Power stupefies

Watching events unfold in the Ukraine over the past few days I've been working over in my head a single question: Was there a specific moment in the last few years when former President Viktor Yanukovich said to himself, "Screw it, I'm going to go ahead and put in the pirate ship-themed dining room and start a private zoo. There's no way that could possibly come back to haunt me."

It is a moldy old saying that power corrupts, when it seems more precisely that power stupefies. Something about being a ruling oligarch makes you think there's no way you could ever be knocked off, and looking from afar, it is hard to believe anyone could be that deluded. It is probably a bit like winning lottery — everyone is convinced they aren't the guy who is going to go bankrupt in a few years after they win, but it keeps happening over and over again.

The Ukraine is a great case study in the ways things just don't change, and how patterns keep repeating in new and wonderful ways. So I watch thing with a very cynical eye, and chortle when I hear commentators in our stunningly earnest and ignorant American media declare, "Well Joe, I tell ya all this started in the 1930s with Stalin." (Only Americans are young enough at heart to say things like that).

I'm incredibly pessimistic about things because I've been following things there closely, and I remember the Orange Revolution. That last outpouring of popular unrest in the Ukraine was enough to scare Russia to its core, and convince Americans that the Ukraine was all set for the future and didn't need anymore attention. But as events unfolded, the new power structure revealed itself very quickly to be just as venal and greedy as the last one. To say, "they blew it" is an understatement. So the stunning events of last weekend were a real downer. I wish it were possible for the public persona of Yulia Tymoshenko to immediate skip from her heroic release from prison and go straight to the cheesy "Evita" theater spectacle featuring her hairdo. Too bad she's going to insist on proving how corrupt she is all over again — and perhaps someday the masses can take selfies in her gold-plated hot tub or with her vintage car collection.

With leaders like these there's not a lot to hope for. Yanukovich was a singular case, such a clown that even Russian is embarrassed to know him (I sincerely hope we someday find out that his tragicomic flight from the mobs included him dressing up as a nun and slipping out a hotel kitchen). But the opposition is reduced to Tymoshenko's flunkies, some nationalist groups that remind you just how scary the far right is in central and eastern Europe, and a celebrity boxer. If only it were just as easy as deciding between owing your soul to Russian oligarch or the German bankers.

The powerful act stupid because they don't believe things will change. At that level, you have to create such world views or you don't function. And I think the rest of us feel it too. All through last week, when the streets were on fire and the bodies were stacking up in the hotel lobbies, it felt like that feeling amped up to 11. How could this possibly end? how could anything change?

And then on the weekend, it did. Everything we will hear in the coming months will suggest that it was the only outcome possible, but of course it wasn't, and it certainly never felt that way as it happened. Scenes feel like they'll go on forever until they don't. Growing up I didn't believe in the possibility of a generation defining event like Pearl Harbor — I thought that right up to Sept. 10, 2011. It always comes as a surprise. Vladimir Putin and Jamie Dimon take note.

How to explain the day John Kennedy died

It is still shocking how badly the Kennedy assassination traumatized us, how it launched millions of rounds of conspiracy theorizing, historical taxonomy, and sorrowful speculation about missing futures. And on this key anniversary, it feels as if all we can do is helplessly circle around the sadness at the heart of it all, about the event itself.

It is a thing that still lives and thrives in a fog of words, feelings, and memories. If we aren't careful, it can be a crutch of self-pity and misplaces frustration. And I think we need help thinking about what is important about it and what questions and challenges it raises that we still have to face. So if I can add my little bit, I'd point readers to something Daniel Schorr wrote in the New York Review of Books in October 1977 that shines through the event's aftermath like a light.

Schorr's essay, which is alas behind a archive paywall, is a patient and methodical effort to connect the investigations done by the Warren Commission in the aftermath of the tragedy to the work done in the mid-1970s as America sorted through the violence, horror, and shame of the 60s. Specifically, he dug through the findings of the Church Committee, which had hauled before the American people all the mischief and skullduggery its secret security services had carried themselves into. It was the kind of shocking and painful public reckoning that only a healthy democracy can live through, and people like me who remember it were in no way surprised by the recent NSA revelations, but have been horrified by our shrugging indifference to them.

Many of the things that Schorr explains in detail were new then but in the past decades have been well-digested and, sadly, forgotten. In particular, he looks at the CIA and the Mafia's efforts to turn back the Cuban revolution. It was both horrifying and plainly ridiculous:

"My favorite plot — nonlethal — was what someone in the CIA called “elimination by illumination.” It was dreamed up by General Edward Lansdale, Robert Kennedy’s coordinator for the hidden war against Castro. Never put into execution, the plan was to spread the word in Cuba of the imminent Second Coming of Christ, with the corollary message that Castro, the Antichrist, would have to go. At the appointed time, American submarines would surface off the coast, sending up star shells, which would presumably inspire the Cubans to rise up against Castro."

And Schorr also casually hints at scandals that continue today. For example, that Bill Moyers, who makes a living as a self-righteous media scold and sanctimonious old fart, almost certainly knows way, way more than he's telling about some important things. Specifically, Schorr notes that Moyer, as a top LBJ aide, was part of the conversation about the effort in the days after the assassination to cut off speculation about motivations and any possibility of Communist involvement (that's in the Church Committee report). And so, until that man speaks — and real reporter Robert Caro has spent decades politely inviting him to do so — he's a fraud and anything else he has to say is bullshit.

