May 21, 2001 | The Nation

NADER INSIDE OUTSIDE

Santa Fe

In her April 30 "Subject to Debate" column, Katha Pollitt wrote, Ralph "Nader's assistant called me recently to say that he had been misquoted last summer in Outside, which had him hoping for a Bush win." Outside regrets that we were not given the opportunity to respond, since this assertion is wholly untrue. In an interview with Outside deputy editor Jay Heinrichs that ran in the August 2000 issue, Heinrichs asked Nader if someone put a gun to his head and told him to vote for either Gore or Bush, which he would choose. Nader replied, without hesitation, "Bush." Nader went on to explain, "If you want the parties to diverge from one another, have Bush win." Indeed, in a portion of Nader's reply that Outside did not publish, he said he favored a Bush win "because that would shake up the Democratic Party and make it revalue its future." Nader's words were reported accurately, and neither Nader nor his campaign contacted Outside to complain about the quotation after it was published.

HAL ESPEN
Editor, Outside

DAMNED IF YOU DO...

Santa Maria, Calif.

Right string, wrong yo-yo, Eric [Alterman, "Tweedledee, Indeed," April 9]. It's Through the Looking-Glass, all right, but that's because the Democrats are the conservative party, we have no liberal party, and the only thing that motivates the GOP is greed.

MICHAEL WARNER

Ann Arbor, Mich.

Why does Eric Alterman persist in bashing Nader for the "loss" in Florida? It is clear that Gore won nationally and in Florida! It is the Repuglicans, who stole the election, who should be the target of his ire. This blame game only distracts us from the real goal--making sure the Repugs are removed from their majority status in both houses.

JOHN CROXTON

Topanga, Calif.

Call off your Nader-hating pit bull, Eric Alterman, and his Nader-baiting puppy, Calvin Trillin. According to those two, every evil act emanating from Washington is Ralph's fault. They don't bark or even whimper at the spineless corruption of the Democratic Party and the gutless silence of Al Gore in the face of crimes committed by the shadow puppet occupying the White House. It's much easier to blame Nader than to condemn the hollow Democratic representatives and senators who are the real collaborators in crimes against the people.

MARVIN A. GLUCK

Rocky Hill, Conn.

The evidence is that the Bush II outrages to the welfare and environment of ordinary Americans listed by Eric Alterman will meet no more than token opposition from the pusillanimous (or, as some say, moribund) Democrats, who, after all, promised at inauguration time to meet George W. halfway on his reactionary agenda. If Alterman and his alter egos could redirect even a fraction of the enmity they spew at Nader and the Greens to Bush and the Republicans, there might be hope for the Democrats to turn into a second party. More likely, the Dems will continue to Whig out, and Alterman will read more and more like Westbrook Pegler. I prefer green to yellow any day.

PETE KARMAN

Mason, Mich.

I am the Green candidate Eric Alterman maligned as costing Democrat Dianne Byrum her rightful seat in Congress. It is true that my 3,000-plus votes included the 110-vote margin by which she lost. So why am I unrepentant, even as I watch the Republican right dismantle or destroy whatever modest gains progressives have achieved?

I agree with former Labor Secretary Robert Reich that it would be great to vote for Democrats if only we could find a few. Instead we're asked to elect people like Byrum, whose recent votes to allow Michigan citizens to carry concealed weapons remind me why roughly half the people in this country never bother to go to the polls at all. What's the point in electing more Democrats if only thirteen Democratic senators have the integrity to vote against the despicable new bankruptcy law?

In the sixties, I was a pragmatist and voted for Hubert Humphrey instead of the peace candidates, because I understood we had to do whatever it took to block Richard Nixon. In the intervening decades, I have continued to vote Democratic, waiting for them to pay me back by delivering on their progressive promises, like universal healthcare, but they continue to move further and further away from me.

My Green candidacy allowed me to talk to hundreds of kids in high school government classes. We explored how the corporate corruption of our politics means that both Bush and Gore ran on spending billions on Star Wars instead of investing in efforts to stop global warming before we trigger a runaway greenhouse effect that will end human life on the planet. We talked about how young people feel about inheriting the richest country on earth, where politicians always find the money to build shiny new corporate prisons while schools fall further into decay.

The issue isn't pragmatism but principle. I can no longer hold my nose and vote Democratic when given a viable progressive choice. Bush may well be Richard Nixon or worse, but Gore was an even more conservative Bill Clinton without the charm. Voting for the lesser of two evils still means voting for evil. I'd hope Nation readers would join the Greens in telling the Dems through the ballot box: Reform or we replace you.

