legend, with tales of blank-eyed field workers, “white zombies,” and witch-doctor mesmerism.

George Romero, a Pittsburgh-based director of TV commercials and occasional segments for Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, took the basic concept of the mindless automaton, stripped out the superstitious hoodoo, and injected it with the grotesque visuals and highly programmatic irony he learned from EC Comics. Night of the Living Dead had a budget of $114,000, jarringly violent content (though its intestinal tug-of-war and close-up cannibalism may seem tame to today’s viewers), and a punkish nihilism: It is equally unkind to media, military, and police authorities and to its own heroes—parents trying to protect an injured child, a goodhearted young couple, and a likable hero who survives the night only to be mistaken for a zombie and killed by sheriff’s deputies. The plot is elegantly simple. For reasons never fully explained, recently deceased bodies return to life in order to devour the living, and several strangers barricade themselves in a deserted farmhouse in a doomed attempt to survive the onslaught.

Night of the Living Dead earned a vast sum (estimated at about 250 times its budget) on the midnight movie and TV syndication circuits, and was honored at the Museum of Modern Art and preserved by the Library of Congress. It repays all the critical attention with a maddening thumbs down on humanity. Characters are done in by their zombified siblings and children. The film’s roots in resurrection and cannibalism parody the founding ideas of Catholicism, yet it avoids any hint of spiritual or supernatural meaning. The zombie plague follows a public-health epidemic model, but the movie doesn’t really offer a scientific explanation for the tragedy. (Hints about radiation from a NASA probe are quickly and shrewdly abandoned.) You get the impression that the dead are rising against us because, in some general way, we deserve it.

Romero’s zombie follow-ups featured increasingly direct political content. The epic-scaled 1978 Dawn of the Dead moved the action to a shopping mall for a grisly satire of consumer culture; the most brain-dead viewer couldn’t miss the meaning of those zombies shambling dimly to the elevator music and eating intestines outside the Thom McAn shoe store. The unloved 1985 Day of the Dead dispensed with the satire, making shrieking villains out of military types who were still holding out against the undead. The inevitable fourth film in the trilogy, Land of the Dead (2005), was practically a 527 ad, with full-bore jibes at American foreign policy and the real estate boom, Dennis Hopper playing a profiteer modeled on then–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Romero openly siding with the zombies.

Romero’s minimal template turned out to be enormously fertile all over this planet. The supremely dedicated Russell lists more than 300 international zombie titles. The genre encompasses such oddities as Stacy, an allusive Japanese schoolgirl zombie dramedy; the Hong Kong “hopping zombie” series of Sir Run Run Shaw; and Lucio Fulci’s magnificent Zombi 2, which combines a flesh-eating zombie, a man-eating shark, and a bare-breasted woman diver in a bravura underwater battle.

Nearly all these films follow, with one or two modifications, the same basic ground rules. The recently deceased return as slow, weak, dumb, disorganized automata whose only desire is to eat the living. Despite their many deficiencies, they have numbers on their side. A bite from a zombie is always fatal, and death means you too will come back as one of them. The setting is nearly always apocalyptic, with the heroes learning through radio or TV broadcasts that the dead are rising not just in their neck of the woods but all over the country. The only way to put a zombie down is to destroy its brain. A geographical constant puts settlers in an isolated outpost (farmhouse, pub, voodoo church, downtown Pittsburgh), where they bicker, weaken, and are finally overwhelmed—making the genre a sort of anti-western that reverses the process of bringing civilization to a savage land.

In Pretend We’re Dead, Newitz, a tech columnist and philosopher, considers the flesh-eating undead as symbols of racial oppression—a credible reading, given the genre’s Afro-Caribbean roots. Even in considering a film as critically paved over as Night of the Living Dead, Newitz manages a fresh insight: that the late Duane Jones’ doomed hero is not only an African American but clearly marked as a bourgeois achiever of the civil rights era, sporting loafers, a dress shirt, and an admirable work ethic. (He spends much of the film boarding up windows and doors.) Thus his murder at the hands of a mob connects the film with what is, in Newitz’s imaginative reading, the first undead picture—Birth of a Nation, where white men become white-sheeted “ghosts” in order to prey upon upwardly mobile blacks.

It’s vain to argue that zombie politics don’t lean left, but the positioning is not simple. Bob Clark’s 1970 film Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, for example, is something of a reactionary fantasy, with the undead attacking the most irritating band of flower children in movie history—possibly the exact moment America turned decisively against hippies. Romero himself is more of a free-ranging anti-authoritarian than a formal leftist, and his monsters, partly because they’ve been divorced from any kind of ethical or supernatural meaning, are open to various interpretations. The conservative blogger Tim Hulsey sees the undead as a Randian nightmare vision, a mobocracy in which “weak and incompetent corpses band together and achieve a dominance over the living minority that they could not otherwise attain.” For Hulsey, “when the zombies attack, their arms are outstretched toward the victim, as if they were begging for something. Which, in a manner of speaking, they are.…The idea of being overwhelmed by stinking masses, of being forced into a way of life (or death) we would not choose for ourselves, lies at the maggot-infested heart of the original Dead trilogy.”

Something else works against reducing the zombie flick to schematic politics: the film’s physical weight, its fascination with eviscerations, rotting skin, simple fleshy mortality. Russell’s Book of the Dead is the kind of horror movie book you don’t see much anymore, in which high-minded text fleshes out a gallery of incredibly gory color stills from ghastly films. With dripping viscera and mutilated sex kittens on virtually every page, it’s something I hadn’t thought possible in this post-shame age—a book I was actually embarrassed to read in public. In other words, it’s an apt, brilliant look at a medium whose saving grace is that it can never become respectable. Russell, a British film journalist, loves the “splatter” or “gut muncher” genre, the series of extremely bloody Italian films that followed the outlandish violence of Dawn of the Dead, and he entertains the not-improbable theory that there’s an element of Catholic mortification of the flesh in here somewhere.

Discussing the Blind Dead series of the Spanish director Amando de Ossorio (in which cowl-wearing Knights Templar mummies feast on beautiful young women), Russell expands the obvious Death-and-the-Maiden theme. “The flesh,” he writes, “is simply a reminder of our own mortality. The younger and prettier it is, the more poignant the realization of its eventual death, decay, and destruction. As the Templars shuffle blindly and (incredibly) slowly toward their victims, it’s impossible not to see them as the literal embodiment of death’s relentless and completely implacable approach.”

In addition to political and eschatological appeals, there is another characteristic of the zombie genre: the strong desire of fans not merely to observe the zombie apocalypse but to participate in it. Shinji Mikami’s phenomenally popular Resident Evil video game is only the most prominent of more than 70 zombie game titles. (Resident Evil has inspired several films for the Japanese and Hong Kong markets as well as two—so far —Hollywood pictures starring the queen of the B’s, Milla Jovovich.) The humorous conceit of Max Brooks’ 2003 Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From the Living Dead is that the undead are another real-life challenge like personal finance or auto repair, and the book is filled with helpful advice drawn from the many movie tropes that have grown up over the years. (Samples: “Blades don’t need reloading” and “Get up the staircase, then destroy it.”) If you watch a zombie picture with fans, be prepared for intense practical discussions about strategy and the science of the resurrected brain. At their best, the movies support this literalness: The long sequence in Dawn of the Dead wherein the heroes secure and sweep the zombie-infested Monroeville Mall in suburban Pittsburgh is as carefully detailed, as true to the logic of tactics and terrain, as anything ever presented in a heist or war picture.

