December 31, 2001 | The Nation

'ASSAULT ON THE CONSTITUTION'

Alexandria, Va.

I could not agree more with "National Security State" by David Cole [Dec 17]. As a twice-wounded Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, I am horrified by the "security" measures hastily taken by this Administration. We have not seen such a blatant assault on the Constitution since we incarcerated Japanese-Americans in World War II. Perhaps the Attorney General should issue orders to mail letters to males aged 50 to 70 with Italian surnames asking them to "voluntarily" come in and talk about what they might know about organized crime.

The real threat to the freedom of the citizens of the United States does not come from the Taliban or Osama bin Laden. The greatest threat to our freedoms comes from George W. Bush and John Ashcroft.

TIMOTHY J. MCKINNEY JR.

BOXERS' BILL OF RIGHTS

Westhampton Beach, N.Y.

I agree with many of your letter writers ["Boxing Days" Dec. 17]. Jack Newfield, as usual, has hit the nail cleanly on the head. The beautiful and brutal sport of boxing can't be abolished, because every time it has been--nineteenth-century England or early twentieth-century New York--it has mushroomed in illegal form, like speakeasies in the 1920s. What it begs for is reform, an honest and aggressive trade union for the only professional athlete with no protection, no pension. Newfield's Bill of Rights for Boxers should be our fistic Ten Commandments. May the powers that be (and the powers that shouldn't be) heed his prayers. Power to the fighters.

BUDD SCHULBERG

'CIVILIZATIONAL' CONFLICT?

Reno, Nev.

Thanks to Edward Said for some rare clarity ["The Clash of Ignorance," Oct. 22]. Yes, we need to destroy those bastards--in self-defense, not because of any far-flung notions like a "clash of civilizations." Hitler & Co. were Western (Christian) analogues of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, to the nth power. Now that was a bastard offspring if ever there was one. What civilization did they represent? The guiding principle? (Mass) psychosis happens. It's in the genes.

DOUG LOWENTHAL

New York City

Samuel Huntington, in his The Clash of Civilizations, did not suggest that the Islamic world was "evil" or "bankrupt." He did not suggest that it did not have a rich cultural, scientific or technical heritage. He emphasized how recent the West's ascendancy has been. The point that Huntington was making was that the twentieth-century obsession with ideology (democracy, fascism, communism) was no longer the rallying point of peoples but rather their ethnicity, religion, language grouping and cultural heritage. And in a world of competing interests, the West and Islam (facing common borders, incompatible ideologies and shared enmities) would come into conflict. This would happen with or without Osama bin Laden. This is not about terrorism--or fundamentalism. It's about a broader move for competition between cultures, made all the more prescient with the decline in the relative strength of the West. Edward Said chooses to ignore Huntington's thesis and offers up political correctness in response, thereby failing to challenge Huntington on a theoretical basis.

MANISH THAKUR

Seattle

Edward Said portrays the September 11 attackers as an isolated band of fanatical criminals with no significant relationship to the broader Islamic world. Said's claims clearly do not hold water. He says, "Why not instead see parallels, admittedly less spectacular in their destructiveness, for Osama bin Laden and his followers in cults like the Branch Davidians or the disciples of the Rev. Jim Jones at Guyana or the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo?"

The falsity of such parallels is immediately evident. Attempts by authorities to restrict or eliminate those cults did not result in demonstrations across half the globe of tens of thousands of sympathizers and supporters. The pro-bin Laden demonstrations we have seen from Gaza to Pakistan to Indonesia do not bode well for his claims. This is not to say that the vast majority of Muslims are not tolerant practitioners of their faith; it is merely to say that bin Laden and his camp are not a tiny isolated friendless minority; if they are an aberration, they are a vast one.

ZEV HANDEL

Palo Alto, Calif.

Let me add a footnote to Edward Said's excellent article. While Said is certainly correct in his description of Huntington's "civilizational" argument against Islam, the remedy Huntington seeks for the United States targets another large group internally--not only ethnic and diasporic groups but a number of political protesters as well. Indeed, Huntington finds that "the central issue for the West is whether, quite apart from any external challenges, it is capable of stopping and reversing the internal processes of decay" [emphasis added]. He names the causes of this "decay": "Western culture is challenged by groups within Western culture. One such challenge comes from immigrants from other civilizations who reject assimilation and continue to adhere to and propagate the values, customs, and cultures of their home societies.... In the late twentieth century...American identity [has] come under concentrated and sustained onslaught from a small but influential number of intellectuals and publicists. In the name of multiculturalism they have attacked the identification of the United States with Western civilization, denied the existence of a common American culture, and promoted racial, ethnic, and other subnational cultural identities and groupings."

Huntington does not mince words: "Rejection of the [American] Creed and of Western civilization means the end of the United States of America as we have known it. It also means effectively the end of Western civilization."

Two years after the The Clash of Civilizations was published, Huntington drew the connection between immigrants and progressive academics in an essay for Foreign Affairs: "The growing role of ethnic groups in shaping American foreign policy is reinforced by the waves of recent immigration and by the arguments for diversity and multiculturalism."

But it is crucial to note that this 1995 piece merely develops a line of reasoning Huntington began two decades earlier, in his work for the Trilateral Commission. In the commission's 1975 publication The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Huntington remarks: "The essence of the democratic surge of the 1960s was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private.... People no longer felt the same obligation to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves.... Each group claimed its right to participate equally--in the decision which affected itself."

In short, while lauding the active participation of more and more diverse populations on the one hand, on the other hand Huntington is concerned that there may be too much of a good thing: "The vitality of democracy in the 1960s raised questions about the governability of democracy in the 1970s.... In the United States, the strength of democracy poses a problem for the governability of democracy.... We have come to recognize that there are potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy."

Thus, with the growing calls to re-examine domestic civil liberties, it is useful to see how a "civilizational" conflict abroad ties into one at home, with specific ramifications for immigrants, ethnic Americans and certain progressive points of view.

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR FLAG IS?

Chapel Hill, N.C.

Perhaps the intensity of patriotic zeal in the aftermath of the September 11 attack has abated enough finally to pose the question, What was the fate of the many millions of flags printed in newspapers back in mid-September? A casual glance around store and car windows confirms that only a small fraction of them are actually on display. Have the others been stored away after a duly ceremonious and careful folding, stars on top? Or, as is more likely, have they been thrown away and, if so, has the disposal been done as 4 USC §8, stipulates "in a dignified way, preferably by burning"?

It is a sad fact that all who recycled those newspapers without first removing the flag are guilty of flag desecration, and environmentalism is at last confirmed to be an anti-American plot. On the other hand, those who sent their papers to the incinerator are true patriots, the dioxin released in the flag-burning assuredly no more dangerous than the smoke that once hung over Fort McHenry. But woe to those who may have used their newsprint flag to wrap fish, since the code explicitly forbids "using the flag as a receptacle."

DAN COLEMAN

COFFEE & CROISSANTS

An addendum to the letter, and Christopher Hitchens's reply [Dec. 10], about the introduction of coffee to Vienna in 1683: Some bakers' apprentices were working at night, preparing the next day's bread, and heard the sounds of a tunnel being dug by the Turks under the city wall. The boys alerted the army and thus an invasion was forestalled. As a reward, the baker boys were granted the exclusive privilege of baking a rich roll in the shape of the Turkish crescent. It became popular as the Kipfel. About 100 years later Maria Theresa's daughter Marie Antoinette came to France as the bride of Louis XVI. She missed her morning Kipfel and imported a Viennese baker to teach the French how to make it. The latter, of course, improved the recipe, and produced the croissant. The rest is gastronomic history.

ANDREW LINN

WELCOME BACK, KLAWANS

Brooklyn, N.Y.

There is no one like him. We have missed him. We can go to the movies again!

ISABEL BYRON

WASHINGTON--Pity the behemoth known as "the Department of Energy." It's
really, of course, the Department of Making Nuclear Weapons--and these
days, the Department of Scratching Its Head Trying

Arshad Chowdhury describes what happened to him at San Francisco Airport one morning in October with precision, calm and all the aplomb expected of a Carnegie Mellon MBA student with a Wesleyan u

The American people, argued President Bush in his weekly radio address on December 8, "want action on an agenda of economic growth, energy independence, patients' rights, education, faith-based legislation--all of which are important issues that are stuck in Congress."

September 11 was supposed to change everything, but despite war and recession the President remains wedded to the same reactionary agenda he pushed before the attack. Invoking his wartime popularity and authority, he is driving his old agenda through a reluctant Congress and forcing party-line votes on a range of fundamental issues. Start with the "stimulus plan." The terrorist attack revealed glaring domestic security and public health needs. The spreading recession has exposed gaping holes in the safety net for workers and the poor. The triple punch of presidential tax cuts, recession and crisis spending has wiped out the projected budget surpluses. But Bush demands that the stimulus plan lock in even more permanent tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy while stiffing unemployed workers, states in growing fiscal crisis and domestic security needs. Protecting our food and water supplies and guarding our nuclear power plants can wait.

The turmoil in the Gulf and the bankruptcy of Enron have given new urgency to regulation, renewables, conservation and energy independence. But Bush has continued to press for an energy plan that features subsidies and tax breaks for energy companies and drilling in the Arctic wilderness. The stock market collapse and the importance of Social Security survivors' benefits to the families of victims of September 11 should have buried talk of privatization. But the President's Social Security Commission has just released proposals that call for deep cuts in guaranteed benefits to help pay for private accounts.

After September 11 there was much talk in the Administration about leading a renewed global initiative against hunger and disease. No more. Instead, the President joined the corporate lobby to buy enough votes to squeak fast-track trade legislation through the House, calling it vital to the war on terrorism. The ensuing negotiations will be less about aiding the poor than about repaying corporate contributors. In the war in Afghanistan, international cooperation and coalition have been essential. But the Administration has continued to shred US international commitments--spurning the final Kyoto global warming negotiations, withdrawing from the ABM treaty for Star Wars, even torpedoing negotiations over enforcing the biological weapons convention.

Attorney General Ashcroft hasn't let the Constitution, state laws or the advice of experienced investigators stand in the way of raids on Arab-Americans and Muslims. But kowtowing to the National Rifle Association, he has blocked investigators from asking if suspected terrorists have purchased guns. And he has found time to deny the terminally ill the right to a dignified exit in Oregon, and the ailing the right to medical marijuana in California.

White House political adviser Karl Rove likes to brag that unlike the Clinton Administration, the Bush presidency is not poll driven. That is certainly true of the policies, most of which offend majority opinion while serving the conservative and corporate interests that underwrote Bush's drive to the White House. What is poll driven, however, is how the policies are sold. Bush calls on Congress to enact his stimulus plan because workers "are hurting in America," even though his plan ignores their pain. He puffs his Big Oil plan as the road to "energy independence," even as it increases reliance on global oil companies and markets. He chides Congress for failing to pass a prescription drug benefit, even as his tax cuts siphon off the needed money.