BONNIE BUCQUEROUX

ALTERMAN REPLIES

New York City

Let me see if I understand Bonnie Bucqueroux's argument. She seems to think it's fine to participate in an election in which she and her comrades work to hand the Republicans the House, the Senate, the presidency and eventually the Supreme Court because it allowed her "to talk to hundreds of kids in high school government classes." It would be hard to parody this kind of thinking, and I won't try. With enemies like this, one hardly needs friends.

And hey, Marvin, quit calling my buddy Trillin a puppy, or he'll hunt you down and bite you on your ass. He may be a poet, but he's no sissy.

ERIC ALTERMAN

...AND DAMNED IF YOU DON'T

Milwaukee

If The Nation prints another article by that traitor to the left, Ralph Nader, I'll cancel my subscription ["Corporate Welfare Spoils," May 7].

RONALD KRITTER

Santa Barbara, Calif.

The only thing I'm interested in reading from Ralph Nader is an apology. This man owes an apology note and a dozen red roses to every liberal or progressive in America--especially the ones who voted for him believing his lies about there being no difference between a Dubya White House and one run by the man the right tagged Ozone Man.

BRETT WAGNER

Woodland Hills, Calif.

Please. Get someone with some credibility. I wouldn't believe Ralph Nader if he told me the sky is blue and Republicans are thieves.

Well, I'd believe the latter. But I'd go outside and check on the former.

DANIEL KEYS MORAN

Beverly Hills, Calif.

I just couldn't bring myself to read Nader's recent article in The Nation. Perhaps if he explained his reasoning on other subjects, I'd be willing to spend some time considering his point of view on how New York should be run...or anything else for that matter. For instance, I'd like him to explain, once again, why it wouldn't have made any difference if Gore or Bush had won the presidency. Until he enlightens us on that subject, I'll just sip some arsenic-tainted water, take a deep breath of polluted air and search for some undeveloped or undrilled wilderness area, as the Supreme Court removes more of our rights.

PATRICIA RICH

Seattle

I was a campaign manager this past election for Joe Szwaja, a Green Party candidate who got 20 percent in his bid for Congress. I supported the Nader campaign, and I appreciate Ralph's efforts to continue to bring public attention to issues of corporate welfare, as he did in his Nation piece. But why--when he's clearly capable of organizing on a broader scale, when Democrats are rolling over and playing dead in response to Bush Administration priorities--is Ralph choosing to make a public statement of such limited scope? I understand that he ran to inspire organizers around the country--on the campaign trail, he repeatedly said he was not interested in being a figurehead for a progressive movement and that calls for him to be its leader would simply divert people's attention from building their base at home. Though this stand is overly extreme, I think he was generally correct. Still: His silence on broad issues of national importance is deafening, the vacuum left by his absence from the public stage significant. Having steered clear of postelection leadership opportunities few progressives ever have, at a time when even moderate critics of corporate politics are lying low, it seems odd to see Ralph speak out only to say so little.

TREVOR GRIFFEY

THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED

Oak Park, Ill.

Jon Wiener laments the commercial colonization of the sixties ["Acid Rock: A Flashback," Feb. 26], pointing to the sale of the Beatles' "Revolution" and Dylan's sellout of "The Times They Are A-Changin'." For me, the epitome of sixties colonization came in the eighties, when a cereal company trumpeted its latest product with "Look what they've done to my oatmeal," sung to the tune of Melanie's "Look What They've Done to My Song." Reagan was President, and I thought we had nowhere to go but up. But that was before December 2000.

JAMES GEREN

SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX

South Pasadena, Calif.

In "Subject to Debate" for March 5, on The Vagina Monologues, the unsinkable Katha Pollitt asks: "Besides, if feminists don't talk about sex in a fun, accessible, inspiring, nonpuritanical way, who will?" The answer, of course, is...men. Always have, always will.

FRANCO COSSU

INVITATION TO A TERTULIA

Cuernavaca, Mexico

We wish to invite Nation readers who visit Cuernavaca to call (52.7.31.7.05.94) and be invited to join us for breakfast with our tertulia. We've had interesting people: Cedric Belfrage (deceased, but his widow, Mary, is extant); Robert Strother, former senior editor of Reader's Digest; actress Helen Hayes and others. We're only forty miles from Mexico City. The latchstring is out!