See, what I'm really talking about is journalism, and how they can help fix a problem. So much of what a reporter can do is really just putting things in context, of explaining the history and the mechanics of a complicated thing in a simple way. And by doing so, he probably comes closest to finding a motivation than anyone else:

"Had the [Warren] commission not been so completely sidetracked from every Cuban lead, it might have found what this reporter was able to find—buried in the commission’s own files or later dug up in congressional investigations and from other sources.

Where the 'Castro revenge' theory had run aground was on the lack of evidence that Oswald had any contact with anyone who knew about the CIA’s secret plotting against the Cuban leader. But Oswald did not need to have such contact to reach the conclusion that Castro, his hero, was being threatened and that he, in turn, could become a hero in Cuba by responding to the threat."

All the evidence is lying in plain sight; you don't need grassy knolls or magic bullets. Just the moral awareness of the irony of what had come back to haunt us:

"The possibility that Oswald acted on his own, inspired by Castro’s statement, cannot today be proved, but it has the elements of the fortuitous and the lunatic that sometimes govern history. The “conspiracy,” then, would have been a conspiracy of interlocking events—the incessant CIA plots to kill Castro, touching off a Castro warning, touching off something in the fevered mind of Lee Harvey Oswald. 

It would be comforting to know that Oswald acted on his own—not as part of some dark left-wing or right-wing plot to strike down a president. It is less comforting to realize that the chain of events may have started with the reckless plotting of the CIA against Castro, perhaps in pursuit of what it thought to be Kennedy’s aim. An arrow launched into the air to kill a foreign leader may well have fallen back to kill our own."

As you can see, Schorr is a hero to me, and I'm amazed at the variety of ways his courage took shape. When he wrote that piece for the NYRB, it was just about a year after being effectively fired by his long-time employer, CBS News, who wouldn't support him in an effort to protect the name of a source who had leaked a suppressed Congressional report about CIA overreach.

The more things are the same… CBS wouldn't stick up for Schorr then, but look at what they stand up for today: television personality like Lara Logan, who interprets her job as "Chief Foreign Correspondent" as being like a press officer to make members of the military-industrial complex look heroic and cool, cheerfully do their dirty work of slandering opponents, and have pictures of herself looking cute taken in tanks and helicopters. That's what corporate journalism is worth. And that's why so little makes sense any more.

Twelve years on

I can't be the only one who feels that the anniversary of Sept. 11 has sprung up on us with remarkably little attention. That the epoch-making horror of our lifetime would become something that would remembered in the context of the calendar, set amongst events and memories great and small, new and old. For years I was certain that that this would remain the thing around which all else revolved, and it certainly did for awhile. But this year feels like the first time I've noticed that its place in our imagination has evolved — that we have processed the details well, choosing what to cling to and what to forget — even as we continue to stumble through the world born that day.

I can see it in the way the day is commemorated, which is similar to how it always is: the gathering at Ground Zero for the recitation of the names. It is an event that is always touching and sad, but is certainly no longer "news" the way it was for many years. One of the most telling things about our culture over the past few decades has been our insistence on remembering tragedy through each individual name. It reflects in part our understanding of the value of each human life, which is a sort of triumph of human empathy if you think about it in a historical context. But I would suggest it also reflects the way we perceive the world, of our (post)modern divided consciousness that includes what we see and know face to face, and what we absorb through images and broadcasts and the internet. It is as though each individual one of us can't process enormous, inhuman tragedy unless we can get a human handle on it. A long time ago, you heard news about things like this by word of mouth, or a newspaper, and what you heard was a story. Someone — an eyewitness, a reporter, basically, another person — began putting it into a narrative that made sense for you. All we have now is a fractured jumble of images and sounds and bits of commentary. So I wonder we choose to remember with such loving attention on the names as a crutch, out of the fear that otherwise we'll make too great an abstraction of something we instinctively know should remain personal and immediate.

But the trouble with doing so is that time wins this argument, as it wins all arguments. Today, the names are being read once again, and it means something desperately important to a lot of people, but less and less to most of us. I just checked, and you have to scroll halfway down the NY Times website to find any mention of Sept. 11.

What is real, and what remains, are the ideas that sounded like trite pundit-speak from the moment they appeared. That we do truly live in another world, that nothing has been the since. So much that has happened in these 12 years reflect this. Consider how we've trundled off to war and come back again, and now find ourselves paralyzed by what to do about Syria. There is a lot we can look back upon with remorse, because we know that if we hadn't squandered so much goodwill from that day — the one point of hope in an otherwise perfectly horrible thing — we might live in a better world today. We live with all that, everyday.

On anniversaries you are reminded to "remember," as if there is a danger we might forget, and it's perhaps too painful to think about how they remind us how far we've gone. Perhaps this is natural, but this year seems like the first that I've felt Sept. 11 was a very long time ago. This is the first year that I've looked at snapshots of the victims and noticed how out of style their glasses and shirts are.