Over time, this big lie technique will surely corrode his newfound credibility. In the short term, however, the war strengthens Bush's hand. In a divided Congress, Republicans march in virtual lockstep behind their popular President. Democrats lower their voices and are reluctant to take on the President frontally. On close votes--scuttling domestic security spending, passing fast track, pushing a shameless "stimulus bill" through the House--the desire to "support the President" has helped him get his way. But the changed politics don't alter the reality that the policies are a deep disservice to the country. Bush is squandering his chance to be a national unity President in order to pursue a conservative agenda out of step with the nation's needs and the people's expectations. It's time for Democrats to stiffen their backbones and make their case. If they do, Republicans may discover just how out of step those policies are in the 2002 Congressional elections.

During the week of December 17, US freighters are expected to dock in Cuban ports and begin offloading a historic shipment of foodstuffs. In a deal worth up to $30 million, the Castro government has purchased wheat, corn, soybeans, rice and flour and is currently negotiating with Perdue and Tyson to buy chicken in order to replenish supplies destroyed by Hurricane Michelle. Paid for with cash, the sale marks the first major commercial transaction between the United States and Cuba since the Kennedy Administration imposed the US trade embargo forty years ago.

Few people know that President Kennedy exempted food from the original US trade blockade. The Johnson Administration added foodstuffs to the embargo in February 1964 after the conservative senator from New York, Kenneth Keating, complained that Cuban efforts to purchase $2 million worth of lard--yes, lard--would have "a significant impact upon the foreign policy and international interests of the United States." According to declassified White House documents, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy's office asked the Department of Agriculture to provide an analysis of the "uses of lard" in hopes that some ominous strategic purpose could explain US actions. "Cuba could be expected to use 100 percent of any lard it gets for edible purposes," an aide reported back. "It would probably not be credible to take the line that we have decided to stop shipments of lard because it is not solely a food."

Since the end of the cold war, the embargo has proved a serious embarrassment for Washington. Instituted as part of a broad set of punitive measures designed to isolate the Castro regime, the trade sanctions have succeeded only in isolating the United States. Every year for the past decade the United Nations has voted overwhelmingly to condemn the US blockade; the last vote, on November 27, was a 167-to-3 defeat for the United States, with only the Marshall Islands and Israel supporting Washington and all fifteen members of the European Union voting against the United States. Our Western allies have been antagonized by the Helms-Burton bill, which tightened the embargo by penalizing friendly nations that freely trade with Cuba. Indeed, as Cuba has opened its economy to foreign investment and international trade, US corporations and agricultural interests have watched from the sidelines as competitors from Canada, Europe and Asia have built profitable business and commercial partnerships on the island.

US corporate interests, led by giant food conglomerates and rice, soy and wheat growers, have emerged as the principal lobbyists for lifting, at least partially, trade restrictions against Cuba. Once an executive order, the embargo was codified into law by the Helms-Burton bill. But legislators from agricultural states like Missouri, Iowa and Louisiana have progressively plowed into the political turf of the hard-line anti-Castro representatives from Florida; majorities in the Senate and House are moving closer to dispensing with this ineffective, counterproductive anachronism of the cold war.

Last year, on an amendment sponsored by Republican Representative George Nethercutt of Washington, Congress took the first substantive step to rescind the embargo, voting to lift the ban on commercial transactions with Cuba involving food and medicine. But a last-minute provision, inserted by the Republican leadership at the behest of a handful of Miami legislators, prohibited private financing of Cuban purchases. Angry at the punitive credit restrictions, the Castro government stated that it would "not spend a nickel" in the United States until the law was changed.

Cuba's deft decision to alter its rhetorical position and ask the Bush Administration to expedite this $30 million cold cash transaction in the wake of Hurricane Michelle may well contribute to reconsideration of those financing restrictions and indeed the embargo itself. Already, the Senate Agriculture Committee, chaired by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, has voted to allow private bank and corporate financing. Analysts predict that US economic interests that want to continue such sales will eventually turn their attention to lifting restrictions on travel to the island, since American tourist dollars could provide Cuba with substantial currency to purchase US goods. "This creates momentum," according to Philip Peters, a Republican economic analyst at the Lexington Institute, who will lead a Congressional delegation to Cuba in January. "This re-energizes people who want to trade with Cuba."

"We have always been rather proud of the fact that 'we weren't trying to starve the Cuban people,'" an aide argued to McGeorge Bundy in an abortive effort to keep food from being added to the embargo. After thirty-seven years of trying, and failing, to do just that, restoring food sales has created the first major crack in the embargo. As the current of commerce begins to flow, that crack is likely to widen until the embargo collapses from its own outdated weight.

UP AGAINST ASHCROFT

Democratic criticism was so tempered during Attorney General John Ashcroft's December 6 appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the hyperventilating Wall Street Journal was right to term the session a "political rout" in Ashcroft's favor. When a fired-up Ashcroft declared that civil-liberties critics "aid terrorists...erode our national unity and diminish our resolve," the Democrats, wary of George W. Bush's sky-high poll numbers, barely pushed back. Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, says, "It is an open question whether Democrats and moderate Republicans have the will to stand up to Ashcroft and the right-wingers, who practice the politics of intimidation." Where does that leave civil libertarians? Where they have had most successes--the courts. People for the American Way, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the ACLU are exploring the possibility of challenging the Ashcroft order that permits the government to monitor conversations between detainees and attorneys. The Center for Democracy and Technology is trying to determine if any Internet service provider has received an over-broad government order instructing it to hand over electronic records of a customer. The Center for National Security Studies, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and seventeen other groups filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department seeking information on the more than 1,000 individuals arrested or detained after September 11 (The Nation is a plaintiff in that case). "The Attorney General, in defending his policies, says there have been no lawsuits," notes Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU. "He should hold on to his horses. They're coming."

CASUALTIES ON BOTH SIDES

Robert Fisk, correspondent for The Independent and a Nation contributor, smelled trouble when his jeep broke down in the town of Kila Abdullah, near the Afghan-Pakistani border. A crowd of refugees gathered, at first friendly but then turning angry. Stones began flying. Fisk was grabbed and beaten until blood streamed down his face. He fought back and managed to break free. As he braced for another assault, a Muslim cleric took his arm and calmly escorted him to a Red Cross/Red Crescent ambulance, which carried him to a hospital. Later Fisk wrote: "The people who were assaulted were the Afghans, the scars inflicted by us--by B-52s.... If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find."

IT HAPPENED IN HOUSTON

The minuscule Art Car Museum in Houston does shows of cutting-edge art, but its staff never expected that one of them would bring the Feds knocking on the door. Last month agents from the FBI and the Secret Service arrived and methodically toured the gallery, occasionally querying the meaning of a topical but obscure piece. They took a particular interest in "Empty Trellis," a sketch of George W. Bush behind a steel trellis, created before September 11 as a criticism of environmental policy. Later, Houston FBI spokesman Bob Dobuim told the Houston Press that the bureau had received a complaint that "Empty Trellis" threatened the President, hence the Secret Service man. In accordance with our Attorney General's call for Americans to be extra vigilant, the FBI was checking out all reports of things deemed "un-American or a concern or a threat."

PEACE BLACKOUT?

Peace demonstrations these days receive scant attention in the media. David Potorti reports that he and several other members of families who lost someone in the September 11 attack made a march "for healing and peace" from the Pentagon to the World Trade Center. At Union Square park in New York, members of the group made speeches calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan and a search for alternatives to violence so other innocent families would not suffer as they had. The Sunday New York Times ran a prominent picture of the marchers but all their signs were cropped out and there was no explanation of the purpose of the march. None of the other media covering the event ran stories. And our friends at Peaceflags, which sells an American flag with the fifty stars arranged as a peace symbol, tell us that CNN canceled a story on them at the last minute, explaining that because it was for a "sponsored segment," headquarters in Atlanta "pulled the plug on the story." The prevailing attitude seems typified by the Washington Post's coverage of an antiwar demo involving some 60,000 people: The only picture showed a lone prowar demonstrator.

PRICE ANDERSON: STEALTH RENEWAL

While you were watching the war news, the House of Representatives hastily and with no debate renewed the Price Anderson Act, which limits the liability of nuclear power generators in the event of an accident. Most sober estimates of the damage from a serious accident range up to $500 billion, yet Price Anderson caps the industry's liability at $9.5 billion. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has concluded that plants are vulnerable to attacks like those on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And nuclear waste storage areas around US reactors are even more vulnerable. The renewal bill also facilitates construction of the new Pebble Bed Modular Reactor, which has no containment structure. The bill is now in the Senate. See Matt Bivens's web piece, "Who Pays for Nuclear Power?" and sign an online petition.

NEWS OF THE WEAK IN REVIEW

The Washington Times's "Inside the Beltway" column reported that a new book by author William Doyle "contains FBI and Pentagon documents detailing a surprise raid" at Ole Miss in 1962, by troops of the 716th Military Police Battalion. Their target: the Sigma Nu house. Inside, the MPs "seized and removed a total of 24 weapons: 21 shotguns, a .22 rifle, a .30 rifle and a .22 Colt pistol." The president of Sigma Nu at the time was the popular cheerleader Trent Lott, who has since risen to his present eminence as Senate minority leader. Lott has declined comment.

The September 11 attacks spread their pall over the AFL-CIO convention in early December as union representatives touchingly remembered the dead--including more than 700 union members--and honored the everyday heroism of workers like firefighters, ironworkers and nurses. But unions also confronted the political fallout of the terror attacks, which undermined major globalization protests, dampened a new antisweatshop campaign, chilled labor's crusade for immigration reform and gave Bush new clout, which he used to eke out a one-vote House passage of fast-track trade-promotion authority that labor strongly opposed. The attacks also deepened the recession, thus making collective bargaining tougher and shrinking union treasuries.

The low-key mood at the Las Vegas gathering obscured the determination of the labor movement to fight vigorously on its major campaigns, not simply to play defense or hunker down and hope as many unions did in the 1980s. Delegates thunderously pounded their tables in approval as AFL-CIO president John Sweeney condemned Bush and "his corporate backers [for] waging a vicious war on working families." Firefighters president Harold Schaitberger similarly warned politicians, "We don't want homilies. We want healthcare for every worker."

While supporting the war against terrorists, the AFL-CIO strongly attacked the Bush Administration's antiterrorism measures for threatening civil liberties with only one dissenting voice in the executive council. Union leaders showed little enthusiasm for the war despite their statements of support, and there were indications that labor would not uniformly, if at all, back extension of the war. "Catching and dealing with bin Laden and Al Qaeda is one thing," UNITE (clothing and textile workers) president Bruce Raynor said. "Waging war on lots of other countries is another."