GEORGE "HOSS" FOSS

Maude Barlow's analysis of the FTAA is available in four languages on the council's website, www.canadians.org.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

When fifty of us dashed into Massachusetts Hall on April 18, we had no idea what would follow. The students, faculty members and alumni who began the sit-in at the office of Harvard's president to demand a living wage for all Harvard employees thought we could be dragged off by police or ignored by the community. Instead, we've been amazed by the outpouring of support for our standoff with the oldest university in the country--and the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere.

This sit-in embodies the conflict between Harvard as community and Harvard as corporation. On the one hand, Harvard wants to foster "genuinely free and responsible discussion" (as the president wrote in one recent statement criticizing our action). On the other, Harvard pays more than 1,000 workers poverty wages while sitting atop an endowment of almost $20 billion. Janitors, security guards and dining hall workers earn as little as $6.75 an hour and work up to ninety hours a week. Our Living Wage Campaign demands that Harvard implement a minimum $10.25 per hour wage with benefits, the same standard enacted by the Cambridge City Council. Hundreds of Harvard employees work two and even three jobs and still struggle to support their families. As a custodian said, "Look, this is not a matter of working hard--people are already working hard. I've been wearing a custodial uniform now going on twenty years. I always say the only thing we don't have is a number across our backs. They figure they own me like a piece of equipment--like a barrel or a buffing machine."

Five of the six members of the Harvard Corporation, the University's highest governing board, are out-of-state millionaires who jet in for meetings. Robert Stone, chairman of the search committee that selected Lawrence Summers as Harvard's next president, is longtime commodore of the New York Yacht Club. Herbert Winokur is a director of Enron, a destructive global energy giant and George W. Bush's biggest corporate backer. D. Ronald Daniel is the director of McKinsey & Co. (and quite a golf fan, if the portraits of rich sportsmen in his plush office here are any guide). These people have final say over everything at Harvard, from the janitors to the endowment to tenure.

For three years the administration refused any meaningful dialogue or action about a living wage. In fact, since we began the campaign, Harvard has outsourced and cut wages and benefits for hundreds more workers. Because things were getting worse and the administration refused even to talk, a sit-in became necessary. And the community's enthusiasm has been enormous. Our rallies now attract 2,000 people. Almost 400 faculty members endorsed the sit-in in a full-page ad in the Boston Globe. Five US senators and four representatives have pledged their support. Ted Kennedy, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and AFL-CIO president John Sweeney have all come to the steps of Massachusetts Hall to embrace our cause--that is, the cause of the thousands of workers, faculty, students, clergy and others who insist that Harvard change its attitude. More than a hundred camp outside the occupied building in tents each night in solidarity. To walk away from this building would be to walk away from all these supporters and from all the workers I know who receive poverty wages.

And so, as I write, we have occupied the offices of the president, provost and treasurer of Harvard for about 300 hours. We've been sleeping on their Persian rugs, sitting in their antique chairs and redecorating their walls with our posters (using university-approved poster tacks, of course). We still don't know how this will end, but we already know some of the things that have come of it. Here is what one professor wrote me: "In my ten years at Harvard, I've never seen the university like this--students, workers, faculty so united. Whatever else happens, you guys have accomplished what to me always seemed the impossible, which is to unite this campus across class and racial lines. It's amazing to me, and I'm so proud of you all."

.
MAY DAY, MAY DAY

May 1 was a warm spring day in Connecticut, but 8,000 nursing home employees braved the icy winds of the Bush-era labor climate when they walked out on strike. At issue are shamefully low staff-to-patient ratios, which rank thirty-third nationally in 200 nursing homes in the country's richest state, as well as wages and benefits. Republican Governor John Rowland has gone to extraordinary (and possibly illegal) lengths to crush the union, New England Health Care Employees District 1199, publicly calling for members, who are mostly women of color, to break ranks and stay on the job. Rowland also promised to pony up millions to pay for strikebreakers, a reprise of his response to the union's one-day walkout in March, when he authorized $4.6 million in Medicaid spending on out-of-state replacement workers. Because Medicaid funds account for three-quarters of the income stream to the state's nursing homes, the state government is a key player in contract negotiations. Rowland has pledged to cover strike costs of nursing home operators for thirty days; to keep workers in the fight the union needs to raise $1.2 million from nonunion sources. Make checks payable to the District 1199NE Strike Fund, 77 Huyshoppe Street, Hartford, CT 06106.