What doesn't change is how shocking the images remain, no matter how familiar they are. If you think about it, you don't really see them that often because we've done an astonishing job of censoring them from ourselves. We saw the images of exploding airplanes, of tumbling towers, of falling bodies, of clouds of rubble, and knew they were stuck with us. We tagged them as "very super important" and carefully filed them away, and we don't live with them in anything like the way I thought we would.

And since this is a moment to reflect on the past, there is also bound up with it a moment to think about the future. Without being morbid, just realistic, it is likely the next great tragedy, will be recorded on a million smartphones. Already, our experience of the next thing is being shaped, and it will be very different than Sept. 11.

The broad, broad view of the Washington Post sale

When I worked at Newsweek, when it was a part of the Washington Post family, Donald Graham used to appear in the office every few weeks. Everything you hear about the guy seemed to be true. He had to be pointed out to me — a gangly, awkward, fellow in a terrible suit. He seemed shy, and smiled the same way to everyone he passed in the halls, from our big cheese world-beating editor in chief to me, a nobody on the absolute bottom of the corporate ladder.

Part of my job was to sit in on the editorial meetings and report on them for our far-flung foreign affiliates. This meant standing in the back of the room, and quietly taking notes. Sometimes I'd perch on the window sill, overlooking Eighth Avenue and Columbus Circle. A few times, Mr. Graham ended up perched next to me, just watching, deflecting whatever remarks or questions were aimed at him.

And I remember looking at the guy, amazed that he ran a global, powerful media empire, and was the steward of one of the most important institutions in American journalism. There was so much resting on his metaphorical shoulders, I thought, as I wondered if that was dandruff I spotted resting on his actual shoulders. It was amazing that so many vital human endeavors ultimately came down to one actual person. And thank goodness that at that time and place the guy who signed my checks was decent and dedicated to the same mission that I was.

And now he sold it. Instead of that one man, who was really part of a family, he sold the thing to another man, Jeff Bezos. It wasn't to a private equity firm, or any of the many bottom-feeder newspaper chains still sulking about, which is good (they've long since sold off Newsweek, whose sordid afterlife as an increasingly unloved old nag was shaping up to be the big media story this month before the sale).

The Post sale, along with the Globe being snatched up by John Henry, raises a ton of questions that high-flying media folk like to publicly mull over. The emerging consensus, I think, is that these are pretty awesome developments. At last, fabulously wealthy, smart business leaders realize the value of "old media." Don't dwell too long on the depressing fact that they were able to buy major metropolitan and national institutions with as much thought and sacrifice as most of us buy new iPods, and what that says about what we value. These guys are new, and they "get it." The can negotiate change, and aren't used to failing. And becoming beholden to a person, a personality, is way way better than the fate most newspapers face, in which some market buys the papers on leverage and cuts them to death. The nagging voices chime up that these men represent such vast bundles of conflicts of interest, that the basic mission of fair and honest reporting is doomed. There's the essential plot development of uncertainty.

But I would like to take the long view. The media-land conversation is fascinating in New York, Washington, Silicon Valley, and among the dwindling corners of the industry where people still make a decent living. In other words, this is the one percent talking to itself. In the broader view, this is a snapshot of life in our present plutocracy, in which most of us can only look on and shrug.

I'm going to wander around a moment, but bear with me. In college I had a close friend who was full of ridiculous ideas that were pretty funny at the time, but I keep thinking about. Both of us were English majors, and very interested in topics like the future of poetry and the role of the arts in society. Sometimes this friend was eerily prescient: he said it would be a good idea to write about vampires, which were an enduring human theme and destined for a comeback (at that moment Stephenie Meyer was still only a receptionist who had never written a word). He thought hip-hop and opera were destined to meet someday (and perhaps it did, if you think R. Kelly counts. We can argue about whether that's a good thing). But one of his sillier idea was that the less profitable arts, like poetry, would have to revert to a model you saw in Renaissance Italy, of finding patronage from powerful families or institutions. The bizarre example he gave was that Bill Gates and Microsoft could be talked into needing a court poet. This spawned a million jokes about Pindaric odes to celebrate the arrival of Windows 95.

What my friend grasped far earlier than I did, was the cynical reality of how we live. I was too busy being earnest and judgmental to see that things don't really change much. I was alive to the idea that the story changes, but didn't realize that it usually happened in ways that I was able to anticipate. I remember in one of my poetry classes talking to a senior who had just accepted a job at a company in Seattle that sold books over the internet. I was sure that was the stupidest idea on earth — who'd deal with that when there was a Borders or a Barnes & Noble on every block? I was just about to start a summer internship at my hometown newspaper — a family run, essential service for my community that was as permanent as the mountains. That was how I'd build a stable and reasonable future. Joke's on me (that college friend I mentioned, by the way, is a investment banker now. He's doing alright).

For all the talk of change, things aren't changing, and to take a much, much broader view, there is great peril lining our future. Consider Venice, which for hundreds of years was a true merchant republic, governed by an evolving and surprisingly fluid class of wealthy businessmen, with the occasional nudge or shove from an angry mob. Unlike the rest of Europe, where wealth and power and social order was determined by land and conquest, Venice was about commercial skill, political dexterity, and luck.