While labor grieved, corporate America attacked workers with plant closings, layoffs and pursuit of legislative favors in Washington, Raynor said, but now unions must "be more aggressive than ever" in organizing and mobilizing public sentiment against the "deceit" and "hypocrisy" of big business and the White House. The minority of unions that have been organizing--with recent large-scale successes among workers ranging from janitors and homecare workers to graduate teaching assistants, nurses and engineers--plan to continue, even intensify, their organizing campaigns. "We don't believe the recession will have any substantive negative impact on organizing," argued Gerald McEntee, president of AFSCME, which since 1998 has doubled its spending on organizing and quadrupled newly organized public service workers to roughly 50,000 this year. The AFL-CIO now is concentrating on helping unions that haven't seriously pursued organizing opportunities in their industries. For example, the Teamsters, who have had few organizing successes recently, announced a new pact with longshore unions to organize 50,000 truckers at the nation's ports.

Most important, the AFL-CIO and affiliated unions are increasing the use of their growing political clout and community alliances to try to counteract employer opposition to unions, perhaps the most important obstacle to union growth. With the help of state labor federations and metropolitan central labor councils, and through their own collective bargaining, unions are winning agreements that require employers to be neutral during organizing drives and that prohibit use of public funds to fight unions. Also, labor is telling union-backed politicians that "they need to help us increase union density," explained AFL-CIO political director Steve Rosenthal, who recently honed labor's already sophisticated operations in New Jersey, getting 73 percent of union members to the polls, with 67 percent of those voting for the new, strongly prolabor governor, James McGreevy. It's in the interest of Democrats: With just 3,000 more union members in five key districts, Rosenthal calculated, the Democrats would now control the House of Representatives. Unions have also decided that they want to double--to 5,000--the current number of union members in elected office, creating what McEntee called "sort of our labor party." But union leaders put off a decision about how much money to give the AFL-CIO for politics as well as its other work until next February, reflecting union leaders' desire to be more involved in developing a focused, efficient plan for the federation.

The momentum for immigration reform evaporated on September 11, but union leaders were determined to renew their campaign early next year with a series of forums and a push to make sure that survivors of the terror attacks and families of victims are eligible for the same benefits, regardless of immigrant status. HERE (hotel workers) president John Wilhelm still hopes to make immigration reform a major issue in next year's elections.

Nobody was sanguine about the prospects for next year, with unemployment growing, state budgets shrinking and double-digit healthcare inflation, but Minnesota public employees successfully went out on strike shortly after the terror attacks, and Boston hotel workers recently won a strong contract on the brink of a walkout. Union leaders think that their members and the general public are quietly outraged at the greed and excess of corporations and the Bush Administration, even during a national security crisis. Mineworkers president Cecil Roberts joined Jesse Jackson in a call for labor to march on Washington in protest that gained warm applause. If Bush and the corporations want to wage war, as Sweeney said, they will find that the labor movement is better prepared than it has been in many years to engage the fight.

Things are quieting down here in Terror Town, and it's probably been days since a talk-show host has denounced Portland's leaders as politically correct, latte-loving traitors. Although city leaders said that local police would not conduct federally ordered interviews with local Middle Eastern aliens, the interviews have pretty much been completed by federal agents. But the whole experience has left at least one moral: In today's legal climate, a law is a dangerous thing to cite.

The explosion began when assistant police chief Andrew Kirkland, acting as head while the chief was out of town, told a New York Times reporter that Portland police would not conduct the local interviews. Kirkland, who is African-American, denounced the idea as racial profiling, which he said he'd suffered from while growing up in Detroit: "I hated the police with a passion." In retrospect, it probably wasn't a great phrasing, and Portland's leaders have been derided by TV talking heads and have received 1,500 hostile e-mails from around the country. Republican Representative Lamar Smith, chairman of the House judiciary subcommittee on crime, has repeatedly threatened to cut off federal law-enforcement aid to the city.

Kirkland's stance was grounded on an assistant City Attorney's finding that several of the federally ordered questions violated a state law declaring, "No law enforcement agency...may collect or maintain information about the political, religious or social views, associations or activities of any individual, group, [or] association...unless such information directly relates to an investigation of criminal activities, and there are reasonable grounds to suspect the subject of the information is or may be involved in criminal conduct." In other words, Oregon police can't legally ask people who aren't suspected of anything questions about whether they've ever been to Afghanistan or the phone numbers of everybody they know.

Says Portland City Attorney Jeff Rogers, "We've been assured these people are not suspected of anything, but these questions are things you would ask people if they were suspected of something. If that were the case, these questions would be perfectly appropriate, but then other safeguards might come into play"--such as advising people of their Miranda rights.

Rogers, a Yale lawyer in a gray suit and with a clipped gray beard, has seen these issues, and national politics, from lots of different angles. His father, William Rogers, was Dwight Eisenhower's Attorney General and Richard Nixon's Secretary of State. He and his ex-wife were classmates of the Clintons at Yale Law School, and she spent the Clinton years as a US Attorney for Oregon. Earlier this year, he was bitterly abused on the same issue--from the left--after the City Council renewed its membership in a Joint Terrorism Task Force with the FBI. At a loud council session, activists charged that the city police would join the FBI in keeping files on people who weren't criminals, and Portland promised that it wouldn't.

So when the interviews came up, the city felt bound to keep the commitment. The Democratic state Attorney General eventually ruled that the city was wrong about the law. But a number of other officials, including the Republican chairman of the state house judiciary committee, concluded that Portland was probably right. And other Oregon cities with sizable immigrant populations quietly made it clear that they wouldn't be doing the interviews either. In fact, neither would police in Seattle, San Francisco and San Jose, who said that they would conduct such interviews only with actual criminal suspects. That leaves at least four major police forces open to Attorney General John Ashcroft's charge that anyone criticizing his policies is a terrorist pawn.

Some people in Portland think the city should have just gone along with the Justice Department, but Portland officials don't agree. "My City Attorney said I would be violating the law," said Mayor Vera Katz. "I swore to uphold the law and the Constitution. I'm not going to wink." Adds Katz, who landed in the United States in 1941 as a 7-year-old refugee from Germany, "I'm the only one who has gone through a war. I know what a war is like. You don't have to lecture me. You don't have to call me a traitor." And the Attorney General doesn't have to imply she's a terrorist accomplice.

The controversy has wound down, but Portland is still not exactly John Ashcroft's kind of town. During a visit to relatives in Portland recently, Senate Judiciary chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont called the interview process "a completely useless waste of law enforcement. I don't think it would accomplish much of anything." It seemed a stronger phrase than Leahy has ever dropped while chairing his Senate hearings in Washington. Possibly there's something in the air in Portland besides talk-radio.

The Hersh Paradox

While we wait out the good riddance to bad rubbish that is Osama bin Laden, troubling questions remain.

Nobody in search of Jewish safety would place Jewish settlements in Gaza at a time like this, or indeed any other time. It follows that an international commitment to Israeli security would have, as its necessary counterpart, an absolute refusal to pay a single cent for colonization or expansion. Then we would see who really wanted what, and at what risk, or price.

As fate would have it, the very first holiday card to show up in my mailbox was from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, of which I am a devoted member and fan. It carried the witty and timely message, "Reason's Greetings." Now more than ever! Just think of the damage religious mania (combined, as it tends to be, with nationalism and patriarchy) has wrought around the globe this year, the first of the new millennium--the World Trade Center attack, the Taliban, suicide bombers in Israel versus yet more settlements on the West Bank. And that's not even mentioning our own home-grown fanatics, like the recently apprehended fugitive Clayton Lee Waagner, who threatened to murder forty-two abortion clinic workers and who is the main suspect in some 550 anthrax-hoax letters to clinics, or the mainstreaming of conservative religious views, as in the explosion of abstinence-only sex education and theologically motivated restrictions on stem-cell research.

I've never been one for the hundred-dollar Christmas promoted by Bill McKibben--gee, thanks for the socks! and is that genuine New York City tap water in that cleverly decorated old Thunderbird bottle? Too depressing. Norah Vincent, the right-wing columnist, took McKibben to task in Salon a few years ago for advocating holiday frugality: Why, the whole economy would collapse, she argued, if Americans didn't get out there and buy buy buy. This year everyone from George W. Bush on down is urging us to shop till we drop, or the terrorists will have won. But you can please both Bill and Norah, enjoy the contrasting pleasures of spending and self-denial, do good and still get that holiday buzz from standing in long lines in a too-hot coat while carrying too many things: Simply buy stuff for needy organizations that help people instead of for your overindulged relatives, friends and yourself. For example, visit your local independent bookstore while it still exists and pick up a few paperbacks for Books Through Bars (see www.booksthroughbars.org for a drop-off location near you; or send donations to Books Through Bars NYC, c/o Bluestockings Books, 172 Allen Street, New York, NY 10002). No travel guides or romances please, and no hardcovers--choose dictionaries, fiction by people of color, science, non-US history. Or help battered New York City, where the mayor proposes deep budget cuts for schools and libraries, by giving new children's books to public schools through PENCIL (c/o Ben Iglesias, New York City Board of Education, 44-36 Vernon Blvd., Long Island City, NY 11101).

Shopping aside, this is the year to use your holiday donations to take a stand for secularism and against all churches (and synagogues and mosques) militant. If you don't already belong to the the aforementioned Freedom From Religion Foundation (PO Box 750, Madison, WI 53701; www.ffrf.org), now's the moment to sign up: The foundation is fearless, tireless and clever in supporting separation of church and state and opposing the increasingly bold power moves of the godly. If it sticks in your craw that evangelical seminarians are teaching the Bible as "truth" in Tennessee public schools, support the group that's trying to stop them.

With Christian fundamentalist churches on a jihad against reproductive freedom for women, don't forget The National Network of Abortion Funds (c/o CLPP, Hampshire College, Amherst MA 01002; www.nnaf.org), an umbrella organization of state and local funds that finance abortions for poor women. Help from the NNAF can mean the difference between sickness and health, unemployment and college, staying in an abusive relationship or starting a new life--or even life and death.

And remember Patricia Hussey and Barbara Ferraro, the two Sisters of Notre Dame who resigned from their order after the Vatican came down hard on them for signing an ad in 1984 affirming that Catholics had many different positions on abortion? They're alive and well and living in Charleston, West Virginia, where they've been running the ecumenically based Covenant House (1109 Quarrier Street, Charleston, WV 25301; www.wvcovenanthouse.org), which helps people with AIDS, the homeless and the poor and works for public school reform and other progressive campaigns in Appalachia.