UNEMPLOYMENT ASSURANCE

A staple statistic in the financial news these days is the number of unemployment insurance claims for the month. But what the statistics don't tell you is how many out-on-the-street workers actually collect. A new study by Marc Baldwin for the National Employment Law Project finds that while only about 40 percent of the unemployed receive benefits nationwide, unemployment taxes are lower than any time in history. Baldwin estimates that twenty-two states lack sufficient reserves to cope with a recession. To read the report go to www.nelp.org.

PROGRESSIVE HEALTHCARE IDEAS

Kathryn Lewis writes: At a recent Capitol Hill conference sponsored by the Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black and Hispanic caucuses a grim picture emerged of healthcare in America. The United States spends more on healthcare than any other nation in the developed world, yet thirty-six countries receive better services, according to the World Health Organization. Some 42 million Americans have no insurance, and 83,000 die each year because they can't afford a doctor. The caucuses are urging the creation of a comprehensive national health insurance program, an expanded version of Medicare that covers every American. Legislators talked up several pieces of legislation, including Representative Jesse Jackson Jr.'s bill to add a constitutional amendment guaranteeing healthcare for all, Pete Stark's measure to establish a health insurance program for all children and John Tierney's legislation allowing states to create their own universal health insurance programs. The consensus was to push reform one step at a time.

NEWS OF THE WEAK IN REVIEW

Asked four years ago if he would televise the execution of Timothy McVeigh, Don Hewitt, executive producer of 60 Minutes, said, "Over my dead body." In a recent interview, Hewitt allowed that he would show it. After all, he said, viewers see people strapped down on a gurney and knocked out every week on ER.

The final vote in the Name the President contest has been tallied. You can box it, can it, put it in a time capsule and send it to Dan Rather. A remarkable 24,136 people voted--23,799 online at the Nation website polling place, the others by absentee ballot (snail mail). While in the rest of the nation voting reform efforts have sunk into a slough of partisanship and official apathy, here at The Nation our technology was state of the art. The website displayed a real-time running total for each candidate, eliminating the TV middlemen. Our impregnable security system stood guard against hacking by The Weekly Standard and other hostile forces. The site was configured for one e-mail account, one vote.

As you'll recall, the electorate voted for five titles for George W. Bush from a slate of eight selected by the editors from hundreds of reader nominations. And now (drum roll) the winners: 1. Governor Bush (6,625 votes) 2. Spurious George (4,949) 3. President* (4,564) 4. President Select (2,436) 5. Boy George (2,095). The also-rans were His Illegititude (1,789), President per curiam (888), pResident (790).

A number of readers submitted the same winning entry. Each will receive a "Worry" Nation T-shirt. Here are their names: Joseph Finneran, Marco & Giulia Giordano, Richard Rosenthal, Gary Crosby, Mateusz Malinowski, Jim Volkert, Bob Blau, Tim Lehnerer, Martha Roth, Dennis Boyle, John Krogman, Darrell Wheeler, Michele Senecal, Michael French, Bill Krumbein, Stafford Meeker, M. Verba, Jim Sleeper, Jon O'Brian, Charmaine E. Gordon, Bruce Vaughn, Norman K. Smith, Victor Madeson, Jean Doerr, James W. Hamilton, Matthew Wilson, Robert Basch, Jon & Martha Lasse, Carol J. Watson, Bill Marshall, Keith & Barbara Byers, Bright Springman, Alan S. Rudolph, Bill Miller, Mark Fisher, Jason Schwartz, Mary Dreksler, Pat Stevens, Rhobie E. Parker, Doug Reed, Mirana Comstock, Ann Bingham, Frank Kirkwood, Mark B. Higgins, Bruce Dudley, Alan Walts, Will Kitts, Barbara Hilliard, Dennis Castanares, Marilyn A. Mihal, Rick Purdy, Jerry Butz, Jennifer Breakspear, Solomon Fisher, Jon Taylor.

Sometime in the coming days, George W. Bush will hand down a list of nominees to fill ninety-nine vacancies in the federal courts. The federal judiciary as a whole is at stake in the fight that will follow. Bush sees the 50-50 Senate balance, with Vice President Cheney the tiebreaker, as a small window of opportunity for loading the benches with judges in the mold of his favorite Supreme Court Justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. The outcome will determine whether Republicans will transform the courts into a rubber stamp for their minority right-wing agenda.