It worked for a long time, until the 13th century when the ruling class decided to pull the ladder up behind them. They restricted access to the circles of power to families that already had it, who over time became a formal self-perpetuating, autocratic nobility. That came with all the nonsense that entails — inbreeding, the creation of surplus offspring that loiter about at parties and in convents and waste resources, and an ossified, entitled, unimaginative ruling class that props itself up until something new and vibrant knocks it over.

Venice slammed shut the door just over 500 years into its existence. Our American republican experiment just hit year 237.

Margaret on the bier

I am enough of an anglophile that I've been following the public conversation in the wake of Margaret Thatcher's death very closely. That is, I've been following the British conversation because the American one has been useless and shallow (credit to Alex Pareene, at Salon, for spelling it out real simple-like for the folks over here).

My first instinct was to keep quiet about it, mostly out of respect that if people had feelings that would inspire "Margaret on the Guillotine," then I wasn't fully engaged to have a right to speak up.

But when has that ever stopped anyone on the Internet, for heaven's sake.

One of the most interesting things I've read is this essay by comedian Russell Brand in this morning's Guardian. His disagreement with her is very kind and human, and allows him to see what really is the horror of her legacy:

All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.

A huge part of the revulsion against her is not so much what she did. Reading through the lefty papers it is clear that all but the most dogmatic Labourites have come around that much of what she did would have had to be done anyway (though, the success of economies like Germany and France that had no comparable Thatcher seems an important note).

What drove opponents nuts — and warmed the hearts of supporters — was the style, how mercilessly grim and angry her approach was. It wasn't enough to do these things, it was to create generations of mutual hate, creating a perfectly atomized little society — of which, she famously said, there was no such thing.

Here is where the comparisons to the American situation, and her obvious homologue, Ronald Reagan. Unlike Thatcher, who was a legitimate bully, I still against my best instincts have a hunch that Reagan was a legitimately decent human. This was the flashing genius of American conservatism, whose greatest successes in its modern form have been ruthlessly pragmatic criminals, like Nixon, or malleable half-wits, like Reagan and Bush Jr. Everything else is all rape philosophers and entitled phonies. For all the toxicity of our political system, a majority of us can't seem to bring ourselves — even in our worst moments — to elect unrepentant bullies to our highest office.

I want to think that this would be a good thing, except that the lesson has been absorbed a bit too well by my side. Thus, our alleged Democratic president has proposed an insane budget replete with "entitlement" cuts. This is an absolute failure of leadership, an f-you to the debt you owe the democratic process, as manifest in the very recent election won by a large margin.

The Watergate Mystique

My generation has been left a whole herd of sacred cows to sort through by the baby boomers, and none smells quite like Watergate. It is, we are ritually reminded, a singularity — the very worst of Presidential mischief, and the very best of American journalism. As it celebrates its 40th anniversary this month has enough time passed to think about it clearly?

Like any very durable collective delusion, it serves the purposes of the powerful. It reshaped our political landscape in a way that the far-right, which was pounding on the doors of the GOP already in the Nixon years, could effectively bury the center-right. For the left, it did the opposite job: handing the center and the right of the party a convenient Republican bogeyman to remind the faithful what happens if the party strays too left. But perhaps the worst of the hangover is with the media. Watergate, and in particular the roles of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, is a very comforting narrative American journalists have told themselves at times of great stress and strain.

I'll admit that my thoughts on the subject are perhaps a bit shaggy — I write this blog for fun in my spare time, don't forget. But I remember the way that when I was in high school the clock of history stopped right at Watergate. I was aware even then the real electric thrill that comes with writing history, which is something you can never forget.

So here are a few ideas, that I hope are food for thought.

WOODSTEIN

Unfortunately for Woodward and Bernstein, their party was spoiled last spring when Jeff Himmelman's account of some lingering doubts about the story appeared in New York magazine. The specific nuances of the controversy are the stuff of J-school panel discussions. Basically, it seems that they actually did get information from a grand juror, which they had previously lied about (because, reasonably, they'd have gone to jail). It's just enough to poke some ugly shadows on the awesome 70s detective story, and the event that sparked a revival of the already moribund newspaper industry.

The legend of Woodward and Bernstein, like any self-flattering fantasy, says a lot about American journalism. In particular, its incredible self-righteousness and obsession with the details of the digging over the big picture. All this is for another post. But what about the results, did they "bring down a president"? Probably not: the wheels of history were grinding along fine on their own.

Here's the blunt truth about how things were going, according to Max Holland:

"Federal prosecutors and agents never truly learned anything germane from the Washington Post’s stories—although they were certainly mortified to see the fruits of their investigation appear in print. The FBI’s documents on Watergate, released as early as 1992, bear this out. The government was always ahead of the press in its investigation of Watergate; it just wasn’t publishing its findings."

And for the record, they were helped greatly by "Deep Throat," just another career bureaucrat with an ax to grind. Don't look too closely at how the sausage is made.