With the economy officially in recession, joblessness up and tens of thousands of welfare recipients about to hit their five-year lifetime limit on benefits, there's no time like the present to support poor people's activism. The National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support is the coalition of grassroots groups that is leading the fight around the reauthorization of welfare reform coming up in 2002 (1000 Wisconsin Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20007; www.nationalcampaign.org).

Finally, the World Trade Center tragedy has fallen particularly hard on the service workers and undocumented immigrants who toiled in the towers: They or their survivors have gotten little out of the millions collected by the World Trade Center Relief Fund and the Red Cross. Thanks to welfare reform, which bars even legal immigrants from most federal safety-net programs, noncitizen mothers now suddenly sole heads of families find themselves ineligible for many essential benefits. To help now-jobless workers from Windows on the World restaurant and the families of those who perished there, you can make a tax-deductible donation to the HERE NY Assistance Fund (Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012; www.helprestaurantworkers.org).

Checkbook running on empty? If you have e-mail, you can sign yourself and friends up with ProgressiveSecretary.org and finally keep that New Year's resolution to stay in touch with your Congressperson. Founder Jim Harris and crew research and produce dozens of e-mails each month on issues from Arctic drilling to racial profiling. If you approve the contents, they'll send them to the appropriate authority in your name. There is no easier way to make your opinion known--one cynic of my acquaintance compared it to spinning a prayer wheel. Hey, right-wingers out-e-mail progressives many times over, and look at the way the country's going--maybe they're on to something.

It was a terrible year, but it's almost over. Reason's greetings!

Peter Huber, a regular columnist with Forbes magazine and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, boasts degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT and law from Harvard.

"Tampering With Nature," John Stossel's June 29, 2001, special, became a public relations problem for ABC when several parents demanded that interviews with their children be removed f

That stentorian denunciation of the Administration came last week not from a Democrat but from conservative Republican Congressman Dan Burton.

China is taking away Mexico's jobs, as globalization enters a fateful new stage.

Two months after the September 11 attacks, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), an academic watchdog group founded by Lynne Cheney, issued a report grandly titled "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It." Its authors proclaimed that while "citizens have rallied behind the President wholeheartedly.... college and university faculty have been the weak link in America's response." They painted academe as a passivist fifth column undermining the war effort through equivocation, "moral relativism" and outright opposition, noting: "Some [professors] even pointed accusatory fingers, not at the terrorists, but at America itself." And they named names: academics who had supposedly pointed such fingers and uttered such equivocations in 117 instances collected from media sources. They also announced that they would send the list to 3,000 trustees at colleges across the country.

Some of those named, such as University of Washington psychology professor David Barash, cheered at making ACTA's list: "Before, I was disappointed at being too young or too inconsequential to make Nixon's list." Others howled, however, that they'd been misrepresented and quoted out of context, leading the authors, ACTA president Jerry Martin and vice president Anne Neal (both of whom served under Cheney at the National Endowment for the Humanities), to yank the list off the group's website (www.goacta.org) after a week. It was soon back, however, minus the names, where it remains--not quite blacklisting, but a weird, anonymous graylist.

This switch went unremarked, and ACTA--which according to the Media Transparency project received nearly $700,000 from the conservative Olin, Bradley, Earhart and Sarah Scaife foundations between 1997 and 2000, and which was hired by Governor Jeb Bush to train Florida's 143 university trustees--continued to score the sort of high-volume attention most watchdog groups only dream of. The Wall Street Journal's editorialists and a Washington Times commentary endorsed the findings of "Defending Civilization"; Washington Post columnist Jonathan Yardley endorsed the similar findings of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which provided ACTA with some of its citations. Leftist "thought-police," Yardley intoned, "have launched a new onslaught on free speech and revived the anti-Americanism that was pandemic on the campuses in the age of political correctness." Other papers reported the claims in more neutral fashion while conceding ACTA's main premise: that it had actually assembled what Emily Eakin, in the New York Times, called "117 anti-American statements heard on campuses."

In fact, many of the statements were innocuous (e.g., "We have to learn to use courage for peace instead of war"), while one, by Oberlin freshman Jim Casteleiro, voices the appreciation of history that ACTA itself extols: "War created people like Osama bin Laden, and more war will create more people like him." Former US ambassador at large to Russia Strobe Talbott, now at Yale, makes the list by noting, "It is from the desperate, angry and bereaved that these suicide pilots came." He shares billing with Arun Gandhi, the Mahatma's grandson, who told a UNC, Chapel Hill, gathering, "We must acknowledge our role in helping to create monsters in the world, find ways to contain these monsters without hurting more innocent people and then redefine our role in the world."

Some of the other statements ACTA cites do express strong opposition to the post-9/11 campaign, and a blithe zeal for blaming America. But the most obnoxious, which leads ACTA's list--"I was cheering when the Pentagon got hit because I know about the brutality of the military. The American flag is nothing but a symbol of hate and should be used for toilet paper for all I care"--is attributed not to an academic but to a "freelancer" at a Brown protest. Freelance peacemonger?

Nearly a third of the 117 examples in this critique of faculty "weak links" come not from faculty but from students and protest signs. ACTA's watchdogs vacuum up attributions where they can, sometimes at third hand (for example, a William Bennett Op-Ed citing a Commentary article). But "Defending Civilization" gets most slippery when it cites instances of universities supposedly suppressing or rejecting patriotic expressions. It reports that when Williams College president Morton Schapiro announced a "public recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance," only Schapiro and one other faculty member showed, plus 200 students and maintenance and cafeteria staff. But the one-minute event was held on a Sunday, when faculty aren't on campus and students and cafeteria workers are. Michael Lewis, the lone Williams professor who came to say the pledge, who sharply criticizes his colleagues' tepid war spirits, admits that many of them did attend a later candlelight vigil.

Then there's the Penn State vice provost whom ACTA lashes for telling a faculty member that "his web page advocating military action against terrorists is 'insensitive and perhaps even intimidating.' 'Intimidating' expression is grounds for dismissal at Penn State." Professor Stephen Simpson had quoted and endorsed an editorial by the Ayn Rand Institute's Leonard Peikoff that concludes, "We must now use our unsurpassed military to destroy all branches of the Iranian and Afghani governments, regardless of the suffering and death this will bring to the many innocents caught in the line of fire." Vice provost Robert Secor says that after "some of the students in Mr. Simpson's class" complained to him, he wrote to Simpson: "Since we have students from all countries at Penn State, whose families might be among the innocents Peikoff refers to, you can understand why these students would find such comments insensitive and perhaps even intimidating. I am sure this is not what you intended, but I want you to know this has been the unintended result."

Simpson at first contested Secor's assertion but then removed the quote. His site now just endorses "all-out war" against terrorist sponsors and has a link to Peikoff's tract. He says he heard nothing more from the administration but "felt a bit intimidated" by Secor's letter. Secor says he never threatened sanctions and, by stipulating that any ill perceptions were unintended, he seems to have absolved Simpson of "acts of intolerance"--which is what Penn State's policy actually proscribes. But though misconstrued, the episode demonstrates the boomerang effect that free-speech advocates warned of when colleges instituted speech and "tolerance" codes in the heyday of the culture wars.

To rouse the academics' enthusiasm for war, "Defending Civilization" proposes that they be required to teach more American history--a reform ACTA has long advocated, along with restoring the liberal arts core, which bears little relation to the purported problem. This turns a good cause into wartime polemic and loads it with extraneous neo-Red Scare baggage. And it's already alienated at least one ally. Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, whom ACTA flaunted as a "co-founder," though he says he was only a supporter, considered resigning from its advisory council out of dismay at the report's methodology and conclusions.

Unless the number of arms is reduced dramatically, peace is unlikely to hold.

It's proven useful of late in Afghanistan, but Annan shouldn't expect miracles.

Debating Afghanistan's future.

The English edition of The Complete Poems of William Empson was reviewed by Frank Kermode in the London Review of Books under the sly headline "William Empson: a most noteworthy poet." Empson liked to append his own notes to his poems, and even as a young man, he asked when entering negotiations with a publisher, "If I publish a volume of verse with notes longer than the text, as I want to do, will that be a prose work or a verse one?" Add to the author's own notes the glosses and historicizing of the book's editor, John Haffenden, and you have a book with nearly three times the length of commentary as of text.

The book is divided into four broad sections: ninety-four pages of introduction, acknowledgments, bibliography and dating; 107 pages of poems; seven appendixes; and a further 266 pages of notes. I like very much poet Roy Campbell's view that "in the notes you meet Mr Empson himself, and that is a charming experience."

To judge by the good humor and diffidence of the notes, and the many letters and other private texts quoted here, Empson does seem to have been a charming man. (His notes on the poems are distinguished from Haffenden's by boldface type.) Where Haffenden's notes are expository and biographical, Empson's are quite enigmatic and puzzling--in his three-page note to the three-page poem "Bacchus," Empson wrote: "Columbus...once puzzled people about how to stand an egg on its end; the answer was to crack the shell. He is Humpty Dumpty the egg and a foam omelette because wisdom via drink requires breaking eggs..." and so on.

"It really ought to be possible to write simple, goodhumoured, illuminating and long notes to one's own poems without annoying the reader," Empson wrote in a posthumously published essay (probably dating from 1929, when the poet was just 23 years old). He saw his poems as a kind of puzzle, and the notes as a set of clues to solving them. In a preface to his 1940 volume, The Gathering Storm (a title he elsewhere accused Winston Churchill of stealing), he spoke of his notes as "like answers to a crossword puzzle" and presented this aspect as part of the pleasure of his poetry. He seems, in fact, to have thought it would have been impertinent to offer the poems without these clues, and so the notes were, to him, inseparable from the poems. He put this point playfully in 1927, in the draft of an unfinished libretto quoted in Haffenden's note to "Two songs from a libretto." The characters are a young girl, May, and her two aunts, and the sequence begins by referring to T.S. Eliot's quotation from philosopher F.H. Bradley in his notes to The Waste Land:

[May:] What did Professor Bradley say whom T.S. Eliot quotes?
[Aunt 1:] Surely but only in the notes.
[Aunt 2:] Why, should I have read all the notes?
[May:] His notes are part of what he quotes

The best of Empson's poems are the slighter of his works, expressing vulnerability, bewilderment or wonder. These often are poems of beautiful poise and tenderness; the two short stanzas of "The Extasie" are a good example:

Walking together in the muddy lane
The shallow pauses in her conversation
Were deep, like puddles, as the blue sky;
So thin a film separated our firmaments.

We who are strong stand on our own feet.
You misunderstand me. We stand on the reflections of our feet.
Unsupported, we do not know whether to fall upwards or downwards,
Nor when the water will come through our shoes.