Can these various critical theories and fan passions be reconciled? I think so. What makes zombie films special isn’t that they feature outrageous gore or invite political readings. Plenty of horror films do that. But they are the only movies that give much thought to the nasty physicality of death. The detail that the zombie can only be dispatched if its brain is destroyed seems like a throwaway plot device, but it connects the genre to something universal and disturbing: the particular quality and nature of corpses. The brain isn’t reasoning, merely lurching the body along in an extended post-death muscle spasm. Gone is the monster that can be dispatched by romantic means like exorcism or proper burial or a stake through the heart. Ironically, the zombie, a creature that negates the finality of death, is a dramatic reminder of the physical permanence of mortality.

The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison’s poetic study of death and burial rituals, is definitely not a zombie book, but it is relevant here. Harrison, a professor of Italian at Stanford, considers how funerary rituals create human institutions, how the dead and the living coexist. It’s in burying the dead, for example, that we put a cultural stamp on a piece of ground. That makes losses at sea and other forms of no-remains deaths especially unnerving for survivors. Naming the dead—at the Vietnam War Memorial, for example—shapes how a living society thinks of itself; praying to particular saints or ancestors is a way not only of honoring the past but of creating your own identity. In all those examples, though, the dead remain mute, an undifferentiated unit whose meaning is concocted by the living. Studying the celebrated closing paragraphs of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” Harrison explains how snow falling evenly is a more apt simile for the end than, say, falling leaves, which retain their original shape. To die is to be subsumed into a mass.

To die is also to be involved in something substantially less pretty than a gentle snowfall. After reading Dominion of the Dead I found myself craving a late-night screening of Zombie Flesh Eaters 7 or 8, something with the decaying dead walking around in their graduation gowns, softball league uniforms, and cheerleader outfits—those markers of healthy and fruitful life now perverted by the humiliating stench of death.

No zombie discussion would be complete without orotund socio-political theory, so here’s mine: By foregrounding the question of how much dignity there can be in death and dying, the era of physician-assisted suicide and Terri Schiavo has spurred the recent revival of the zombie film. The British director Danny Boyle revived his career with the zombie-type plague picture 28 Days Later (2002). Dawn of the Dead was remade in 2004 with a big budget and an A-minus-list cast. That same year, the genre-informed Shaun of the Dead proved it’s possible to combine romantic comedy with zombie holocaust in a completely successful picture. And in 2005 Romero, whose forays outside his genre have yielded mixed results, returned to form with what the posters promised would be his “ultimate zombie masterpiece.”

Land of the Dead, a Metropolis-style parable, takes the elements of class warfare to their insane conclusion. The zombies—“blue-collar monsters,” Romero calls them in interviews—are dressed in hilariously explicit class markers: a butcher’s smock, a gas station attendant’s coveralls, etc. The villains are literally cigar-smoking capitalists, holed up in Fiddler’s Green, a high-security skyscraper in Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle. The movie opened in mid-2005 to mixed reviews and mediocre business; it was savaged by fans who found the politics obvious even by genre standards. Yet within a few months, Hurricane Katrina had made the movie’s vision seem prophetic, with a full complement of venal and indifferent authorities and something few of us would have imagined seeing in our lifetimes: bodies lying unburied for weeks in the streets of a major American city. By the time the activist Randall Robinson claimed (erroneously) that New Orleans residents were resorting to cannibalism, the message was clear: It’s George Romero’s world; we’re just mindlessly shambling through it.

The spectacle of an advanced society laid low by a Third World catastrophe is the zombie film’s stock in trade —the “return of the repressed” in a modern, death-denying culture. That’s why the ultimate zombie picture may be one that features no gore or cannibalism at all. Robin Campillo’s 2004 film Les Revenants (released as They Came Back in the United States) envisions a resurrection of thousands in a provincial French town, who then don’t do much of anything. They can talk, but they have no affect, nor any personality beyond mild pleasantness. Their clothes are neatly pressed and their complexions are good, but they’re sort of distracted, unable to relate to loved ones, unable or unwilling to talk about the afterlife, just somehow not there.

Brilliantly, Campillo refuses to milk this material for either comedy or horror but instead explores, in rapid succession, the metaphoric possibilities: The situation looks at times like France’s immigration and refugee crisis (as helpful government officials, pontificating about the rights of all citizens, provide temporary housing for the resurrected in indoor tent cities), at times like a comment on the full-employment state (all the undead are given back their old jobs, which they’re not really able to do anymore), at times like family drama (as characters find themselves guiltily impatient with the empty spouses and children miraculously returned to them), and finally like a parody of the nanny state (as the government sets up thermal monitors to keep track of the returned people—whose body temperatures are just slightly below normal).

That’s an irresolvable setup, but it gets to the heart of what makes our zombie friends such paradoxical creatures: metaphorically potent because they’re grounded in a mundane reality, spiritually provocative because they dispense completely with spirituality, symbols of class warfare that posit a classless society as the ultimate horror. The zombie embodies the greatest horror of death: the inescapable sameness of it. In the end, the grasping, hungry, rotten legions of the living dead are not so different from W.M. Thackeray’s description of the garden-variety dead: “Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.”

Tim Cavanaugh is Web editor of the Los Angeles Times opinion page.

Contract Killings

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 17:37:00 EST

With characteristic deadpan delivery, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) shocked and amazed nobody with a September report announcing that “the United States generally has not met its goals for reconstruction activities in Iraq with respect to the oil, electricity, and water sectors.” As of August, oil production remained below prewar levels, and efforts to restore electricity and water treatment capacity have failed to meet stated goals.

Much of the trouble stems from shady contracting arrangements and unrealistic expectations. As the report explains, “When setting requirements for work to be done, [the Department of Defense] made assumptions about funding and time frames that later proved to be unfounded.” The GAO cites numerous cases where hiring of a contractor was completed before the Defense Department, the State Department, or Iraqi authorities had even decided on the work to be done or the budget for the job.

The agency has been tracking the lousy record of contracting in Iraq since soon after the 2003 invasion. It has turned up dozens of cases where guidelines for competitive bidding were circumvented (by, for example, inaccurately describing the scope of work on a given project) or where agencies abused the “interagency contracting” method designed to increase efficiency and timeliness. In many of the single-bid contract cases, the agencies involved have claimed they didn’t have time to put together a multiple-bid process.

On the plus side, some areas of reconstruction (such as water treatment) have brought Iraq to a level higher than what it had prior to the war, though almost all areas have failed to meet the lofty goals of U.S. agencies.

March of the Moles

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 09:41:00 EST

California now has a central anti-terrorism center, and police and sheriff's departments in the state have developed homeland security, anti-terrorism, and intelligence units, with many departments participating in an FBI joint terrorism task force. So what progress have the cops made against the Golden State's homegrown Bin Ladens?

According to "State of Surveillance," a recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union, they've been working overtime to infiltrate and neutralize activist groups. In Sacramento a police "identification specialist" videotaped the crowd at a demonstration because, in her words, "This is a crime scene." Oakland police infiltrated, and helped plan some of the activities for, a demonstration against police brutality. A San Francisco cop (acting without authorization) donned a Che Guevara pin and helped whip up excitement at an anti-war rally. A deputy sheriff in the terrorist hotbed of Fresno posed as an especially active and motivated member of a local peace group a ruse that unraveled when the deputy died and members of the group recognized his picture in an obituary.

These efforts to help agitators agitate recall the work of the FBI's notorious Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which sowed confusion among radicals in myriad ways, from publishing a fake Black Panther Coloring Book filled with violent racial imagery for children to spreading the rumor that the actress-activist Jean Seberg was pregnant with a Panther's child. Compared to those masterstrokes, the recent efforts by local flatfoots seem practically tame.