The Supreme Court--whose recent actions include an attack on the Americans with Disabilities Act and its undermining of the Violence Against Women Act--remains the ultimate arena. Although its right-wing bloc has put its man in the White House, it should not be allowed thereby to insure its own succession. Because Bush lacks a mandate, there should be a moratorium on all High Court appointments until after the 2004 election. For the moment, however, immediate retirements appear unlikely, so the important campaign is in the lower courts.

Thanks to GOP obstruction of Bill Clinton's nominees, Republican-appointed judges are predominant in eight of the thirteen federal appellate circuits. Several of these circuits--the Fourth Circuit, located in Virginia, the Eleventh in the Deep South and others--are tipped in the direction of "strict constructionism," which means the most activist judiciary in memory. These circuits are already well outside the mainstream of American legal opinion. The Fourth Circuit's rulings, for instance, have so radically stripped the rights of criminal defendants that they have been repeatedly overturned in recent months even by the law-and-order Rehnquist Supreme Court.

The Administration has junked the American Bar Association's vetting of judicial candidates and turned this task over to conservative legal ideologues. Senate Republicans are trying to outflank Democratic opposition by jettisoning the practice of consulting with senators of the opposition party on political nominees from their states. Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch plans to abandon the tradition of requiring that nominees win the approval of both senators from their home state--a maneuver that will bring to the floor Bush nominees from the fourteen states with only one Democratic senator.

With the Rehnquist Supremes taking ever fewer cases--only eighty this past term--the federal appeals courts are now increasingly the courts of last resort, and it is essential that Senate Democrats hold the line against further shifting the balance in those courts. There is nothing immoderate or partisan in Democrats--as well as independent-minded Republicans--using their advise and consent power to the fullest to reject any nominees for those circuits who cannot demonstrate substantive commitment to progress in civil rights, to women and to environmental and business regulation. Conservatives will accuse them of "Borking," but that distorts the meaning of the fight against Robert Bork's confirmation, which involved no more than an intensive scrutiny of the nominee's record and philosophy. The goal should be to block the Administration's avowed attempt to pack the federal bench with ideologues who would undercut environmental protection laws, roll back basic rights for all Americans and give the religious right's "morality" the force of law.

We're sorry, but Jules Fieffer's two-page editorial-cartoon spread can be seen only in our print edition, as it is not technically feasible at this time to post them on our website.

Few things are harder than an honest, voluntary accounting by a nation of its own crimes. When the crimes are committed by other nations, people know well how to respond. The pictures--those of, say, Serbia's recent atrocities in Kosovo shown in the Western media--are abundant. Investigations are energetic, coverage prompt. The outrage is spontaneous, and the indignation flows easily. Perhaps judicial proceedings will begin, or "humanitarian intervention" will be contemplated, accompanied by a gratifying debate on the limits of decent outsiders' moral obligations. Perhaps in time movies will be made showing--and caricaturing--their evil and contrasting it with our virtue. Maybe museums of the horrors will even be founded.

But how different everything becomes when our own countrymen are the wrongdoers. Investigations move at a snail's pace--perhaps they take decades, if they occur at all. Whereas before we seemed to be looking at the events through a sort of moral telescope, which brought everything near and into sharp focus, now we seem to look through the telescope's other end. The figures are small and indistinct. A kind of mental and emotional fog rolls in. Memories dim. The very acts that before inspired prompt anger now become fascinating philosophical puzzles. The psychological torments of the perpetrators move into the foreground, those of the victims into the background. The man firing the gun becomes more of an object of pity than the child at whom the gun was fired.

All of these responses have been on full display in the reaction in this country to the excellent, meticulous report in the New York Times by Gregory Vistica on the killing of at least thirteen civilians in February 1969 in the Vietnamese village of Thanh Phong by a Navy SEAL team led by Bob Kerrey, now president of the New School University (where, I should state, I am a part-time lecturer) and formerly a senator from Nebraska and presidential candidate. Vistica's original source was Gerhard Klann, a member of Kerrey's team. According to Klann, critical elements of whose account have been corroborated by Vietnamese eyewitnesses independently interviewed, the SEAL team entered the village, known to support the National Liberation Front, at night, to capture its mayor and an NLF representative. Upon arriving at a hut on the outskirts of the village, the team killed five members of a family consisting of two grandparents and their three grandchildren. The SEALs used knives in an attempt to preserve silence. Klann says that when he had trouble killing the grandfather, Kerrey held the man down with his knee while Klann cut his throat. The team, Klann goes on, proceeded to the village, where it ordered about a dozen women and children out of their bunker, lined them up and executed them at close range. Neither the mayor, the NLF representative nor any enemy soldiers or weapons were found.