John Cook at Gawker provides a more thorough brief about their work. "It represents the Platonic ideal of what journalism-with-a-capital-J ought to be, at least according to its high priesthood — sober, careful young men doggedly following the story wherever it leads and holding power to account, without fear or favor," Cook writes. "It was also a sloppy, ethically dubious project the details of which would mortify any of the smug high priests of journalism that flourished in its wake. The actual Watergate investigation could never have survived the legacy it helped create."

But isn't it convenient there are so many photographs of them while they worked?

NIXON IN CONTEXT

Now let's take a look at Richard M. Nixon, a man who became a cartoon villain in the eyes of baby boomers. This month, Woodward and Bernstein teamed up again (for the first time in decades! what an event!) to rehash what he meant. They argue that saying "the coverup was worse than the crime" — a bit of lazy thinking that's become common — disregards what a bastard he was. That makes them look, again, like crusading superheroes.

Watergate ensures that we are unable to see Nixon clearly, which is a shame. His domestic policy was ruthlessly pragmatic, which meant a certain degree of pandering to the South, but also a lot of things worth cheering about. OSHA and the EPA were created under his watch.

On foreign policy, he and that miserable, fatuous toad Kissinger came up with some real Hague-worthy evils. No doubt about that. He was desperate to finish on his terms a war which, let it never be forgotten, was started by his Democratic predecessors. But on other fronts, the easing of the Cold War is going to remembered centuries from now. Much is made of his China moment, but less acclaimed is the spirit of detente with the Soviet Union, which brought us a full decade of peace and enabled the wretched old system to collapse under its own inefficiency and nastiness. Look at this campaign ad from 1972 — a Republican, a man who made his name hounding FDR loyalists for being Reds, made that! It's almost, please excuse me, human.

Which brings us to the other fact: Nixon was dark and bitter and twisted, and anyone who has read a novel or glanced through Shakespeare can understand that there was something very complicated and very familiar about him.

THE SCARECROW

The great tragedy of Watergate was the opportunity it presented to seal for another generation the victories of moderate liberalism of Roosevelt and Johnson.

No matter what anyone tells you, George McGovern is the man the Founding Fathers dreamed about. Modest, dedicated to public service, intelligent. His like simply don't exist in American politics today. But in the wretched aftermath of the loss, Democrats managed to ask all the wrong questions. They were so worked up with the evil of the other guys, that didn't bother to think about themselves. In 1976, a free pass if ever there was one, they were still freaked out about appearing too far to the left.

That left the door open for an unctuous, self-righteous con man who couldn't stop talking about how much he loved Jesus and how bloody fucking honest he was and how don't you dare call him a "liberal" (I've gone at length into the truth about the Carter "legacy" here).

Everything Nixon and his gang of clowns couldn't accomplish with their college pranks, Jimmy Carter did for them.

THE BOTTOM LINE

In terms of scandals, Watergate is a lark compared to Iran-Contra, which we will never conclusively get to the bottom of. In terms of politics, Nixon was was responsible for nothing as bad as the pollution that has streamed into our civic life since 1994. The Plumbers were ridiculous, evil, and shitty (Colson, in his afterlife, proved he was a bigger fuck than we could have imagined, Magruder deserves a heavy dose of honest respect and forgiveness), but they were mere pranksters compared to what Dick Cheney or Alberto Gonzalez could accomplish.

And in terms of the real structural damage Nixon accomplished to the United States and the constitution, again, nothing compared to what George W. Bush pulled off. A wholesale redistribution of the nation's wealth to the rich, wars launched on false pretences, half-wits installed all over the federal branch that will take a generation to shit out. And with the Roberts Court, its a gift that could keep on giving for decades more.

There is a lot to talk about on the occasion of this anniversary. But at some point, we have to start asking the right questions about this third-rate burglary.

'One or two secret policemen along the way'

There is a line in Anne Applebaum's review of Masha Gessen's new book about Putin that that is so inaccurate and mendacious I can't believe it appeared in print, let alone in the New York Review of Books. Describing Yuri Andropov's response to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, when he was the Soviet ambassador to Budapest, she writes,

He had been shocked when young Hungarians first called for democracy, then protested against the Communist establishment, and then took up arms against the regime, even lynching one or two secret policemen along the way. 

First a factual note about those "one or two secret policemen along the way." On Oct. 30, 1956, a mob lynched at least 24 AVH conscripts at Köztársaság Square. A photographer for Life magazine was at the scene, and it's tough viewing if you agree with me that murder is murder, no matter who does what to whom. 

But just as bad is her glib effort to make 1956 fit her world view. The uprising was remarkable for the breadth of its support -- young and old -- led first and foremost by left-wing, Marxist intellectuals and students who wanted a better form of socialism. They were joined a huge outpouring of support, including from many veterans of the extreme right. One eyewitness recalled that the uprising included the first reappearance of open anti-Semitism in Budapest since the Holocaust. 

By clumsily tromping outside her area of "expertise," she's let her stereotypes and assumptions show, and provide an insight into the Russophobic recesses of the neoconservative soul. This mix of provincial arrogance and willful ignorance is tragedy when we stumble into avoidable wars and prop up dictators, comedy when George W. Bush gets shoes instead of flowers thrown at him, and irrelevant when authentic people-led movements for social change -- in Serbia in 2000, across the Arab world last year, and in Russia right now. 