The poem effects a kind of reversal, its simple language and limpid imagery twisting around something unsaid, around a current of confusion that is not named but is felt in its discomforted air. The knotted first image reveals this--"deep, like puddles, as the blue sky"--the contradictions here, the running together of shallowness and immensity, are the first hint at the uncertainty and confusion that lie beneath the thin film of the poem's composure.

"Camping Out" is another good example, and to my mind the best of Empson's poems. He managed here to draw a Metaphysical poem from an everyday act: "And now she cleans her teeth into the lake," it begins, and then the poem reads in the splatters of toothpaste on the water's surface "a straddled sky of stars," concluding: "Who moves so among stars their frame unties;/See where they blur, and die, and are outsoared." The central image is similar to that of the poem just quoted--but where "The Extasie" speaks of the real sky mirrored in a puddle, here the image is inverted so the sky is replaced, indeed is created, by the spreading pattern of white toothpaste floating on the lake.

Was Empson an important poet? He was certainly an important writer, and his critical works--most famously, his Seven Types of Ambiguity--will always be worth reading. Like his criticism, his poems are very much of their time--they are a necessary instruction in the aesthetic values of high Modernism, and they make the most sense when considered amid the work of his contemporaries, including Eliot. Empson consistently derided and dismissed his own poetry, and he eventually stopped writing it, arguing that "if I'd gone on it would have got appallingly boring. It's only because I stopped in time that you still think it's poetry." Introducing the epigrammatic "Let it go" on a recording of his poems, he simply said: "'Let it go' is about stopping writing poetry."

It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
   The more things happen to you the more you can't
      Tell or remember even what they were.

The contradictions cover such a range.
   The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
      You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there.

If this is simply about his decision to write no more poems, we must understand that the dangers of "madhouse and the whole thing there" lie in the direction of poetry, and that more poems would have led to things going "so far aslant." But you never know with Empson; you're never sure whose voice speaks, or what it portends, or whether this is just a well-considered move within the construct of the poem. Discussing Empson's annotations, Haffenden avers, "Though tricky, his poems were not intended to be tricksy." This is generous, but occasionally untrue. In his signature modesty, Empson spoke of his own verse as "clotted," and he confessed, in a letter to Eliot, his "air of having to be clever all the time." Before a reading of the poem "Bacchus," Empson used the very word Haffenden denies, describing the poem as "slightly tiresome to listen to, really, because it is so tricksy." This was always a tendency of the poetry, and if one does not adopt the view of poetry-as-puzzle, his work can be frustratingly obscure, and sometimes raises the question of whether it is worth the considerable effort and concentration it demands.

English poet and critic Craig Raine has argued that Empson's verse suffers from what he calls "the undistributed middle"--beginnings and conclusions are presented without adequate connection, and so "the reader doesn't get it." And then the poems can often seem inconsequential. Yet poets as various as Geoffrey Hill and John Fuller and John Berryman have spoken up for Empson's verse. Berryman noted in the margins of his copy of the 1949 issue of Empson's Collected Poems, "a poetry matter-of-fact, alert, spare; & yet elegant." All of these terms apply, and I would emphasize, too, that Empson was, for all his complications and complexity, a poet of tremendous feeling.

In a 1963 interview reprinted as the second appendix to this volume of the Complete Poems, William Empson spoke of his interlocutor's "beautiful sympathy," and the phrase fittingly describes the careful and affectionate tone of Haffenden's introductory essay and copious notes to Empson's work. Haffenden has done an excellent job of unraveling the poems and situating them within their literary and personal contexts.

I'm left with an odd tension over Empson's ultimate significance, and yet am wholeheartedly convinced of the value and achievement of what Haffenden has done in preparing and presenting Empson's work. This is both a collected and a variorum edition, and the editor's devotion to Empson (this is the sixth book of the poet's writing that he has edited), his thorough knowledge of his subject and his careful unraveling of allusion and reference are of great value. The book will not reinvent Empson's verse or make its difficulties much easier, but Haffenden's dedication and "beautiful sympathy" have created an affable and engaging context for it. Despite the poetry sometimes being frustrating, and even though the hundreds of pages of notes occasionally distract from the poems themselves, The Complete Poems of William Empson is an extraordinary book.

In speeches delivered to the State of the World Forum in September 2000, Mikhail Gorbachev blamed the United States for squandering unique post-cold war opportunities to bring "new thinking" (novoe myshlenie) to the problems of globalization, arms reduction and nuclear disarmament. He's entitled. For, paradoxically, it was Gorbachev--the product of an ostensibly moribund, so-called totalitarian regime--whose idealism and dynamism went farthest in demilitarizing the cold war, assuring its peaceful resolution and ushering in those very opportunities.

Nevertheless, Gorbachev erred when he blamed the United States. In fact, it appears that the United States "won" the cold war (this month marks the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union) without ever recognizing, let alone understanding, the indispensable role played by Soviet ideas. Thus, a corresponding paradox: Vibrant, dynamic, democratic America had no new thinking to squander.

Such conceptual disarmament can be traced to the US political leadership's cold war embrace of the concept of totalitarianism to explain Soviet behavior, and to the post-cold war support it found in the work of the "totalitarian school" thinkers. Apparently it mattered little to them that Richard Pipes and Martin Malia, two of the school's most prominent members, could not even agree on the origins of Soviet totalitarianism: Pipes indicted virtually all of Russia's history by finding fully developed totalitarianism to be the legacy of "patrimonial" rule under the czars, with the addition of Lenin's militarized lust for dominance. Malia simply blamed socialist ideology.

Having learned from Merle Fainsod that "the totalitarian regime does not shed its police-state characteristics; it dies when power is wrenched from its hands," both historians denied the very possibility of systemic change from within and, consequently, credited pressure from the West, best symbolized by the Star Wars program of the Reagan Administration, for precipitating the collapse of Soviet Communism.

If a flawed idée fixe like this could capture such erudite Russia scholars, imagine the blank spots that impoverished the thinking of lesser "totalitarian school" Sovietologists, especially those primarily concerned with national security problems. Suffice it to say that these scholars' intense search for the slightest improvements in Soviet weaponry obscured much bigger developments: the mellowing Soviet leadership identified by George Kennan, the "friends and foes of change" detected by Stephen F. Cohen and the potential implicit in generational change in the Soviet leadership suggested by Jerry Hough and Archie Brown. Imagine how much worse were the unschooled cold war politicians of both major political parties, who further militarized and coarsened the worst of cold war scholarship--which continues to this day, in some cases.

Serious and comprehensive early post-cold war scholarship by Raymond Garthoff and Archie Brown properly credited Gorbachev. Garthoff concluded that, "in bringing the cold war to an end...what happened would not have happened without him; that cannot be said of anyone else." Brown, in addition to proclaiming Gorbachev "the individual who made the most profound impact on world history in the second half of the twentieth century," explicitly rebutted the totalitarian argument by concluding: "From the spring of 1989 [thus, well before its collapse] it is scarcely meaningful to describe the Soviet Union as a Communist system."

The publication of Gorbachev's memoirs should have deflated the Star Wars claims made by Pipes, Malia and others. Rather than compelling the Soviet leaders to undertake the reforms that precipitated the regime's collapse, as they claimed, Star Wars was actually trumped by a comparatively cheap asymmetrical response--the Soviets' development in the mid-1980s (and deployment in the late 1990s) of the Topol-M ICBM. It remains capable today of penetrating any foreseeable missile defense system the United States might deploy. Gorbachev advised Reagan about his countermeasure in late 1985, but neither Reagan nor the totalitarian school paid much attention.

In 1999 Matthew Evangelista, in Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War, dealt another blow to the totalitarian interpretation when he demonstrated the emergence, early in the post-Stalin period, of influential, dissenting Soviet "policy entrepreneurs" whose sources of information were often Western colleagues in transnational organizations. Evangelista's evidence thus demonstrated that Gorbachev's "new thinking" had deeper intellectual roots than is commonly assumed. Now Robert English confirms in his impressively researched new book, Russia and the Idea of the West, that the sources of Gorbachev's novoe myshlenie date back to the early post-Stalin period, when liberal, "Western" thinking began its slow but steady proliferation.

Before turning to those sources, however, English explains the origins and nature of Soviet "old thinking" from which it departed. Beginning with Peter the Great's compulsory Westernization of the Russian nobility, English examines the impact of Western influence in such events as the Decembrist revolt and Great Reforms of Alexander II, during the early and mid-nineteenth centuries, until he reaches the pinnacle of such influence in Russia's intellectual history, at century's end. Western inroads then, of course, brought Marxism, which appealed to many Russian intellectuals who sought absolute answers to life's fundamental questions. (English claims that an "Asiatic" disposition distinguished the Bolsheviks from other Marxists; a dubious assertion, but it scarcely detracts from his most critical conclusions.)

World War I precipitated the Russian Revolution and eventual seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, which in turn virtually guaranteed civil war and foreign intervention. In the wake of that extremely brutal civil war, the ranks of the Bolshevik Party swelled with half-worker, half-peasant "sovietized workers" who were "ill-educated, xenophobic and militant." They viewed the civil war as a heroic struggle against Western invaders and preferred the war's harsh, ad hoc system of requisition and supply (dubbed "War Communism") to the subsequent, if temporary, compromise with capitalism--the New Economic Policy.

Purges of Westernized, non-Marxist scholars and intellectuals only increased their influence, leading English to the critical conclusion that "their 'puerile' views of socialism, 'warfare' ethos, and crude anti-Westernism changed the Bolshevik Party radically."

Stalin exploited these beliefs by manufacturing the War Scare of 1927, decrying "hostile capitalist encirclement," exposing the "wrecking" by domestic and foreign subversives, substituting relentless propaganda for outside sources of information, rooting out ideological nonconformity and orchestrating the great purge trials of the late 1930s. Such measures not only secured Stalin's undisputed political power but also embedded what English labels "hostile isolationism" into Soviet life. Such was the "old thinking," which was not surmounted until Gorbachev came to power.

English correctly identifies the thaw era following Stalin's death in 1953 as "a critical turning point in Soviet history." Highlighted by Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech" at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, which denounced Stalin's crimes, it "led to freedom and rehabilitation for millions, economic changes to benefit society instead of the militarized state, a cultural rebirth, and considerable truth-telling about Soviet history, politics, and the world."

Less noticed was Anastas Mikoyan's speech at the Twentieth Congress, which led to the creation of new research centers that became "oases of creative thought." A special oasis, however, was the journal Problemy Mira i Sotsializma (Problems of Peace and Socialism), based in Prague. In the early 1960s, its staff variously included talented young liberals, including Georgy Arbatov, Anatoly Chernyaev and Georgy Shakhnazarov, who were to play an important part in articulating and implementing Gorbachev's reforms two decades later.