Casual Sex, Sunni Style

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 10:35:00 EST

With great trepidation and a roar of religious mumbo jumbo, many Saudis are opting for a matrimonial loophole known as the misyar (or "visit") marriage, a form of clandestine matrimony in which the woman gives up any spousal rights and stays in her own residence, the man visits her for sex, and after a while the union is dissolved by a divorce. Officials tell Arab News that seven of 10 contemporary marriage contracts in Saudi Arabia are misyar arrangements.

The popularity of the arrangement in a country top-heavy with spinsters and divorced women and men unable to afford the expense of maintaining a full-time bride has prompted Saudi religious authorities to observe a time-honored method for dealing with vice: renaming it virtue. This spring, the Institute of Islamic Religious Law sanctioned misyar marriages but stipulated that neither party can enter into the union with a secret intention of getting divorced. Even this caveat is belied by the wording of many misyar contracts. One version makes divorce automatic if the woman gets pregnant; another ends the union if the marriage is made public.

In a society that disguises hatred of women as concern for the well-being of the distaff, it's not surprising that much of the controversy over misyar marriage has centered on exploitation of women or concern for the children of these unions. But the dynamics of the practice create some intriguing questions about power relations and economic clout specifically, whether women may in many cases be driving misyar marriages. Although some of these unions appear to be kept-woman arrangements, a cleric tells the newspaper Al-Madina that the majority of misyar wives are professional women. Some opponents of the practice raise the specter of young gigolos reeling in wealthy old bags and "extorting" them.

But in Saudi Arabia, the most pressing concern is not about women's rights or even Islamic piety but something closer to the heart of the Gulf's Sunni majority: that misyar marriage seems like the kind of thing a Shiite would do. Shia Islam has allowed a similar practice known as mut'a ("pleasure") marriage for centuries except that the Shia version is somewhat less hypocritical, making no secret of the union's nature and allowing the contract to be dissolved without a divorce.

Alan Moore Comes Like a Thief in the Night

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 12:32:00 EDT

The Last Yankee

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 15:16:00 EDT

Institutional sex scandals come in only one package these days. The downfall of former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) has become a gift that keeps on giving, but in its broad outlines it isn't much different than the sexual abuse accusations that rocked the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston in 2002. In both cases a media organization turned up a story that had been kept quiet by authorities: In the case of the Catholic Church, The Boston Globe provided the most voluminous documentation on a story that had been simmering for decades; in the case of the Congress, ABC News broke a story that Florida papers had apparently been sitting on. In each case defenders of the organization were quick to savage the media outlet in question. Neither case contains as much sex as initially advertised: Cases of actual pedophilia in the Catholic Church were rare, and instances of pederasty (that is, incidents involving adolescents rather than pre-adolescents) somewhat more common; as Kerry Howley noted yesterday, "the Mark Foley pedophilia sex scandal lacks two things: pedophilia and sex."

For different reasons, opponents of and apologists for both the Church and the Republican leadership found it convenient to accentuate the sexual aspects of the respective cases. For opponents the motivation was obvious: Both organizations trade in the regulation of human desire and are not shy about promoting their own virtues, and the scandals revealed pitch-perfect hypocrisy. But the apologists have a more complex goal: The kid-happy Republicans who are falling over themselves to denounce Foley's "obscene," "abhorrent" and "sick" antics (it's disappointing that Rep. John Shimkus, the Illinois Republican who chairs the House Page Board, hasn't yet made the two-fingered gagging gesture in any of his news conferences, but there will be plenty of time for that) are engaged in the same game as Catholic apologists who scrupulously counted each instance of improper touching a few years ago. Maximizing the questionable sexual behavior minimizes the obvious failures of management that constitute the real scandal.

This is a tried and true formula: First mischaracterize the nature of the scandal, then defend the mischaracterization. So far, however, it has proved fruitless. Mark Foley's attempt to blame the whole thing on a never-previously-hinted drinking problem is a strategy for which the number of sellers (one) is far greater than the number of buyers (zero). The House leadership may do slightly better, provided the amount of energy left in the scandal is smaller than the amount of doubletalk left in House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.).

Keeping the focus on Foley's pathetic attempts at sex also point up the story's most visionary element: the normalization of masturbation as the true national pastime. With the possible exception of some enchanted evening in San Diego, Foley's lawyer claims that the congressman conducted his affair with a House page entirely in the virtual realm. Hard as that is to believe, it dovetails with ABC's Brian Ross' decision to call one of Foley's trysts "internet sex." This is an odd term, like "phone sex," that gussies up an ancient practice with a fancier or more salacious name. It's not sex at all: It's masturbation. Whatever her failings as a U.S. Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders never had to resort to such euphemisms or blue-phemisms.

Foley was not shy about his preference for manual stimulation, even the form of two-man solitaire that frequently surfaces in the sexual explorations of youngsters (and legislators whose mid-life crises involve full-blown adolescent regression). "[D]id any girl give you a haand job this weekend," he asks his prospective boyfriend at one stage. When the boy replies that he's now single (and, tantalizingly, available), Foley asks the obvious followup: "[D]id you spank it this weekend yourself." And to the boy's reply that he is too tired, Foley gives what will undoubtedly become the capstone of his career: "[I] am never to busy haha." (All quotes are direct and uncorrected.)

There's an element of bragging in that last line, a close cousin to the kind of porn spams that promise "You'll be able to yank it like a pro." This is something new, and it's to the left-handed credit of Foley that he's at the forefront of it. Masturbation used to be vaguely shameful. Long after autostimulation was no longer regarded as sinful or unhealthy or a cause of blindness or hairy palms, it was still looked on as something of a failure, evidence that you were unqualified for sex with another adult human. For Foley, masturbation is not only a practice without shame, but a matter of great fascination, as this not-safe-for-work exchange will demonstrate:

Xxxxxxxxx (7:50:57 PM): i dont do it very often normally though
Maf54 (7:51:11 PM): why not
Maf54 (7:51:22 PM): at your age seems like it would be daily
Xxxxxxxxx (7:51:57 PM): not me
Xxxxxxxxx (7:52:01 PM): im not a horn dog
Xxxxxxxxx (7:52:07 PM): maybe 2 or 3 times a week
Maf54 (7:52:20 PM): thats a good number
Maf54 (7:52:27 PM): in the shower
Xxxxxxxxx (7:52:36 PM): actually usually i dont do it in the shower
Xxxxxxxxx (7:52:42 PM): just cause i shower in the morning
Xxxxxxxxx (7:52:47 PM): and quickly
Maf54 (7:52:50 PM): in the bed
Xxxxxxxxx (7:52:59 PM): i get up at 530 and am outta the house by 610
Xxxxxxxxx (7:53:03 PM): eh ya
Maf54 (7:53:24 PM): on your back
Xxxxxxxxx (7:53:30 PM): no face down
Maf54 (7:53:32 PM): love details
Xxxxxxxxx (7:53:34 PM): lol
Xxxxxxxxx (7:53:36 PM): i see that
Xxxxxxxxx (7:53:37 PM): lol
Maf54 (7:53:39 PM): really
Maf54 (7:53:54 PM): do you really do it face down
Xxxxxxxxx (7:54:03 PM): ya
Maf54 (7:54:13 PM): kneeling
Xxxxxxxxx (7:54:31 PM): well i dont use my hand.i use the bed itself
Maf54 (7:54:31 PM): where do you unload it
Xxxxxxxxx (7:54:36 PM): towel
Maf54 (7:54:43 PM): really
Maf54 (7:55:02 PM): completely naked?
Xxxxxxxxx (7:55:12 PM): well ya
Maf54 (7:55:21 PM): very nice
Xxxxxxxxx (7:55:24 PM): lol
Maf54 (7:55:51 PM): cute butt bouncing in the air
Xxxxxxxxx (7:56:00 PM): haha
Xxxxxxxxx (7:56:05 PM): well ive never watched myslef
Xxxxxxxxx (7:56:08 PM): but ya i guess
Maf54 (7:56:18 PM): i am sure not
Maf54 (7:56:22 PM): hmmm
Maf54 (7:56:30 PM): great visual
.
Maf54 (7:57:05 PM): i always use lotion and the hand
Maf54 (7:57:10 PM): but who knows
Xxxxxxxxx (7:57:24 PM): i dont use lotion.takes too much time to clean up
Xxxxxxxxx (7:57:37 PM): with a towel you can just wipe off..and go
Maf54 (7:57:38 PM): lol
Maf54 (7:57:45 PM): where do you throw the towel
Xxxxxxxxx (7:57:48 PM): but you cant work it too hard..or its not good
Xxxxxxxxx (7:57:51 PM): in the laundry
Maf54 (7:58:16 PM): just kinda slow rubbing
Xxxxxxxxx (7:58:23 PM): ya..
Xxxxxxxxx (7:58:32 PM): or youll rub yourslef raw
Maf54 (7:58:37 PM): well I have aa totally stiff wood now
Xxxxxxxxx (7:58:40 PM): cause the towell isnt very soft
Maf54 (7:58:44 PM): i bet..taht would hurt
Xxxxxxxxx (7:58:50 PM): but you cn find something softer than a towell i guess
Maf54 (7:58:59 PM): but it must feel great spirting on the towel
Xxxxxxxxx (7:59:06 PM): ya
Maf54 (7:59:29 PM): wow
Maf54 (7:59:48 PM): is your little guy limp.or growing
Xxxxxxxxx (7:59:54 PM): eh growing
Maf54 (8:00:00 PM): hmm
Maf54 (8:00:12 PM): so you got a stiff one now
Xxxxxxxxx (8:00:19 PM): not that fast
Xxxxxxxxx (8:00:20 PM): hey
Xxxxxxxxx (8:00:32 PM): so you have a fetich
Maf54 (8:00:32 PM): hey what
Xxxxxxxxx (8:00:40 PM): fetish**
Maf54 (8:00:43 PM): like
Maf54 (8:00:53 PM): i like steamroom
Maf54 (8:01:04 PM): whats yours
Xxxxxxxxx (8:01:09 PM): its kinda weird
Xxxxxxxxx (8:01:14 PM): lol
Maf54 (8:01:21 PM): i am hard as a rock..so tell me when your reaches rock

This pathetic exchange (and there's plenty more where that came from) marks a departure. Before the scandal is over, Foley will undoubtedly play another card, the one that seems to have worked for former New Jersey governor James McGreevey: He will come out not as an alcoholic or a victim of priestly sexual abuse (a gambit that joins the decade's two great sex scandals), but simply as a gay man, a Republican Barney Frank, pursuing happiness in his own way.

But the Foley in this exchange doesn't seem particularly committed to any gender preference. It's yanking it that's the source of the real fascination. And it's too bad he didn't stay true to that love. The great advantage of masturbation is that it spares you the pain and risk of dealing with another person. And the heartbreak: While he may not be a pedophile, Foley here resembles Humbert Humbert toward the end of his affair with Lolita, an old, pitiful man getting played by a child who is finally aware of the power he or she can wield in exchange for doling out stingy amounts of sexual release. In that case the IM exchange that Brian Ross coyly describes as "Foley and the teen [appearing] to describe having sexual orgasms" may be a form of distance learning.

With Foley gone from the scene, however, the scandal now grinds on in the regions where it should remain: as an example of a self-protecting institution that, like the Catholic Church before it, responded to a crisis in ways that reveal its detachment from whatever social norms exist in the United States. (And come to think of it, why do both the Congress and the church seem so attached to maintaining a permanent catamite class, in the form of pages and altar boys, respectively?) But Foley's work is already done. Jerking off may not have been cloaked in darkness and shame before he came along, but it took the hypocrite congressman to wrap it in a sheen of pride and vigor. And he did it with one hand behind his back.

Adios, Vinegar Joe

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 10:42:00 EDT

It's too bad that his support for President Bush's war in Iraq provides such an easy explanation for the downfall of Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT). The pious prig from the Nutmeg State is almost the perfect Murder On the Orient Express figure: There are so many reasons to wish him ill that the real challenge shouldn't be finding suspects, but settling on just one. To have Lieberman's Iraq stance become the default reason for opposing him (among Republicans, of course, it's also been the only reason for supporting him) is just too easy.

Lieberman is possibly the least libertarian member of the United States Senate: An infinite-state liberal who always found ways to oppose Social Security reform (which he allegedly supported), an absurd moral scold who co-sponsored the "Silver Sewer Awards" with William Bennett, a values buttinski who couldn't resist attaching himself to Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, he was in the final analysis nothing but a fake, a tartuffe, a figure able to puff enough gas into every opportunistic action to make it seem like an example of high principle. (Witness his Captain Renault-level shock when President Clinton's Lewinski scandal came to light—a case of the vapors that conveniently allowed Clinton to duck the more serious legal issues facing him, neutralized the Democrats-as-Woody-Allen-level-perverts trope that was popular at the time, and massively raised Lieberman's own national profile. For further study, consider the longtime champion of gay rights' vote for Clinton's Defense of Marriage Act.)

Ironically, the morally serious Lieberman has always had a secret weapon usually reserved for unctuous playboys like Bill Clinton, a reserve of charisma and likability that have made it hard to turn fully against him. Old timers who recall the 2000 presidential election will remember the strong sense, during the vice-presidential debate, that if America could just bypass the two jokers at the top of the tickets and vote for those standup guys Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney, the country might not be headed into such a mess. Even this quality seems to have deserted Vinegar Joe in defeat, as he makes surreal references in his concession speech to the return of "the old politics of partisan polarization."

It's not clear that yesterday's primary defeat will be the end of Joe Lieberman. As with Freddy, Chucky, Jason, and Napoleon, we can never be truly sure he's finished, and the Nutmeg State has a history of being friendly to newly-minted independent candidates. But Lieberman is suffering today, and that's good enough. Over the years, Reason has been a relentless counterforce to the crushing weight of Joe-mentum, and here are some highlights:

Jacob Sullum drowned out Lieberman's call to ban devil music in the late 1990s, and wondered where the senator's support for Social Security and Affirmative Action reform went when Al Gore came a-callin'. Sullum also challenged Lieberman to a multiplayer game of Doom when Lieberman and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) took on violent entertainment. When the celebrity-mad Lieberman started stocking Senate panels on the environment with pop stars, Charles Oliver led a paparazzi party poop. Michael Lynch rocked with former Silver Sewer nominees who were nevertheless supporting the Gore/Lieberman ticket. At the peak of the senator's ostentatious piety, Jacob Sullum reinterpreted Lieberman's holy writ.

Nick Gillespie marveled at how Lieberman managed to connect Howard Dean, Saddam Hussein, and the death penalty into one incoherent blather. New Democratic Senate nominee Ned Lamont told Reason Lieberman's Schiavo stance should encourage libertarians to vote against him. Connecticut's own Mike Alissi tracked the Republican efforts to save Lieberman's career and appreciated the senator's more recent Schiavo two-step. Jeff A. Taylor cast a plague on both Lieberman and Lamont.