There's something pathetic about this unending desire to keep fighting the Cold War. Applebaum has plenty of places that will pay her for these thoughts, which she has honed as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and which have been feted by the most dishonest intellectual engineering project in Europe. So how she became NYRB's designated Russia expert is a mystery.

Giorgio Perlasca and the banality of decency

Among the things we need to remember about the Holocaust is the role of redemption. It is something I think about whenever I look out our window, which faces an apartment building that had been one of the city's safe-houses for Jews set up by Giorgio Perlasca. Like Raoul Wallenberg and Carl Lutz, he used diplomatic cover to help save thousands of Budapest's Jews. Unlike them, he doesn't get nearly as much recognition. I've wondered if part of the reason is that he was a fascist.

There are no simple stories, and every one is bent to make some sort of argument. You'll hear a lot about Wallenberg this year, and rightly so. This Swedish diplomat saved many, at great personal risk, and as long as there are people around we should remember that we are capable of such bravery. But there is another dimension to his legacy. His mysterious disappearance — at the hands of the invading Soviets — creates a neat narrative that right-wingers and neo-cons cherish: a direct connection between the evil of fascism with the evil of communism. And it is a convenient way to downplay the fact that Nazism was defeated only by the incredible sacrifice of the Red Army, and little else.

Perlasca's story is complicated. He was a full-throated fascist, although of the more melodramatic Italian model. He willingly fought in Mussolini's absurd neo-colonial adventures in Africa, and went as a volunteer to fight for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He later said that he became disillusioned in the late 1930s, when Mussolini adopted Germany's anti-Semitic tones.

During the war, Perlasca was in Budapest working as a supplier for the Italian military, and was here when Italy collapsed and dropped out of the war. The avoid going home, he took up an offer of Spanish citizenship for his service during the civil war.

The Holocaust came to Hungary soon after. The events here have a particular horror, because the Horthy regime, an eager ally of the axis powers, was certainly anti-Semitic but not quite exterminationist. They dragged their feet for years, but by 1944, as the war grew more and more desperate, pressure grew, and through the summer and fall deportations began. Eventually, Horthy was ousted in favor of Hungary's own homegrown fascist goons, who took the savagery to a new level.

It was those very dark years when people like Wallenburg, and Lutz, and Perlasca realized what was happening and could not stand aside. Perlasca, with the Spanish consul Angel Sanz Briz, began arranging dubious protection papers for Jewish families. When Sanz was sent to Switzerland, Perlasca stayed behind and cunningly pretended to represent the Spanish government in Sanz's absence. All told, over 5,000 Jews were protected. 

This building, on the north end of
Szent Istvan Park, was
one of Perlasca's houses

There was something desperate about their work, especially as all they could do was buy time. There was one famous anecdote about when Perlasca personally took two Jewish children off a deportation train, sparking a confrontation with an armed SS officer. According to the story, Adolph Eichmann himself, who was overseeing the work, appeared and let him go, advising the SS man that "we'll get them eventually." Only the capture of the city by the Soviets in January 1945 stopped the horror.

Perlasca (and especially Sanz, who had a long diplomatic career for Franco after the war) would not speak about what they did, and remained completely unacknowledged for forty years. It wasn't a simple story, and the only true thing, perhaps is the title of the 1993 book about Perlasca written by Enrico Deaglio, entitled, The Banality of Good.

Life under the boot

There is a photo from my wife's family that haunts me in an unusual way. It shows my mother-in-law when she was still a small girl, standing on the balcony of the family apartment, being hugged by her father, my wife's grandfather. It is taken sometime in the late 1940s, and they are all smiling and laughing.

As a Western who has read and studied those years, something startled me. That during Stalin's reign -- when millions of people had already starved, perished in unimaginably horrible wars (which her father had just endured), vanished into gulags, and generally lived beneath a permanent dark cloud of arbitrary arrest -- people could laugh and hug one another seemed very strange. It had not crossed my mind in such horrible times, people would still behave like people.

I thought of that picture again this month when I on something of a whim read Martin Amis' 2002 book Koba the Dread, a sort of literary memoir to remind everyone that Stalin was awful. I was curious to read it to see what sort of animal this book was. I remember when it came out, how left field and strange it seemed that the guy who wrote London Fields and a treatise about arcade games felt obliged to abruptly join a sprawling, quintessential 20th century argument. I wanted to read it now just to see if there was any news on that conversation.

It didn't take long to realize there wasn't. Amis spends most of the time relitigating familiar arguments, and the text is mostly a synopsis of Robert Conquest's work, with memories of his father's journey from card-carrying Red to loudmouth Tory, and some gruesome, heartbreaking details from firsthand accounts by Nadezhda Mandelstam and other survivors.

He sifts through a lot of material gracefully, which might make it a useful first read for a "lay reader" who doesn't think regularly about Nikolai Yezhov's gruesome end, or the psychogeography of Kolyma. As Michiko Kakutani wrote at the time in the New York Times, "as flawed as Mr. Amis's book is, it does a credible job of conveying just how Stalin went about 'breaking the truth,' and it should send readers running to better, more scholarly books on this tragic period in history."