The creation of new Central Committee consultant groups provided a pipeline for the "Praguers" and other liberal thinkers to move into the party apparatus, thereby enabling a critical mass to develop within the broader rebirth of the Russian intelligentsia. From that time forward, it challenged the legions of "proletarian intelligentsia" molded by Stalin.

According to English, on the literary front, it was not only questions raised about the Stalinist system by Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Vladimir Dudintsev's Not By Bread Alone but the work of the literary avant-garde of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina and Vasily Aksenov, who increasingly brought a Western orientation to their work.

In philosophy, for example, a "revolt of the young" questioned limitations in the thought of both Lenin and Marx. In history, Mikhail Gefter was calling for a "'perestroika' of Soviet historiography" and subsequently established a section on methodology at the Institute of History. His seminars, which attracted scholars from many fields, were devoted to reconsidering "fundamental issues of the world-historical process." In economics, we have the word of Otto Latsis, who recalled "that by the early 1960s 'the urgent necessity of market reforms [was agreed on by] all serious economists.'" New and influential institutions like the Novosibirsk Institute of Economics and Industrial Organization and the Central Economic-Mathematical Institute were established in the early 1960s. Both became centers for liberal and reformist research.

Finally, English addresses the evolving views of the mezhdunarodniki, the scholars, analysts, journalists and practitioners particularly concerned with foreign affairs. Compelled to re-evaluate foreign policy as a consequence of Khrushchev's substitution of "peaceful coexistence" for Stalin's "inevitability of war," reformist impulses were abetted by the need to obtain accurate information about the West, especially the United States, in order to successfully manage arms control negotiations.

Borrowing from the work of Evangelista, English also notes how leading Soviet scientists utilized information provided by their Western colleagues to rethink "international confrontation, especially when the Soviet leadership entered serious arms talks."

After Khrushchev's forced retirement in 1964, a mild retreat toward Stalinism was followed by more forceful repression after Soviet tanks crushed the "Prague Spring" in 1968. Yet a Brezhnev "thaw" accompanied the SALT and ABM treaties, the Helsinki Accords and the joint Apollo-Soyuz space flight under détente, resulting in expanded Soviet-Western contacts.

English describes much of the liberal intellectual activity during Brezhnev's rule as one of "public conformism, private reformism." Privately, the intelligentsia pursued a "much more serious study of the outside world...that went well beyond that of the thaw era." Inspired by Andrei Sakharov's 1968 samizdat work Reflections on Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, they came to embrace "universal human" values and repudiate their class-based worldview--years before détente flourished and more than a decade before Gorbachev made it the foundation of his new thinking.

But implementation required not only Gorbachev's selection as Soviet leader--by no means a sure thing during the period 1980-84, when the new thinkers, armed only with the power of their ideas, waged an uphill battle against the entrenched power of the conservatives, who were aided by the arms buildup and bellicosity of the Reagan Administration. According to English, implementation also required Gorbachev's deeper immersion into such thinking before the Soviet Union could finally escape Stalin's "hostile isolationism" to undercut America's militarized Soviet policy.

Anatoly Chernyaev's diary-memoir, My Six Years With Gorbachev, provides invaluable evidence of that very immersion. Chernyaev served as Gorbachev's top foreign policy aide from February 1986 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. His account of those years pulls no punches.

The reduction of cold war tensions was considered an indispensable condition for undertaking urgent domestic restructuring, or perestroika. By 1986, according to Chernyaev, Gorbachev had "decided to end the arms race no matter what." Consequently, he aimed his January 15 proposal for a nuclear-free world by the year 2000 directly at Reagan's professed desire to render all nuclear weapons "obsolete."

Gorbachev subsequently introduced his new thinking, including "reasonable sufficiency" in military expenditures and "mutual security," based upon universal human values rather than class conflict, to the participants at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress. Chernyaev, however, had his doubts: "As for guiding reform and guaranteeing its success, this role is still reserved for the Communist Party.... It never occurred to him that changes might bog down because of the system itself, even if people became more active."

Nevertheless, when Gorbachev met President Reagan at Reykjavik in October of 1986, the Soviet delegation was prepared to "sweep Reagan off his feet" by appealing to his antinuclear sentiments. Sure enough, an ill-prepared and overwhelmed Reagan ultimately suggested the elimination of all nuclear weapons--which Gorbachev eagerly embraced. Only a disagreement over Star Wars and the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty prevented two antinuclear radicals from formalizing an agreement to eliminate the very weapons that, in many Western minds, deterred a Soviet invasion of Europe. Margaret Thatcher likened Reykjavik to "an earthquake." Senator Sam Nunn observed that, had the negotiations not broken down over Star Wars, "it would have been the most painfully embarrassing example of American ineptitude in this century, certainly since World War II."

Chernyaev correctly placed some blame for Reykjavik's collapse on Gorbachev. Like Reagan, he wouldn't budge on Star Wars. Nevertheless, Reykjavik convinced Gorbachev that Reagan was a fellow nuclear radical who intuitively "felt the challenge of the times."

Gorbachev and Reagan brought starkly different approaches to Reykjavik, though. As Chernyaev's pre-Reykjavik Politburo notes clearly demonstrate, the concept of "mutual security" guided Gorbachev's plans: "We are by no means talking about weakening our security. But at the same time we have to realize that if our proposals imply weakening U.S. security, then there won't be any agreement." For contrast, note the questions that an exasperated US representative, Max Kampelman, asked a fellow member of the Reagan team: "Then why do we do this? Why propose something he'd [Gorbachev] never accept, something even we might not want?" The approaches demonstrate why Gorbachev was so instrumental in bringing the cold war to a peaceful conclusion, and why the United States still embraces the state-centered "realism" and unilateralism that guarantees an adversarial relationship, fifteen years later.

Although this watershed event opened the floodgates for subsequent foreign policy successes, it had little effect at home. Chernyaev still doubted Gorbachev's willingness to undertake economic reforms that would "change the system's essentials." He observed too much talk and too little action. Worse still, the actions taken were disastrous; an anti-alcohol campaign that cost him much popular goodwill and "predetermined much in the tragic course of perestroika," and a law on enterprises in 1987 that "was probably the first step toward the economy's collapse."

Nevertheless, by the middle of 1986, Gorbachev had "begun referring to the ills of 'the system,'" prompting him, at the January 1987 plenum of the Central Committee, to deliver a blistering critique of the party. Gorbachev used that plenum to schedule what would prove to be an extraordinary Nineteenth Party Conference during the summer of 1988.

Soon after that January 1987 plenum, Andrei Sakharov persuaded Gorbachev that Star Wars was a "Maginot line in space--expensive and vulnerable to counter-measures" that should not prevent the Soviet Union from concluding arms reduction agreements with the United States. A late-March meeting with Margaret Thatcher, to which Chernyaev devotes considerable attention, succeeded in persuading Gorbachev that Europe genuinely feared Soviet military power. Consequently, when Mathias Rust's Cessna aircraft landed in Red Square in late May, Gorbachev seized upon the ensuing scandal to replace his defense minister, the head of the air defense forces, and approximately 100 generals and colonels who opposed Gorbachev's mutual security initiatives.

Thus, by the summer of 1987, it was discontent with domestic perestroika (and not Reagan's Star Wars fantasy) that prompted Gorbachev's threat of harsh measures. For example, Chernyaev recounts one Politburo meeting where Gorbachev furiously tossed a "big stack" of letters on the table at which his colleagues were seated, before remarking: "They write many different things, but it all comes down to one and the same. What's this perestroika? How do we, ordinary people, benefit from it? We don't.... Here, in our Soviet state, big bosses enjoy every luxury and remodel their apartments at government expense. They couldn't care less about the people.... I'm warning you--this is our last conversation about such issues. If nothing changes, the next time I'll be talking to different people."

Gorbachev replaced rhetoric with action in the wake of the "Nina Andreyeva affair"--an ill-disguised but more formidable attempt by second-in-command Yegor Ligachev to bring perestroika to a halt in the spring of 1988--by compelling the participants at the Nineteenth Party Conference to schedule both the overhaul of the Central Committee apparatus and elections to a Congress of People's Deputies. Once implemented, both actions would break the party's stranglehold on political life.

Chernyaev's May 1989 diary entry vividly captures the political turmoil wrought by these changes:

All around Gorbachev has unleashed irreversible processes of "disintegration"...
the planned economy is living its last days and the 'image' of socialism is fading. Ideology doesn't exist anymore. The empire-federation is falling apart. The Party is in disarray, having lost its place as a ruling, dominating, and repressive force. Governmental authority has been shaken to the breaking point. And nothing has yet been created to take its place.

The disarray and shaken authority cost Gorbachev much of his domestic influence. Yet, according to Chernyaev, even as late as November 1990, "the disruptions and uncertainty of the domestic situation hadn't yet affected the authority of the Soviet Union as a great power." Gorbachev used it to conclude a treaty with Reagan on intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) in December 1987. In April 1988, the Soviets signed the Geneva accords for removing Soviet troops from Afghanistan. And in December, Gorbachev stunned the United Nations and the world by denouncing both the threat and use of force in international relations--moral idealism he subsequently and courageously lived up to in 1989, when faced with the revolution his actions sparked in Eastern Europe--and announcing that the Soviet Union would reduce its armed forces by 500,000 men, withdrawing many from Eastern Europe.

During that extraordinary period, America's conservatives vilified Reagan for signing the INF treaty. Later, as Frances FitzGerald has reminded us in Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, Henry Kissinger, William Safire and George Will seized upon Reagan's subsequent performance at the Moscow summit (May 1988) to accuse him of "creating a false 'euphoria' that would give a breathing space to the unchanging enemy." Finally, who can forget Will's memorable bouquet to the departing President: "Reagan has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West--actual disarmament will follow." Nevertheless, in January 1989 a nonplussed Reagan proclaimed, "The cold war is over."

And so it was--notwithstanding needless obstacles created by the first Bush Administration. For, as Chernyaev notes, "beginning in the summer of 1990...Gorbachev was paying attention only to the major areas of foreign policy and almost entirely from the point of view of their necessity for solving domestic problems." Meetings with foreign dignitaries "were increasingly of a ruminating, 'philosophical' character." Thus, during President Bush's visit to Moscow, in July 1991, Gorbachev not only suggested a new strategic paradigm to replace nuclear parity but also engaged Bush in discussions about the best approaches for advancing the interests and solving the problems of other countries. In a word, "mutual security."

The meetings with Bush marked the culmination of Gorbachev's efforts, but only because a failed putsch against him in August facilitated the countercoup by Boris Yeltsin, in December, that ended his political career. Few should dispute Chernyaev's conclusion that Gorbachev's "epoch stands out as one of the most remarkable of the centuries." Nevertheless, prior to September 11, 2001, America's post-cold war triumphalism--distorted by the totalitarian school's refusal to countenance the very possibility of meaningful change from within the USSR--prevented the cold war "victor" from embracing Gorbachev's revolutionary lead.