David Weigel, who met Lamont in the flesh, and was there when the Daily Kos first threw his T-shirt into the ring for him, tracks Lieberman's defeat, cheers on millionaire dilettante politicians, questions the Republicans' apparent strategy of doubling down on support for the Iraq war, and wonders who will take Lieberman's place as the Senate's killjoy in chief. Mike Alissi, who watched campaign finance law come to Lieberman's rescue right before Michael Schiavo came to Lamont's, celebrates the bad news for both parties.

Hit List

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 10:43:00 EDT

On Easter Sunday, Stephen A. Marshall, a 20-year-old Cape Breton dishwasher visiting Maine, borrowed his father's truck, rifle, and two handguns, shot and killed two men in two different towns, then boarded a bus to Boston, where he was approached by police and shot himself. Marshall's motive for the murders is still unclear, but his method of selecting victims is not: He found them on Maine's online registry of sex offenders.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia maintain Web sites providing information on convicted sex offenders who have been released from prison. States differ in how much information they provide. Maine's registry provides users with home addresses, employment addresses, photos, and legal descriptions of the crimes that landed offenders on the registry.

The justification for maintaining such public lists rests on the presumption that sex offenders have higher recidivism rates than other criminals—though Bureau of Justice statistics indicate that rapists are substantially less likely than other violent and nonviolent criminals to be rearrested for the same crime. The psychological theory that pedophilia is a lifetime condition carries more weight with the public, but registries do not distinguish among varieties of sex offenders. As it happens, one of Marshall's victims, 24-year-old William Elliott, was registered for the crime of having sex, at the age of 19, with a girlfriend who was two weeks shy of her 16th birthday.

You can decide for yourself whether such a man deserved to be marked for life, let alone murdered. Meanwhile, the registries create a conundrum: If the offenders are still menaces to society, why have they been released from prison? And if they are not, why is the state blocking their attempts to return to society?

Financial Friendly Fire

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 11:01:00 EDT

More than 2,400 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq and more than 18,000 wounded. According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study of military pay, nearly 900 of the wounded and 400 of the dead still owed money to the Army—more than $1.5 million total—most of it resulting from overpayments, the rest due to housing allowances, travel advances, lost or damaged military equipment, and other factors.

Some 74 battle-injured soldiers have been referred to collection agencies, while others have had their separation pay docked. As a rule, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service does not pursue collection actions against soldiers killed in action, but it may take debts out of their final payments.

House Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis (R-Va.), who ordered the GAO report, calls the phenomenon "financial friendly fire." Soldiers in the field, Davis' office says, "should not have to worry that their government is sending debt collectors after them, thereby threatening their credit ratings and their ability to buy a house, take out a loan, or even get a job."

Of the $1.5 million total, about $959,000 was written off, waived, or cancelled; another $124,000 was paid; and another $420,000 remains open. Past GAO reports have included more than 80 recommendations to fix the payroll accounting problems. The Army says it's working on those.

Happy 40th Birthday, Star Trek

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 10:40:00 EDT

Which Way To the Front?

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EDT

Let's leave aside the danger to American policy in the Middle East, the creation of a new generation of orphan terrorists, the horrific prospect of World War VII or VIII. Forget about all those erstwhile "Cedar Revolution" cheerleaders, who not two years ago were discovering their inner Lebanophilia, gloating at Syrian discomfiture, and plastering their blogs with photos of Beirut "freedom babes," and who now must be wondering what happened in the ten minutes after their attention spans ran out. Hell, I'll even put aside concerns for the safety of my immediate family, all of whom are right now trapped in the Republic of Lebanon. At the moment, I'll settle for an answer to just one question: What the hell is Israel's game plan?

Officially, the plan is simple. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made his three goals clear last night: The Israeli blockade on and bombing of Lebanon that began six days ago will end when two abducted soldiers are returned, Hezbollah ceases its attacks on Israeli territory, and the Lebanese army is deployed to the Israel-Lebanon border. The problem is that none of Israel's actions so far appear to be aimed at those goals.

By this I don't mean that the vicious cycle of violence creates more terrorists, or that the Jewish state risks international chastisement, or that the response is disproportionate, or any of the other bugbears that get trotted out every time an Israeli sneezes. I mean that as a practical matter, Israel's actions do not appear aimed at achieving its stated objectives.

This becomes clear once we examine the stated goals in more detail. Last one first: Lebanon is not a nation, and it probably never will be. The Lebanese army is worthless, and if it ever tried to make a move against Hezbollah, the half of its cohort that has any fighting spirit at all would defect to Hezbollah's side and devour the other half. This is aside from the many political considerations that make the idea of Lebanon's reining in Hezbollah by force a non-starter, and the detail that any sort of redeployment of a still-armed Hezbollah will still leave Lebanon with an uncontrollable paramilitary within its borders, quickly returning us to square one. The only army in the area that has the means to clear Hezbollah forces out of the south of Lebanon is Israel's.

As for Hezbollah's ceasing of its attacks on Israeli territory, I'm going to go way out on a limb here and predict that Hezbollah will never cease its attacks on Israeli territory as long as it has the means to attack. Better minds than mine have already opined that the only way to take away those means is to attack Syria or somehow wish Iran into the cornfield—two actions Israel has a demonstrated disinclination to take. But even if we eliminate the international element, the pacification of Hezbollah would involve a full-scale invasion of Lebanon, encompassing at least the southern half of the country and the Bekaa valley, cutting off all avenues of escape, and deploying ground troops in massive numbers.

This has been done before. The Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982 to demolish the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and they achieved that goal. The PLO was removed, and it withered and faded in exile, to be replaced by other enemies (chief among them: Hezbollah, an organization created by the 1982 assault). History remembers this infamous invasion in vivid, grisly detail, but forgets one central aspect: that it was an absolute success. Israel, for a variety of reasons, appears unwilling to repeat that success, but if you're serious about ending Hezbollah violence, the only way forward is to crush Hezbollah.

As for the return of the two soldiers, the pattern is too well known to need much rehearsal here. You can't find a kidnap victim through military force alone. That's true in tiny Gaza, and it's truer in less-tiny Lebanon, medium-sized Syria, and large Iran. Israel has traded Arab flesh for Israeli flesh in the past, and will do so again. This casus belli is, as Patton (or just George C. Scott) said, so trivial in its nature and so terrible in its consequences that we must look for meaning elsewhere.

One thing is clear. Israel is trying to effect some strategic shift or change. A sea and air blockade, even on a country that neither commands nor deserves respect as a sovereign state, is serious business. So is attacking military installations and infrastructure all over the country, and killing more than 200 people (nearly all of them civilians, as Israel bashers are pleased to note).

Is all this fury designed to deplete Hezbollah's capacity for violence? It is not. The target selection is telling: The bombing of bridges and infrastructure indicates a ground invasion is not in the works, while the focus on political targets and Lebanese national military bases borders on the strange. The Hezbollah offices that were destroyed over the weekend are located in a densely populated mixed-use neighborhood. There was nothing to achieve in this attack, at least if your goal is to prevent rocket attacks on Haifa, nor could you make with any credibility the modern warrior's fondest claim—that every effort was made to avoid civilian deaths. More puzzling is a navy ship's attack on an army installation in the northern town of Batroun, which killed one soldier. I have been by that base many times, and it appears to contain little more than a dozen personnel carriers and a dozen more sleepy soldiers. Perhaps there's more to that base than I've seen (Israel claims to have destroyed a radar station), but given the geography of the area I suspect not. (Disclosure: My wife and daughters were staying at a nearby beach resort during that attack but were unharmed.)