But ultimately, the first questions that arise when you hear of the book continue. Why did Amis, who by his own admission never really engaged very deeply in the politics of his times, suddenly feel he had to weigh in on all this?

I'm sensitive to this because of my current work. When I step away from my manuscript, I see that I'm basically trying to "explain" a group of people who for specific reasons bought into the Soviet scheme, and may or may not have had doubts about it along the way. I've been struggling to find the line between justifying what no sane person -- aware of all the facts -- could possibly endorse, and trying to explain how intelligent, well-meaning, and daresay decent people could have dedicated their lives, their work, and sacrificed their freedom for it. Seems to me someone has to think about these things on their own terms without rushing to judgment.

It is about seeing complexity, a skill not just useful when looking into the past. It is self-evidently ghastly to prosecute twelve-year olds for political crimes, but you'll never know why if you can't appreciate how at the same time loyal Party members in the state bureaucracy also loved their children.

Imagine you live in Germany in the 1930s, or in North Korea today. No matter how much you wish it to be true, the statistical reality is that you would not be a member of the underground helping save your Jewish neighbors, or standing at the side of a weep-athon for Kim Jong Il shaking your head. You would be trying to keep yourself and your family alive. You'd be hoping the Gestapo walks past your door and leaves you alone, you'd be on your knees making sure everyone could see you wailing for the departed Dear Leader.

Mob dynamics are terrifying, and easy to underestimate from a distance. And the best inoculation against their danger is an awareness of what human nature really is like. Our Founders understood this, and did everything they could to protect us from it while preserving democratic order.

And still... too many give in to the worst parts of our collective consciousness. There are too many today who howl with rage and delight when some hateful fool tells them we need to round up "illegal aliens," or deny rights to adults based on who they have consensual sex with, or rail about how elite liberal snobs use higher education to indoctrinate young adults (who, presumably, could think for themselves). The past isn't dead, as Faulkner warned, and it isn't even past.

Loyalty Day

The "Loyalty Gate" in Sopron shows city dwellers pledging allegiance to Hungary.

It seems I share a birthday with a small national holiday here. Today is "Loyalty Day" (A Hűség Napja), which is celebrated in the western town of Sopron. It commemorates the plebiscite in 1921 in which the people of the city and several surrounding villages voted to become a part of Hungary, rather than Austria. About 65 percent voted to stay, and earned the city the nickname "Civitas Fidelissima" -- "the most loyal city." It's important because it marks the only time the hated Treaty of Trianon -- which dismembered historical Hungary -- was ever revised.

A few awkward questions about Warsaw

A marker in Nowe Miasto notes where the boundary of the Jewish Ghetto stood.

Exploring Warsaw with an inquisitive preschooler is a minefield of unexpected and unhappy conversations which I'd thought were still a few years away.

Here are just a few questions that popped up in our first day wandering around Stare Miasto and Nowe Miasto with my five year old daughter:

Q: "Why did they have to rebuild all these buildings after the war?"
Q: "Why were the Nazis so bad? Did they kill people? Even kids?"
Q: "Why did all the Jewish people have to go behind a wall? What was everyone else doing? Why didn't they call the police?"
Q: "What is that thing you do with your hand when we walk into a church?"
Q: "Why do we go into churches here but not back home?"
Q: "Did your grandfather live in Warsaw? Well, why didn't you ask him when he was alive? Why do you always tell stories about your granddad but not about your dad?"

Happily, introducing her to Polish food and taking her to new science museum weren't as intense.

Memorials like this, on Wierzbowa, mark the spots where Nazi reprisals took place.

One more thing on Sept. 11...

Everyone has a Sept. 11 story, and on this, the tenth anniversary, it feels like most of them are being told. The events of that day are almost too large to look at with our usual tools of distance and detachment, because they fail to describe what we remember. What happened, in one way or another, wounded everyone, so to understand it, we feel an obligation to break it into manageable little stories.

I haven't even tried to read that much of what has appeared about it -- just enough to figure I might as well pitch in my thoughts as well. I've seen a lot of older writers, baby boomers, who still seem astonished that something happened in the full flush of their adulthood that shaped an entire era. And I've read a lot of recollections from kids who were in college or in high school at the time, who have lived with this as part of their life.

I don't have anything to say about the event itself, a crime of such horror and evil that words fail. So I'd take the opportunity to look at another angle of it. Perhaps one can make too much of it, but I think about this through the lens of my generation, that awkward thing between Gen X and Gen Y, that slacker, post-slacker whatever that seems to hold together mostly by coming into consciousness in the 1990s, during that profound "vacation from history."

Russia's Lost Bastille Day

The memorial to the 1905 uprising. We're still waiting on the memorial for 1991.

Last month, on August 19, Russia could have celebrated its version of Bastille Day. There were some television specials and broadcasts of glasnost-era movies, but the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, the failed coup by Communist hardliners, came and went. The memory of those historic events among today's Russians is mixed, and seems to reflect that in politics, sometimes success is only managed disappointment.