Kerrey, while admitting that civilians were killed, disputes this account, and his version of events has been supported in a statement signed by the five other members of the seven-man team. All but one of them have declined individual interviews. About the killing at the first hut, the statement of the six is vague: It cryptically says, "At an enemy outpost we used lethal methods to keep our presence from being detected." Kerrey says he did not participate in this killing or know that those killed were two old people and three children. When the team proceeded to the center of the village, the statement says, it received hostile fire, and the civilians were accidentally killed by the American fire in response. Klann's testimony obviously deserves special weight, because it was not in the interest of the testifier and also has been independently confirmed by the Vietnamese eyewitnesses. Although his account is of course sharply at odds with Kerrey's, Kerrey has said, "I'm not going to make this worse by questioning somebody else's memory of it." At the same time, however, he has attacked the Times and CBS, which worked on the story with the Times, in an interview with the Associated Press. "The Vietnam government likes to routinely say how terrible Americans were," he said. "The Times and CBS are now collaborating in that effort." Kerrey's other responses have likewise been uncertain and changeable. He has been, by turns, confessional, apologetic, tormented, defensive, anguished, irritable, forgetful and contrite.

Kerrey has been an uncommonly thoughtful, constructive, independent public figure. Volunteering to serve his country in what he believed was a just war, he found himself instead in a slaughterhouse devoid of reason. (Upon returning to the United States, he became a fervent opponent of the war.) He has flatly stated, for instance, "We were instructed not to take prisoners." If so, he was instructed to commit war crimes--doubly, if the potential "prisoners" were civilians. According to the US military adviser on the scene, David Marion, the policy of the local Vietnamese district chief toward civilians in the area was, "If you are my friend, you will do fine. You support me and the government of Vietnam, we get along OK. You do not, you're Vietcong, you die." Marion, who observed the results of these policies firsthand, confirmed to Vistica that in practice, "Those were the rules."

I can testify from my experience in Vietnam as a reporter in 1967 that the rules in other parts of the country were the same. In the northern provinces of South Vietnam, villagers in "free-fire zones" were warned that if they supported the NLF their villages would be bombed, and I witnessed the execution and the results of this policy throughout Quang Ngai and Quang Tri provinces. The policy, which contravened the laws of war forbidding the deliberate targeting of civilians, was nowhere written down in government documents, but it was announced in millions of leaflets showered from planes on Vietnamese villages, and it was carried out. One leaflet, for example, read, "Many hamlets have been destroyed because these villages harbored the Vietcong. The hamlets of Hai Mon, Hai Tan, Sa Binh, Tan Binh, and many others have been destroyed because these villages harbored the Vietcong. We will not hesitate to destroy every hamlet that helps the Vietcong...."

These de facto policies obviously placed an extraordinary moral burden on the young men sent to carry them out. However, the struggles of Bob Kerrey to come to terms personally with his experience are of secondary importance. What is of first importance is exactly what was done that day, what the response of the American public and government to this will be and whether anyone is to be held accountable. A serious war crime has been credibly alleged. Did it happen? Is anyone responsible? Will they be held responsible?

So far, it looks as if, through a series of subterfuges and evasions, there will be neither an adequate investigation nor any accountability. In its editorial, the Times commented: "With the emergence of this story, Mr. Kerrey's career has entered a new phase of public assessment." Even this muffled admonition, however, was too much for Mark Shields of the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, who called the editorial "an act of moral arrogance rarely seen." Kerrey, he explained, had not ducked service in Vietnam, as so many others had done, and had never bragged about that service. But the question, of course, is not whether Kerrey was a coward or a braggart--he obviously was neither--but whether on February 24, 1969, he twice ordered the massacre of civilians--first at the hut, second in the village. The debate so far has concentrated on whether there was hostile fire before the killings in the center of the village, as if the unit's entire conduct could be excused by it. However, that question has no bearing on the horrifying scene at the hut, which remains without explanation. If the nation should not engage in any reassessment of Kerrey, should it at least try to find out, by means of a Pentagon investigation, what happened that night? Three senators who served in Vietnam and were decorated for their valor--John Kerry, Max Cleland and Chuck Hagel--think not, as they said on ABC's This Week. (A fourth, John McCain, wanted to leave the decision up to the Pentagon.)