The leaflets are even more puzzling. Last week Israel blanketed southern Lebanon with flyers warning civilians to avoid areas frequented by Hezbollah—a message that, given Hezbollah's ubiquity, amounts to a flee-your-homes warning. This is a proven tactic at least as old as Heinz Guderian: You present the enemy with roads blocked by panicking civilians and a major humanitarian crisis. Yet with the people in headlong flight, command and control in ruins, and total air supremacy, the Israeli Defense Force opted not to invade. By the weekend, the Israeli pamphlet campaign had been reduced to distributing caricatures of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah so crude and artless you'd have thought they were made by an Arab rather than a Jew. I also heard a rumor of a leaflet claiming Nasrallah was dead, but I suspect that one didn't exist.

So what is the strategy? We must assume the Israeli military is as steeped in game theory and scenario-building as any war machine in history. What we're seeing in practice now is one of a host of contingencies that were on the books long before the terrorists kidnapped some poor schmuck in olive drab. The possibilities:

1. Israel is trying to prompt the Lebanese government to take control of Hezbollah. This is not plausible. The Lebanese state has no means of coercing the Shiite militants. We can talk all day about how things should be different, but the bottom line is that they're not. Olmert knows this; any talk of getting Lebanon to take control is a feint.

2. Israel is hoping to take a military bite out of Hezbollah. Not plausible. One missile destroyed after all this violence? Moshe Dayan is rolling over in his grave. If the Israelis were serious about taking on Hezbollah, their tanks would already be in Lebanon.

3. Israel is trying to get its soldiers back. Good luck with that one.

4. Israel is trying to turn the population of Lebanon against Hezbollah. Even less plausible. Forced to choose between Israel and Hezbollah, the majority of Lebanese, including substantial numbers of Christians and Sunnis, would pick Hezbollah.

5. Israel is trying to turn elite opinion in Lebanon and Syria against Hezbollah. More plausible. The opinions of the masses matter even less in the Arab world than they do in the democratic world, and a good pitch to the actual leaders would go something like this: "Yes, yes, the Israelis are brutes and villains and Jews and so forth, but they've been there your whole life and they've never threatened your position. This radical Shiite cleric, on the other hand, he's actually got ideas, and ideas do threaten your position."

6. Israel is trying to internationalize anti-Shiism. Even more plausible, and supported by the tepid criticism of Hezbollah coming from Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The invasion of Iraq has turned the dream of a Shiite Crescent into a reality. The Sunni states are looking for any means to cut chunks out of that crescent, and with Saddam Hussein no longer available, Israel becomes a useful means to that end.

There are undoubtedly many other possibilities, and I should note that the assumption that there is a master strategy may be rooted in the simultaneously philo-Semitic and anti-Semitic notion that The Jews have figured out the universe and therefore always have a plan. However, in this case it is only reasonable to assume that we're seeing more than just some feckless hissy fit.

Of course, for the hawks and stab-in-the-back theorists who supposedly make up the hard backbone of Israel's support, the answer is (and always is) cowardice and fecklessness. In this view, Israel's hesitation is due to weakness, to the treasonous pacifism of insufficiently warlike Israelis or Americans. I look at an Israel that year after year strengthens its strategic position and expands its economy, and I conclude that that's crazy talk. The Israelis know what they're doing.

And the American position? President Bush summed it up yesterday by finally making the word "shit" suitable for polite conversation. I'll take him up on that offer: President Bush is full of shit. He has no ideas for this situation, nor should he. His strategy on the Arab-Israeli conflict has always been to let nature take its course, and he's not about to change now. The Israelis are in the driver's seat. I just wish I knew where they were heading.

AFI's 99 Percent Perspiration

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EDT

In the eight years since the American Film Institute premiered its original list of the "100 greatest American films of all time," the institute has shown all the dexterity of Alan Smithee in finding new ways to repackage and re-promote the same group of movies. We've seen lists of greatest stars, greatest comedies, greatest thrillers, greatest love stories, greatest movie songs and soundtracks, greatest heroes and villains, greatest lines of dialogue, and this year, the 100 greatest inspiring movies—and yet the basic group of films has remained almost unchanged. If your idea of a great movie experience is to line up for Gone With the Mockingbird Who Came To Casablanca While Saving Schindler's List of Arabia, this year's list is for you. Then again, so is every year's list.

A strong element of Willie Loman anxiety has crept into these efforts to keep reselling the same product. Most of the entries in the original "100 greatest" pictures (including the entire top 10 and at least 18 of the top 20) have appeared on at least one of the subsequent lists, and a few have appeared on nearly every list. If you asked the AFI voters (who are those people, anyway?) how many motion pictures have been made since the beginning of time, I suspect they would paraphrase Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (the 63rd most inspiring film): "About a hundred movies."

Isn't it the job of AFI to be moving back-catalogue inventory? Where is the fiscal incentive to keep promoting such mangy warhorses as To Kill A Mockingbird and It's A Wonderful Life? If there's anybody out there who has not seen eight-time honoree Casablanca by this point, what are the odds that that person will add the Michael Curtiz classic to his or her Netflix queue just because AFI has also declared it the 32nd most inspiring film in American history? Why not come up with some interesting categories for a change? Where are the 100 greatest unintended homosexual subtexts? The greatest scenes where some Hollywood "ugly duckling" gets a makeover (generally consisting of little more than doffing her eyeglasses, combing her hair, and getting into a backless dress)? Where are the greatest disgruntled, "I'm sick of zis damn var" Nazis, like Robert Shaw's valet in the lousy (and suspiciously snow-free) Battle of the Bulge?

The desperation evident in the "100 Cheers" list suggests an idea better than anything AFI has come up with: The 100 Most Desperate American Films of all time, a rogues' gallery of forlorn productions; vehicles for distressed stars; second, third, and fourth sequels; sweat-soaked attempts to cash in on some already fading fad; tax writeoffs featuring Christopher and Lynda-Day George. What is the value in reminding people once again that they're supposed to endure Schindler's List for the good of the culture when you could be convincing them to invest in Trog or Three On a Meathook, to recapture the magic of both Gymkata and Lambada, or to pick up an underrated gem like Leprechaun In the Hood?

The missed opportunity here is acute, because this year's stand-up-and-cheer list probably expresses most completely how AFI voters and people like them understand film: as a classy, monumental medium to be viewed by a compliant audience that will react only in the exact manner the filmmakers intended. It doesn't matter that the ending of Repo Man (not on the list) is a lot more fun and cheer-worthy than the scene in E.T. (Number 6) that it spoofs. What matters is that in the latter film you're supposed to be cheering.

So plenty of pictures that generate some generalized sense of camaraderie or uplift get shoehorned into the "inspiring" category. The American people, whose wisdom is as inexplicable as God's, have decided that The Shawshank Redemption (not even the best prison film of the 1993-1994 period) is the second greatest motion picture of all time; and since nobody is willing to accept the obvious explanation for this vote (that people are still confusing it with The Hudsucker Proxy), AFI splits the difference and places Shawshank at Number 23 on its cheer list. But Robert Aldrich's The Longest Yard gets shut out entirely, possibly due to confusion with the Adam Sandler remake. Rocky shows up at Number 4, and there's certainly something to cheer in the fact that Apollo Creed, a man who knows how to honor his country's 200th birthday, ends up winning at the end of the film. But if Rocky has aged well, it's because it makes strenuous efforts not to be a feel-good picture, instead knocking around a kind of Delaware Valley neo-realism leavened with offhand banter about shell-shocked turtles and taking retards to the zoo.