But triumphalism collapsed momentarily with the World Trade Center, thereby creating yet another opportunity for new thinking. And who, better than Gorbachev, to both suggest and remind us? "It is now the responsibility of the world community to transform the coalition against terrorism into a coalition for a peaceful world order. Let us not, as we did in the 1990s, miss the chance to build such an order," he wrote recently.

With the smoke still rising from the fallen twin towers of the World Trade Center, it seemed like an opportune time to throw some faggots on the fire. Or so thought Jerry Falwell, when, on Pat Robertson's 700 Club program, he proclaimed that God permitted the terrorist attacks because He was pissed off at those who have "tried to secularize America"-- civil libertarians, abortionists, pagans and, his favorite bêtes noires, gays and lesbians.

Falwell's demagoguery, though disgusting, was predictable. But then something surprising happened. The rabid reverend was immediately engulfed by a tidal wave of denunciation, from virtually every segment of society outside the insular world of American fundamentalism. Not only mainstream and liberal voices weighed in; even fellow conservative Rush Limbaugh and the National Review and Weekly Standard added their reproaches.

Falwell wasn't the only right-winger to use the WTC catastrophe to bash gays. Groups like the Traditional Values Coalition and The Family Research Council have deplored as "antifamily" efforts to provide benefits to gay partners of people killed in the towers on September 11. The Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition commented that "this is just another example of how the gay agenda is seeking to overturn the one man, one woman relationship from center stage in America." But their meanspiritedness was rejected by public officials such as New York Senators Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer and the state's Republican governor, George Pataki, all of whom have supported such assistance.

You could say that the distaste for Falwell's rant was one sign of a post-September 11 truce--at least momentarily--in the culture wars that had raged until the Islamist faith-based initiative brought us all together in one big patriotic group hug. I prefer to think that three decades of struggle since the Stonewall uprising have given gays and lesbians social visibility and, to a lesser degree, political clout, such that brazen appeals to bigotry don't go down as smoothly as they used to.

The homophobic rhetoric from America's Taliban and the general repudiation of same make a neat metaphor for the current status of gays and lesbians, and they illustrate one of the key arguments of Suzanna Danuta Walters in All the Rage. So many years after Stonewall, homophobes still attack homosexuals, often scapegoating them for the purported decadence of society. But the greater public profile of gay people has changed in the interim, along with the context in which such attacks are made. Not so long ago, few outside the gay community or liberal activist circles would have denounced Falwell, and certainly not his comrades on the right.

Walters, a sociologist and member of the Research Advisory Board of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), sees both opportunities and dangers in the new, heightened visibility of gay people. "Visibility is, of course, necessary for equality. It is part of the trajectory of any movement for inclusion and social change.... There is nothing worse than to live in a society in which the traces of your own existence have been erased or squeezed into a narrow and humiliating set of stereotypes." But, she cautions, "visibility does not erase stereotypes nor guarantee liberation."

Walters asks, "If the problem once was perceived as invisibility itself, then how is the problem defined in an era of increased visibility? If the closet was the defining metaphor for gay life in earlier eras, then what do we make of the swinging door that is gay life in the nineties and beyond?"

Today's is a best of times/worst of times situation: "Never have we had so many openly gay elected officials, or so many antigay initiatives." Pop culture may be replete with images of gay life, but hate crimes are increasing, discharges of gays and lesbians from the military have risen precipitately since Don't Ask, Don't Tell was enacted and state legislatures all over the country are rushing to pass laws banning same-sex marriage.

Walters's argument is similar to that advanced by cultural critic Michael Bronski, who, in his excellent 1998 book, The Pleasure Principle, described a tension between "heterosexual fear of homosexuality (and the pleasure it represents) and the equally strong envy of and desire to enjoy that freedom and pleasure." In Bronski's analysis, heterosexuals try to mitigate their own conflicts over their desire for freedom and pleasure versus their longing for an ordered world built on "traditional values" by refusing to grant homosexuals full citizenship, basic civil liberties or minimal respect for their person and sexual integrity. Says Walters: "The paradoxes we are witnessing now (the simultaneous embrace and rejection) are reflections, if you will, of a culture terrified of the potential disruption that full inclusion and integration would provoke."

Although some commentators have described a paradoxical situation in which gay cultural progress unfolds in a retrogressive political environment, Walters claims that both politics and culture abound in contradictions. "The cultural moment is not wholly embracing, nor the political moment wholly rejecting: both realms coexist and interact in an uneasy mix of opportunity and opposition, inclusion and exclusion."

Walters, attentive to confusing contradictions and to the possibilities for progressive change they present, offers a dialectical reading of the current situation. Cultural visibility, she notes, can be "synonymous with commercial exploitation." But sometimes it "can really push the envelope, bringing complicated and substantive gay identities into public view," with the effect that intolerance, if not eradicated, is at least undermined. She sets out to identify "these disparate moves of visibility so we are better able to understand which forms...are the ones that shake up the world and which ones just shake us down."

Walters focuses her pop culture criticism on the "Gay Nineties," a decade in which depictions of homosexuality flourished on television and in the movies, theater, pop music and advertising. She emphasizes the tube because it "has become our national cultural meeting place, a site of profound social meaning and effect," and because the "story of gays on TV is a more complicated, fractured, and ultimately interesting one than its filmic counterpart."

Perhaps it's just as well that Walters develops this TV-centric approach, for her film criticism tends toward the obvious. Hollywood produces compromised representations that offer a safe, liberal view of gay life, in which homosexuals (usually white males) are either just like straight people or are colorful but harmless eccentrics. In these films--Philadelphia, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything!, Julie Newmar, In & Out and numerous others--homophobia is easily overcome because it is, after all, just a matter of mistaken attitudes, not a deeply entrenched social prejudice. Independent and foreign films, not under the same commercial constraints of having to reach the largest possible audience, are more realistic and challenging. The late Vito Russo made the same observation two decades ago in his landmark The Celluloid Closet.

Walters notes that it was not until the 1970s that "any substantive depiction of gays occurred on entertainment, 'fiction' TV...." The subsequent decade saw some timid efforts, mostly "one-shots," in which a sitcom or drama presented a discrete gay episode. The 1980s, however, began to open the doors for what became, in her view, "the boom in gay representations of the nineties."

Sometimes Walters's TV criticism leaves the impression that it's propaganda she really wants. She scolds The West Wing for an episode in which a gay Republican rationalizes his support for an antigay bill by claiming that the GOP's agenda is more important to him than sexual politics. But gay Republicans really do say such things! Presenting a member of this strange species accurately doesn't legitimize his views, which is what Walters charges. And given the thoroughgoing liberalism of The West Wing, it's evident (though not to Walters) that the show doesn't endorse those views, either.

But she can also be right on target. The most successful gay-themed show, NBC's Will & Grace, is "a puzzle. Dabbling in double standards [Grace gets to have a sex life; Will doesn't] yet indubitably gay. Apolitical yet surreptitiously aware. Familial yet hedonistic. Gay male centered yet with two of the strongest female characters on TV. Devoid of larger community yet assuredly not tokenized."

She singles out for particular scrutiny--and commendation--the 1994 "lesbian kiss" episode of Roseanne and the very funny and subversive episode of The Simpsons directed by gay filmmaker John Waters. Both are notable because they "are not out to make homosexuality accessible and assimilable, they are not designed to make heterosexuals feel less threatened and to make gays feel more 'accepted.'" Both shows "deal hilariously with the strange mix of fear and fascination, desire and disgust that marks heterosexual engagement with the vision of the homosexual." "The gay characters are not the problems to be solved here, nor is homophobia the vaguely vile emotions of outside agitators. Heterosexual leads are here the problems: it is their discomfort, homophobia, bigotry that must be confronted."

Walters sees this more radical approach as both the strength of the canceled sitcom Ellen and its undoing. Ellen DeGeneres's character, Ellen Morgan, "was not solely seen and understood through the eyes of heterosexuals eager to counter their own fears. The series implicated Ellen in a larger world of gay people, with other gay characters, lovers, gay spaces, and even gay in-jokes. In other words, the series decentered heterosexuality and centered homosexuality, now no longer satisfied with being the object of heterosexual curiosity."

Walters is adamant that ABC canceled the show because it was "too gay." Ellen DeGeneres was "an acceptable homo when she promised tearfully (in interview after interview) that she just wanted to be the girl next door, and that the series would never foreground her gayness, quite to the contrary she repeatedly stated. But the show did become a gay sitcom and that was clearly unacceptable." Walters says although homophobia was the culprit, it was a "quite specific form" of bias. DeGeneres's show "was not cancelled simply because she depicted homosexuality, but because she refused to be then re-closeted, to relegate her gayness to the 'been there, done that' realm." (Walters's book was completed before DeGeneres's recovery at CBS in The Ellen Show, which has her playing a small-town dyke. The network has so far been a big booster, ordering additional episodes and changing her time slot to put the series in the vicinity of the megahit Everybody Loves Raymond.)

Walters detects a new kind of liberal homophobia underlying ostensibly sympathetic programs. A 1993 NBC documentary hosted by Maria Shriver "constructs a very particular narrative" about gays and AIDS in which gay men, under the threat of disease and death, abandoned their wanton, reckless behavior to become sober citizens. "The implication here is not that gay people rallied around each other to deal with AIDS, but rather that gays themselves needed saving as gays, and that it was the disease that made us 'clean up our act.'" Other well-meaning journalistic attempts include a Bill Moyers documentary that exemplified the mainstream media tendency to distinguish good gays--in committed relationships, churchgoing, wanting to parent, craving acceptance--from bad queers who wear leather, have sex with more than one person and otherwise don't want to be normalized or assimilated. Noting that both the Shriver and Moyers shows presented gay and lesbian couples doing wholesome domestic things, Walters exasperatedly wonders, "How many scenes of cooking and gardening do we need to see to prove the point that gays are human too?" Such depictions, she aptly notes, represent "a failure of imagination...where equality can only be posited as sameness."

It is refreshing, Walters observes, to see gay characters as "decent, loving human beings who are not homicidal serial killers, suicidal losers, or angst-ridden closet cases." Yet she contends that the introduction of the "good gay" often depends on a desexualization and loss of community. Heterosexual characters, after all, "can be valorous, brave, noble, without being stripped of passion and desire." In other words, "the emergence of the new good gay reveals to us both how far we have come...and how steadfastly double standards still prevail."

But breaking down sexual double standards doesn't necessarily result in verisimilitude. Turning to the Showtime cable series Queer as Folk, Walters recognizes "the breakthrough quality of its depiction of sexuality" while indicting the show for "substitut[ing] sexuality for community" and for implying "that gay sexual expression means an absolute erasure of everything else," including work and friendship. Moreover, as she astutely observes, the "Queer" sex doesn't even seem all that pleasurable.