Their reasons are noteworthy. You have to take into account the special circumstance into which the war placed Kerrey, the senators said. The SEALs' mission "was to take out the civilian infrastructures," John Kerry observed. The Phoenix program, whose objective was "assassination" of NLF leaders, was in operation, he added. It was the nature of war that civilians "suffer the most," Hagel said. Civilians had been killed in the tens of thousands, Kerry continued, by the firebombing of Dresden and at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In short, they cleared the individual by condemning the war. As Kerry said, if Bob Kerrey was to be judged, then "you'd have to investigate the whole war."

Others made similar points. Doyle McManus of PBS's Washington Week in Review said that the debate was in a "time warp," because in Vietnam it was policy to kill civilians in free-fire zones, whereas in the more recent Gulf War this was forbidden. All of that is factually true. What was left unanswered, however, is whether there could be any accountability for the deed or for any others like it if they were committed by Americans. If in fact it was American policy to declare that in wide areas civilians were to be killed, that policy was a crime against humanity in the strict definition of the term. Then criminal responsibility would in fact be much clearer than it would be if soldiers had massacred civilians in violation of orders. However, the senators were not suggesting a wider investigation; they opposed any investigation. If the individual soldiers should not be brought to account (and credible allegations of a war crime should not even be investigated) because the fault was in policy, not in individuals, and yet no policy-makers are to be held responsible either, then there will be no accountability. The answer, the four senators agreed, is to "blame the war," not the "warrior." But they suggested no method by which a "war"--as distinct from the people who guided the war and fought it--could be held responsible.

Approval of the deed was symbolized by the Bronze Star that Kerrey received for the action. Reporters asked him whether he planned to return it, and he answered with annoyance that he didn't care about it one way or the other. So far, the Pentagon has not asked for it back.

Some have suggested that the United States has anguished long enough over the Vietnam War and that it's long past time to put it behind us. The debate over Thanh Phong, however, occurs in a new context. Today, nations all over the world--South Africa, Chile, Argentina, Poland, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Rwanda, to name just a few--have been struggling to come to terms with crimes committed in their recent past. In some countries, judicial proceedings are under way. In others, truth commissions, offering amnesty in exchange for full confession, have been founded. Elsewhere, lustration--laws preventing wrongdoers of the past from holding office--has been the recourse. Western countries have been liberal with their advice. "International civil society" has added its voice. Hundreds of academic conferences have been held. In still other cases, international tribunals have been created at The Hague to bring committers of crimes against humanity to justice. Special tribunals are in operation to prosecute the perpetrators of the genocide in Rwanda and the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo by Serbia. The United States is among many countries that have sought the extradition of the former President of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, and others to face justice at The Hague. More important, thirty countries have ratified an agreement to establish a permanent international criminal court. Taken in their entirety, these efforts amount to a sort of movement, in the wake of the terrible violence of the twentieth century, to create a bare minimum of accountability for the worst crimes in the twenty-first.

The reactions of journalists and senators on news programs in the United States to the Thanh Phong massacre will not decide the outcome of these efforts. But if as a nation the United States--the self-styled "world's only superpower"--cannot investigate, cannot condemn, cannot assign responsibility for the killing of the women and children of Thanh Phong, then state-licensed murderers everywhere will take heart and those who are seeking to bring them to justice will be discouraged. The United States cannot condemn in others what it covers up when committed by its own. The movement for justice will continue, but the voice of the United States will be discredited. We'll be missing in action.

Let's start in North Side Chicago at the Shan Restaurant, a Pakistani bistro where South Asians like to hang out, among them Ifti Nasim, a 53-year-old Pakistani writer and radical who's also a leading light of Muslim gays, many of them mustered in the international gay Muslim organization Al-Fatiha. Nasim was sitting in the Shan on the night of March 12 when a man at the table called Salman Aftab began verbally hassling him for being "too visible" in his sexual orientation and an "embarrassment" to South Asians. Nasim apparently likes heavy jewelry and presented himself in drag on the cover of his latest book of poems.

Nasim says Aftab told him, "I'm going to stab you up the ass to tell God I'm getting rid of at least one sinner! I want to clean up the planet after your type!" Then, on Nasim's account, Aftab got a knife from the kitchen, yelled out "gandoo," meaning "faggot bottom," declared an Islamic "jihad" against Nasim and gay Muslims and lurched toward the poet. At which point two people in the restaurant restrained Aftab, and Nasim dialed 911.