In fact, AFI shows a postmodern indifference to the actual content of many of its entries. This produces some interesting results: Where else could Erin Brockovich and Gunga Din end up as bunkmates (at 73 and 74 respectively)? Lawrence of Arabia clocks in at 30, a film that opens with its hero's meaningless death, ends with his ambiguous departure from the battlefield, and in between features both an extended segment of homoerotic torture in a Turkish army prison and an Arthur Kennedy performance that really drags down the film's second half. I don't know, maybe pointless death, sexually-charged torture, and ambiguous battlefield departures are what Americans find inspiring these days. If so, where is our Arthur Kennedy? And who exactly is cheering for The Bridge On the River Kwai, The Diary of Anne Frank, On Golden Pond, The Killing Fields, Silkwood, The Spirit of St. Louis, or Coal Miner's Daughter? Did the people voting even see these movies?

I called up Reason contributor A.S. Hamrah for some analysis of these mysteries. "Everyone knows this list is horseshit because the most inspiring film ever made is The Vikings," Hamrah said, "and number two is Showgirls. This is the only list where The Paper Chase and Fame could be next to each other, and it's supposed to be a list of good movies. And the most inspiring film is It's A Wonderful Life? That's a dark movie about a guy who realizes what a loser he is: He never even got out of his hometown, and he's suicidal because he realizes his life was pointless. But I do like how The Ten Commandments is one space above Babe: Where's your Moses now? He's right there with the pig. Should Moses even be that close to pork?"

If such ironies only heighten your confusion, here's something that will make sense. It's pretty clear that Hollywood still equates inspiration with prestige. A surprising number of pictures on the list lack even Shawshank's proven crowd-pleasing quality. Instead, they're socially conscious downers, message pictures, and other sorts of prestige films that people dutifully honored at the time and stopped caring about almost immediately. Stanley Kramer, king of the leaden message movie shows up three times, as producer and director. Sidney Poitier makes five separate, inspirational appearances. Even Martin Ritt clocks in with two entries (Sounder and Norma Rae) that will make you suspect that, in some collective, utilitarian way, blacklisting Ritt may have been in the best interest of society. Sidney Lumet, American cinema's most gifted purveyor of good-for-you heavy-osity, also turns out to be an able inspirer, with three entries (all of them deserved, in my view).

Such political works figure prominently in the list, and conservatives at odds with Hollywood's leftish bias will find little to please them here. Could we explain the over-representation of films made in 1993 as some kind of gassy expulsion of relief at the first year of Bill Clinton's presidency? Would any conservative be bold enough to protest the inclusion of The Best Years of Our Lives at Number 11? I wouldn't, because I think The Best Years of Our Lives is just jake, but consider the film's dramatic high point, Fredric March's stunning "collateral" speech (which you can view in Quicktime here, here and here). Who could observe this drunken plea for a massive increase in federally guaranteed spending and not wish Ayn Rand had gone through with her plan to denounce the film to HUAC?

There's an even more glaring point of contention between Hollywood and this nation's traditional values. If, like me, you only get really inspired by films whose titles feature phrases like "They came from beneath..." and "...has risen from the grave," you will notice the glaring absence of Jesus Christ from the list: no King of Kings, no Greatest Story Ever Told, no Passion or Temptation, not even The Ruling Class. (Maybe that last one doesn't count as American.) And forget about Song of Bernadette. Ben-Hur (Number 56) is the closest the list comes to any overt Christian inspiration. Is AFI telling us that Ruth Gordon is more inspiring than Jesus? (I agree! I agree!)

Few things are more discouraging than a failed attempt to win over a crowd. The AFI 100 lists continue to generate attention; this one got a flurry of press coverage and a CBS special I didn't watch. Nevertheless, the institute is operating on an outmoded model of the roles of audiences and cultural gatekeepers. If AFI focused on coming up with weirder and more offbeat categories, if it aimed not to be a steward of an acceptable canon but to get people participating with stuff they haven't seen before, the organization might do some good. Hollywood may be on the left politically, but it's remarkably conservative in the way it views its own product. Providing life support for a dying medium and haranguing audiences about the proper way to consume your product—that's a depressing spot to be in. Add up all 100 Cheers and you've got a pretty serious Demotivator.

Literary Paper Lions

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 15:03:00 EDT

Endgame In New London, or, Another Successful Five-Year Plan

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 13:37:00 EDT

To understand why the last two homeowners in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood of New London, CT are now in the process of being evicted from their homes, consider this: More than half the property in New London generates no tax revenue for the city because it's owned by several colleges (including Connecticut College, the Coast Guard Academy, and Mitchell College), by churches, hospitals, or by the city itself. The Fort Trumbull redevelopment project—in which the city took over 115 lots, forcibly removing 15 homeowners whose fight to remain in their homes has been immortalized in the U.S. Supreme Court decision Kelo v. New London—was designed to address this very problem, and the prospect of increasing the city's property tax revenues was a central factor in the high court's decision to allow the transportation by force of American citizens. As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his decision:

The City has carefully formulated an economic development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including—but by no means limited to—new jobs and increased tax revenue. As with other exercises in urban planning and development, the City is endeavoring to coordinate a variety of commercial, residential, and recreational uses of land, with the hope that they will form a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

This week the New London city council voted 5-2 to begin evicting the last of the Fort Trumbull property owners, Susette Kelo and Michael Cristofaro. Barring an unlikely intervention by the state of Connecticut, the Fort Trumbull neighborhood will have been vaporized within 60 to 90 days.

And the only project the New London Development Corporation is currently working on is a National Coast Guard Museum—a public building that will pay no taxes to the city.

All but one of the remaining projects associated with the Fort Trumbull development—the condominiums, the retail shops and restaurants, the hotel half of whose rooms Pfizer, Inc. promised in 1999 to keep permanently filled—are out where the woodbine twineth, vaporware with no visible means of support.

If you want another example (beyond the intrusion on individual rights) of why eminent domain abuse needs to be stopped, New London is in the process of providing it. The city is in the final stages of removing private property owners in the name of a development plan that is nearly ten years old, drafted in an era of post-cold-war base closings, soaring profits for pharmaceutical companies, and a depressed real estate market. That is to say, at a time when the local, state, and national economies were entirely different from what they are today. Pfizer, a private company, has already moved on from its entanglement in the Fort Trumbull mess. The city of New London can't. They broke Fort Trumbull, and now they've bought it.

Activists have made much of the fact that the Kelo case centered on an eminent domain taking for private, rather than public, benefit; and there have been some interesting counterarguments questioning whether there is a legal difference between the two. In the July issue of Reason, the 9th Circuit Court's Judge Alex Kozinski argues that there is not: "What's the difference between taking property for public roads or anything else?" Kozinski asks. "Do only public automobiles travel on public roads? I don't understand why it's a problem. If the government thinks the city will benefit by having a road there instead of having your house so that people can drive their private cars on it, then it has to make that decision. Who owns the road really doesn't matter. What matters is that it makes it easier for other people to get from point A to point B using their private vehicles for private purposes. You could say 'but it's my house and my private purpose is more important than your private purpose.' But we live in a society."

Whatever the legal merits of that argument, there's a strong economic argument against it. "If we throw these people out, there's no financial gain to the city," says Charles Frink, one of the two New London city council members who voted against the evictions this week. "So it's not only immoral, it's irrational."

A 2001 economic impact analysis of the Pfizer/Fort Trumbull project is a hilariously precise and airy projection of how the development would save the city. We're told, for example, that

Upon completion, these developments will directly create 4,174 new jobs in the city, of which 4,172 will be private sector, non- farm jobs. The largest employer will be Pfizer, which will add 2,040 new jobs by 2004. The other large employers will be the office complex, projected to add 1,166 new jobs; the biotech labs, projected at 942 workers; and the hotel, projected to employ 120 workers.