Walters's attenuated discussion of cable TV, limited to Queer as Folk and the woman-centric If These Walls Could Talk films on HBO, overlooks the most in-your-face depiction of homosexuality on the small screen--the prison melodrama Oz, also on HBO. In the pressure-cooker, hyperviolent world of the Oswald maximum-security prison, virtually all inmates except Muslims engage in gay sex--some because women aren't available, or to exert power over other men, or because they discover, to their surprise, that they like the sex. Some inmates, including previously straight men, even fall in love with each other. OK, so they're mostly convicted killers. But this show at its best leaps right into Genet territory, with powerful images of passion and betrayal. (Not to mention that it features the most male nudity you're likely to encounter outside of a porn film or an off-Broadway show.) I'd rather spend time with the anguished, violent, complex same-sexers of Oz than with boring über-guppie Will Truman and his buddy, the shrill stereotype "Just Jack."

The latter chapters of All the Rage largely leave pop-culture criticism behind to focus on the social and political realities that media images often distort. Walters wades into the controversies over gay marriage and parenting, saying that these issues "will, I am convinced, be the last holdout in the battle for gay and lesbian rights." As a leftist, she unsurprisingly urges gays and lesbians not to mimic heterosexual patterns, instead endorsing "a utopian construction of 'families of choice' that is not bound by definitions of blood, of law, of sex, of gender." In other words, she wants homosexuals not only to challenge "traditional values" but also to replace them with more fluid and creative constructs. Walters makes a persuasive argument, but it's also a familiar and predictable one.

More interesting are her observations about one of the most notable aspects of the new visibility--the constitution of gays and lesbians as a "niche market" catered to by both straight and gay commercial interests. Walters acknowledges that gays and lesbians "can no more be outside the commodity machine than any other group: to turn difference into an object of barter is perhaps the quintessentially American experience." If all social movements and subcultures eventually become commodified, then the fundamental question facing gays and lesbians isn't assimilation into "mainstream" heterosexual, capitalist society versus subcultural identity and resistance. Such formulations, argues Walters, fail to capture the complexity of the moment, in which assimilationist and radical impulses both clash and coexist. Yes, "the rainbow world is a food court and shopping mall"; but it is also "filled with righteous young queers, whose insistence on the absolute right to visibility has spawned a tidal wave of teen trouble for heterosexual business-as-usual."

Walters views the story of gay visibility as one of "simultaneous containment and display, progress and regress, shattering of old ways and their reassertion." Refusing prognostication, she says we can't see how the still unfolding narrative will play out. "The space beyond visibility may be filled with commodified queens and buttoned-down wannabes, but it is also filled with possibilities unimaginable in previous eras. As the gaying of American culture continues on its uneven path, heterosexuals will--I am convinced--come to know themselves differently, to see their sexuality in less finite and tandem ways, opening up their sense of family, of place, of intimacy." This is essentially the same point historian John D'Emilio made in his 1983 book Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: "As the life cycle of heterosexuals exhibits greater variety and less predictability, they have come to face many of the choices and experiences that gay men and women confront."

But in the almost twenty years since D'Emilio's book was published, antigay sentiment has not only endured but, as Michael Bronski has argued, in some ways seems even more entrenched. (One of the consequences of being visible is that it makes it easier to be stigmatized.) So what will it take to move beyond this contradictory and confusing moment and achieve what Walters wants--"a kind of conscious, conscientious integration, where lesbians and gays are full citizens in a society that is fundamentally altered by their inclusion"? She doesn't say, exactly. But it's hard to argue with her insistence that a critical consciousness of both the pitfalls and possibilities presented by today's increased visibility is essential to advancing the gay agenda in the new millennium.

It's too early to tell what the long-range effects will be on the American economy of September's disastrous events--certainly the short-term effects have not been salutary. And the recession we had been fearing is now officially declared. We can be sure that the cost to book publishing will be great.

If it were simply part of the decline of sales within the overall entertainment industry, there would be less cause for concern. But at a time when the country badly needs more information, new ideas and countercyclical analyses of American foreign policy, the chances that these will be published have diminished considerably. The recession will bring increasing profit pressures on the conglomerates. The natural reaction to this, as we know from the past, will be to cut back on "smaller" books, the ones that have little chance of selling in any large number, precisely the books we will be needing at this critical juncture in our history.

In the year since The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read appeared, the trends I tried to analyze have continued unabated. In country after country, the few remaining independent publishers have decreased still further in number and the large international conglomerates have taken over an ever-increasing share of publishing. In Britain, where there were only four important independents, one of the most promising, Fourth Estate, was bought by HarperCollins, part of the Murdoch empire. One of the first decisions taken after the merger was to cancel the contract for a biography of Murdoch, which the publishers realized would be critical of its subject. The impact of Fourth Estate's sale negatively affected other independent publishers. A number of the smaller British firms, like Granta, Profile and Verso [whose managing director, Colin Robinson, recently joined The New Press--Ed.], relied on Fourth Estate's excellent sales force to represent their books to the bookstores. Once the merger had taken place, this was no longer possible, and these smaller firms had to find new ways of selling their wares. This task became even more difficult with the announcement that Britain's largest bookstore chain, Waterstone's, would demand much higher discounts from smaller firms, a decision that threatened economic ruin for many of them. Appeals to the appropriate authorities in Britain went unheeded. Interestingly, a similar development has occurred in the US record business, where the giant Tower chain has decided to cut back drastically on its stock of the smaller, classical-music labels.

In France the long-established nineteenth-century firm of Flammarion, the doyenne of French independent publishers, was bought by Rizzoli, the Italian publishing firm partially controlled by the Fiat Corporation, just as last year's Frankfurt Book Fair opened its doors. I have yet to find a French or Italian publisher who can explain the editorial rationale for such a merger. But clearly the urge to diversify internationally, to become a player on the European scene and in general simply to grow by acquisition is enough to justify mergers that may seem difficult to understand otherwise.

In the United States the merger between Time Warner and AOL had surprisingly swift consequences. The New York Times reported the departure of Little, Brown'spublisher shortly after the merger was announced--Little, Brown's list was apparently not sufficiently commercial for the new owners. More ominous, the new merged entity announced that it would transform the nature of CNN, the country's only remaining international news outlet. Four hundred people were fired immediately amid reports that CNN would place less emphasis on news and more on entertainment--and presumably more on profit. Having safely navigated the shoals of antitrust scrutiny, the new AOL Time Warner was clearly intent on being even more profitable than its components. CNN's recent return to massive news coverage shows how unreliable corporate planning can be.

The list of independent US publishers was reduced when Vivendi, the French water and book company, which already controlled a third of French publishers, bought Houghton Mifflin, the largest of the remaining US independents. Few could understand why close to $2 billion was spent to acquire a company whose educational publishing barely fitted with Vivendi's general program. A group headed by Reed likewise bought Harcourt General in July. This time Reed's educational and reference focus caused concern for the safety of Harcourt's small but prestigious general list.

It's safe to assume that more such mergers will take place. The only question is whether the economic downturn that marked the first half of 2001 and has now entrenched itself will slow down the trend toward ever-larger conglomerates or whether, on the contrary, the increasing economic pressures will force even further amalgamations and greater cutbacks. Indeed, these foreign conglomerates may well wonder why they bought these excellent trade houses to begin with. They represent but a small part of both Houghton and Harcourt, and could well be dumped in hard times.

Everywhere, publishers and booksellers have debated the issues raised by the mergers and have sought differing and new solutions. In Italy, for instance, a series of debates in bookstores across the country led to the introduction of a bill in the Italian Senate seeking to protect the independents. These were defined as bookstores in which the majority of sales come from the publishers' backlists. In other countries, the debate on possible discounting and the future of the fixed price of books continues to be hotly disputed.

In some places, such as Spain, critics have disagreed with my suggestions of increased government aid. When this has happened, these critics argue, the result has been nepotism and corruption, as in their film industries. But each nation has to find its own appropriate solution. Certainly just about everyone could do with better funding for schools and public libraries (as has happened in Norway), which alone would suffice to give back to publishing some of the economic underpinning from which it has benefited for many decades.

There has been widespread discussion as to whether the problems are as severe as I suggest. Critics and independent publishers have tended to agree with the analysis I put forward. In several countries, those working for the large conglomerates concurred in general but argued that it has not affected the firms for which they work. The nature of the changes that I discuss varies from country to country, of course. In France and Germany the large houses are still publishing a far wider selection of intellectual titles than in neighboring countries, but even there, available choices have been narrowed. In the United States and Britain, there is little doubt in my mind, after looking carefully at the publishers' catalogues over the past decades, that the changes are very considerable and perhaps permanent.

The area in which critics have differed most markedly with my conclusions is in the field of new technology. There are many who feel that electronic publishing will solve many of the problems I describe; but it is evident that the underlying problem of how to get people to pay for materials that appear on the web has yet to be solved. Random House recently canceled its e-book publishing, AOL-Time Warner has laid off almost its entire e-publishing staff and everyone has given up on CD-ROMs as the wave of the future. Even Stephen King's experiments at getting readers to pay for his books in the Dickensian manner of purchasing each chapter separately did not last. King abandoned this attempt when the number of purchases diminished markedly, even though the quantity of would-be purchasers was far greater than most authors would dream of. Perhaps more telling is the fact that the widely read American literary and political magazines that appear on the web, such as Slate and Salon, have struggled to find a way to get people to pay for their service. Only time will tell whether alternatives such as issuing print versions will work, but it is clearly not a way of dealing with the problems facing books on the web.

The more optimistic partisans of the web tend to forget that the most expensive book is not the ten thousandth or even the hundredth copy but the very first. I well remember my last year at Pantheon, when two books on The New York Times Book Review's list of the ten best of the year came from our catalogue. Ian Gibson's biography of García Lorca and Donald Cameron Watt's marvelous history of the origins of World War II, How War Came, had both been commissioned twenty years before we published the books! Clearly the authors needed substantial financial support over those decades, support we were only able to provide in anticipation of sales.

Even the university presses have not yet figured out how the editorial work required in the preparation of monographs to be published online will be paid for once the initial foundation grants allowing for them run out. It is hard enough to make books pay for themselves when they are sold, copy by copy, in bookstores and by mail. The idea that authors can sit down at their computers and simply feed in their major works without outside support is not at all realistic.

We are still in the early days of the new technologies, and it is certainly possible that novel ways of dealing with these problems will be discovered. The question remains whether sufficient time, effort and money will be spent on books that are not significantly profitable in printed form and even less profitable online. These are the books that are often the most important and are the most endangered.