The coup began on August 19, and the next day, a Monday, Russians heard the news that their leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was "ill" at his Crimean dacha and that a committee of reactionaries was now in charge. But it was clear from the start that the putsch was a farce. They issued a stream of bizarre, apocalyptic statements, and ostensible "leader" Gennady Yanayev couldn't keep his hands from shaking when he appeared on television. Within hours, a crowd had gathered around Russian President Boris Yeltsin at the Parliament building, the White House, and began throwing up barricades.

American writer Jamey Gambrell, writing in the New York Review of Books just days after the coup failed, summed up the giddy sense of confusion and excitement. "At the first mass demonstration, there was at last a feeling, which was to grow as the days passed, that Russia had taken a stand, perhaps for the first time in its history."

The coup fizzled over the next few days, as the military declined to participate in a bloodbath, and the Soviet Union quickly began to unspool. By the end of the week, the enormous statue of Felix Dzherzhinsky, the hated founder of the secret police, had been ripped from his pedestal outside KGB headquarters, which itself was covered with derisive graffiti. Emotions in those days spread, soon vented against not just the Party and the KGB, but at Gorbachev himself. By Christmas, the Soviet Union was history.

But not everyone remembers the story as an uplifting journey from oppression to freedom. A recent poll by the independent Levada Center found that only eight percent of respondents viewed the events of August 1991 as the start of a democratic revolution. About 43 percent said the coup attempt was nothing more than a struggle for power among bureaucrats. To this day, 36 percent say the collapse of the USSR was a negative thing.

A lot of that comes through the lens of hindsight, through all the shocks and traumas that Russia endured in those years. When the coup took place, Soviet citizens were already adjusting to a radical realignment of their political space. They lost an "empire" in Eastern Europe, and the splintering of the USSR into separate republics left about 25 million ethnic Russians suddenly as minorities in foreign nations. And it was unclear when the unraveling would stop, raising questions about the territorial integrity of Russia itself -- the Caucuses were already in revolt, and there was a danger that Tatarstan, in the heart of Russia, would be next.

No clear order had emerged in domestic politics either. Yeltsin may have been hero at the White House, but a little more than two years later he would bomb the same building after months of squabbling with the Congress of Peoples Deputies. The irony was lost on no one. And the appearance of free markets held little appeal. The "shock therapy" recommended by the international neoliberal elite meant that to most, instead of being robbed blind by Communist nomenklatura, they were now free to be robbed blind by elitny businessmen.

There are many ways to read all these struggles. Russophobes insist Russians, after centuries of oppression, are culturally unable to handle freedom. But Russians weren't alone in finding the Brave New Post-Socialist World more complicated and difficult than they expected. Disappointment and frustration appeared everywhere once they had moved beyond the black-and-white struggle against Communism. "We are witness to a bizarre state of affairs," lamented Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel, in April 1992. "Society has freed itself, true, but in some ways it behaves worse that when it was in chains."

There are many moving parts in politics, and success is sometimes a matter of how you organize them into a story. In Russia, the past ten years the story has been about the horrible 1990s, how Russia was rudderless and adrift and only a "strong hand on the tiller" -- like Vladimir Putin's -- could keep the ship on course. The story worked while the economy was treading water -- thanks to Russia's disproportionate reliance on the export of raw materials. But as the global economy stumbles and another round of disappointment takes shape, it is a tragedy not to have the memory of moments of courage and promise to rely on.

'Winning' the Space Race

Look, I like to mock the former half-term governor of Alaska as much as anyone, but her recent comments about the "Space Race" prove the old adage that even a broken clock is right twice a day (if only for a few glancing nanoseconds, and it doesn't realize why it is right).

America's chest-beating about "winning" the Cold War is so profound and pointless, it makes us merrily buy into the Tom Hanks version of a heroic, patriotic victory for our side.

Folks that I ordinarily agree with have been jumping to the safe conclusion...

Yes, the Soviet Union won many of the early contests in the space race (including putting the first man in orbit, which may have been what Palin meant by "race to space"). But it was the U.S. that walked away with the biggest trophy in the space race when it put a man on the moon.

But here's another take... the Soviets jumped out to a huge lead with Sputnik and manned flight, and then they kept it.

While America chose to believe it had launched into some kind of sci-tech rodeo contest, the Soviets were actually doing science. I'll make the bold assertion that the work Soviet engineers and cosmonauts did on long-term space flight will prove far, far more useful in the long-run than the explorations by American astronauts of how far you can hit a golf-ball on the moon.

And the fact that future crews going up to the ISS will be launched from Baikonur for the foreseeable future -- not Cape Canaveral -- seems to suggest the final outcome could at best be called a draw.

The Carter legacy

I'd love to offer former President Jimmy Carter the kind of quiet respect his office ought to deserve, but his weirdly vindictive and plainly untrue comments as he hawks his new new book shouldn't be left alone. It would have been nice to forget the nightmare of his presidency, and the wasted opportunity his election was for generations of Americans, but if he's seriously going to say in public that it was Ted Kennedy's fault health care reform didn't pass, then I'm going to say what a fraud and waste his entire career was.

They like to say that Carter has been a better ex-president than president. Which frankly, isn't that hard a post to pass. But the man does not get nearly enough blame for obnoxious trends in national politics that he introduced. These are things many of us think may have come from Nixon, or Reagan, but are in fact his unique contribution to American culture.