History had other plans. Pfizer, which built a new waterfront research facility in the late nineties as part of the original project, does not disclose how many of those 2,040 jobs were created by 2004 (nor does the New London Development Corporation reveal what those two presumably public-sector farm jobs will be). But the company is not as well positioned to shed its bounty on New London as it was in 1998. Now the world's largest pharmaceutical firm, Pfizer is operating in a business environment that could not be more different than the one it enjoyed in the late nineties, losing money, losing patents, and battling a hostile market.

As a result, the company's enthusiasm for the Fort Trumbull development has cooled, and the controversy surrounding the project has prompted Pfizer to distance itself from the NLDC and disavow any role in shaping the project. This is a considerable mood change from March of 1999, when the company's then-director of research George Milne wrote in a letter to then-NLDC president Claire Gaudiani:

The Fort Trumbull area is integral to our corporate facility and to the plan for the revitalization of New London to a world class standard. The Amended Reuse Plan will provide a waterfront hotel with about 200 rooms, a conference center and physical fitness area, extended-stay residential units and 80 units of housing. We will use the proposed hotel and conference facility as an extension of our facility committing to 100 of those rooms on a daily basis for visiting international staff and other professionals. In addition we require conference space and are exploring a "virtual" Pfizer University to keep our researchers up to date on the most recent breakthroughs in biotechnology. The extended stay housing will provide for researchers who often stay for periods of up to 3-6 months. Year round quality housing is also crucial to recruiting top scientists.

The point here is not to play gotcha with Pfizer but to demonstrate that economic circumstances can change radically in a relatively brief period of time, and while private companies are capable of adapting, governments (and in particular "private-public partnerships") are not. Governments can react, however, as the NLDC is also finding out. The brutality with which the Fort Trumbull residents were removed has shocked the nation, and Connecticut Gov. Jodi M. Rell, a wavering supporter of the homeowners, has a strong disincentive to sink more money—beyond the $15 million that's already going to the Coast Guard museum—into the town of 25,000.

The political fallout in New London itself has been even greater, leading to the council election of Frink and Bill Cornish under the newly formed One New London party. (Frink is a pretty fascinating figure himself: a playwright and composer who made his first foray into politics last year, going door-to-door at the age of 77), and to a continuing boil at city council meetings. "These council members always say they've received hundreds of messages of support that they never disclose," says Cristofaro, one of the two holdout homeowners. "I can tell you, I've gone to every city council meeting for the last year, and there are always at least 15 people who speak against this project, and nobody who speaks in favor of it."

After all this strife, will the Fort Trumbull redevelopment project go bust? Not likely. Government projects have a life of their own, and nobody's going to let waterfront property stand empty for long (at least, not in this market). But then, that's the whole point: Left to their own devices, and spared from this exercise in Ceausescu-style central planning, the Fort Trumbull property owners (several of whose lots, including Kelo's, have never even been included in any of the plans floated for the area) would have been improving the area for the last ten years, instead of fighting for their lives. Property values have increased in New London, as they have almost everywhere in the country. How to capitalize on that? Cristofaro has an idea.

"So far the only thing they've even started to work on is this Coast Guard Museum," he says. "I'm sure I could convert my house into the Eminent Domain Museum and I'd get more visitors."

Do They Dare to Say "Impeach"?

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EDT

You’ll never find anyone as impartial, disinterested, judicious, and concerned only with the well-being of the American people as a party hack laying into a politician from a rival party. Thus the case for the impeachment of President George W. Bush has grown organically from the very fabric of the universe. It’s not that Democrats are motivated by frustration with Bush and his party’s electoral winning streak—hell, the Dems profoundly regret that they’ve been brought to this! It’s that Bush’s lies and violations of the Constitution are so egregious, so without precedent in American history, that we must activate the gravest of constitutional mechanisms.

To wit: In his 286-page report The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War, House Judiciary Committee member John Conyers (D-Mich.) isn’t grinding any party ax. Rather, the problem is that “we have found that there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice President, and other high-ranking members of the Bush Administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war with Iraq.”

As a result, “the House should create a bipartisan select committee vested with subpoena authority to investigate the Administration’s abuses” in order “to protect our constitutional form of government.”

Interestingly, Conyers, who entered the House of Representatives in 1964, never managed to find any impeachable behavior in the conduct of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who lied America into a far more destructive war and presided over the colossal civil rights violations of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. But it’s not just elected Democrats who view impeachment as something that should happen only to the GOP.

Former Harper’s Editor Lewis Lapham, whose most recent cancer on the national attention span was a 5,000-word “Case for Impeachment” in the magazine’s March issue, told a Harper’s roundtable: “The media tends to believe that the branches of government are the Democratic and Republican parties.…I think we also have to make it clear—if this turns into a partisan thing, Democrat/Republican, I would think it would do more harm than good.” (To his credit, Lapham adds, “I also think we should get over the idea that impeachment is a big deal. I mean, we should use it more often.” That’s a sentiment any good American would endorse.)

Thus, Lapham notes, we must distinguish between the Bush administration’s “criminal DNA” and the far more famous DNA of “Bill Clinton, whose penis was known to be aimless and shown to be harmless.” Not so harmless, of course, to those civilians in Yugoslavia, Sudan, and Afghanistan who were sacrificed when Clinton turned American forign policy into an extension of his own impeachment scandal.

Elizabeth Holtzman, the former member of Congress and New York City comptroller, made the same gestures toward nonpartisan concern for the Constitution in her 4,000-word impeachment brief in The Nation in January, but there’s no way to know how she would have voted when her own party was on the hot seat.

Alas, Holtzman’s political career ended in 1993, with a tearful denunciation of reporters who ignored her “long record of standing and fighting for people,” and focused instead on a $450,000 loan she accepted from Fleet Bank in exchange for a lucrative city contract. Undoubtedly she would have vigorously contested Bill Clinton’s promiscuous bombing raids, if only the media had given her the chance.

It’s true: Bush is impeachable on the bare facts of the case, without any recourse to party differences. Back on Planet Earth, he’s invulnerable as long as his party continues to control both houses of the Congress. If these Democrats and their supporters are serious about bringing him to account, they’ll need to learn how to win elections. To make that happen, they might start by impeaching a few of their own leaders—not for high crimes and misdemeanors, just for incompetence.

Next Beer in Jerusalem

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EDT

Fulfilling half of Frank Zappa's rule that you're not a country until you've got your own beer and airline, Palestine's ruling party now has its own (unofficial, nonalcoholic) brew. Taybeh Brewery owner Nadim Khoury is introducing a new 0.0 percent beverage with the brand name "Hamas" on an Islamic green label.

Khoury, who already markets a variety of real beers, notes that nonalcoholic brews are widely popular in the Gulf states; he hopes Hamas will look with favor on his new venture. (Taybeh's other beers are not sold in Gaza, and one of Khoury's distributors was burned down a few years ago.) But the brewer also sees his new drink helping Palestinians in their "unified goal," stating, "Every time we sell a bottle of beer it goes toward building the state of Palestine."

This isn't the first time Levantine suds have been served with a foamy head of national unity. Syria markets the government-owned Al-Sharq ("The East") medium malt, while Lebanon's Almaza advertises itself with the unbeatable slogan "One People, One Beer." But the arrival of Hamas brew reminds us of one encouraging tendency in the Middle East: the ability to make a buck during the grimmest of times.

Consider Gaza shop owner Ahmed Abu Dayya, who stocked up on flags of Denmark just before the riots against depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper hit the occupied territories. Interviewed by Reuters while flag burners were buying out his stock, Abu Dayya said Danish flags had temporarily been outselling his usual product—flammable flags of Israel. Most intriguingly, he noted that his supply of Israeli flags comes from a distributor in Israel. Who says international cooperation is dead?