The first Chicago cops on the scene reportedly told Nasim it looked to them like "an ethnic problem" and declined to take Nasim's complaint. Then police Sgt. Mary Boyle arrived and ordered Aftab to be arrested, charged with simple assault, a misdemeanor.

What bears upon the title of this column is that the Chicago police declined Nasim's request that they hit Aftab with a hate-crimes charge, to the great fury not only of many Chicago gays but of the local chapter of the ACLU. The Al-Fatiha Foundation has been urging gays across the United States to call Cook County State's Attorney Dick Devine to demand that hate-crimes charges be filed against Aftab on the grounds that the assault was motivated by Nasim's sexual orientation and ethnicity. The Chicago Anti-Bashing Network has made the same call, and has prompted the ACLU's Pamela Sumner to write a three-page, single-spaced letter to State's Attorney Devine detailing why she feels he should pursue hate-crimes charges in Nasim's case. Devine has refused to do so.

Now, CABN has done good work in Chicago on such issues as killings and torture by Chicago's cops. When I phoned the group to ask for Sumner's letter, CABN co-founder Andy Thayer told me he was well aware of my opposition to hate-crimes laws and indeed agreed that "the promotion of hate-crimes legislation has generally been a distraction from legal inequalities faced by lesbians and gays"; also that the "Democratic Party in particular has very cynically promoted hate-crimes legislation while conveniently ignoring the Defense of Marriage Act and the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy that arguably contributed to the climate requiring hate-crimes laws." After voicing these sentiments, Thayer said he wants Aftab charged with a hate crime because the law is on the Illinois books (as are a lot of unjust laws) and it is a useful way to pressure Devine, who grandstands on his support for such laws.

But the more he talked, eloquently, about astounding cases of police killing (LaTanya Haggerty, shot to death) and police assault (Jeremiah Mearday, face beaten to a pulp) in which the Chicago cops had escaped charges, the more I thought he was making my case for me. Why fool with such laws, with their importing of thought crimes into the statute book, when the issues at hand concern murder, torture or, in Nasim's case, assault? Why is the ACLU's Sumner spending hours on a three-page letter urging hate-crimes charges against Aftab when there are such urgent matters of everyday business as men sitting on death row, put there by confessions elicited by torture?

And finally, why is Al-Fatiha wasting time on hate-crimes issues in Chicago when their Muslim comrades round the world are confronted by forces of intolerance even grimmer than Mayor Daley's Blue Knights? Seven Islamic nations prescribe the death penalty for homosexuality. But on the issue of the death penalty Al-Fatiha's founder and director, Faisal Alam, wrote earlier this year to Bill Dobbs of Queer Watch (the gay justice group that opposes the death penalty and hate-crimes laws) in mealy-mouthed terms, to the effect that "Al-Fatiha continues to maintain a level of discretion when it comes to dealing with what we perceive as 'political matters.'... Al-Fatiha maintains itself as a 'religious organization.'... So this means that we have actively taken a stance NOT to directly get involved with such situations."

Prosecutors are finding that hate-crimes charges sometimes have their uses. Take the case of James Cosner, 31-year-old self-described "revolutionary freedom fighter." On March 9 he took a hammer to a statue of Christopher Columbus in the Santa Cruz, California, city hall, severely damaging the statue while denouncing Columbus as a perpetrator of genocide. The statue is worth $100,000, according to a deputy DA in Santa Cruz.

Cosner is now being charged with vandalism. If convicted he could get up to three years in prison, but the prosecutor has added a hate-crimes enhancement--which could add another three years--from California's penal code.

So here's a fellow who did something that's a crime, with enough destruction to draw a felony charge. But suddenly that's not enough. Now we're into the issue of his motive, namely the avenging of Columbus's destruction of the Arawaks. In other words, he could get an extra three years because of his ideology, not because he made a mess of city property.

Earlier this year Oregon State Senator Gary George, a hazelnut farmer, introduced a bill making it a hate crime to smash a Starbucks window or sabotage a timber company. George told the press his real target was political correctness on hate crimes. "Even the Scriptures tell you not to judge a person's thoughts but their actions." His bill calls for an additional five years in prison for an offender whose crime is motivated by "a hatred of people who subscribe to a set of political beliefs that support capitalism." The bill was intended more to make a political point than as serious legislation. But I could see it romping through the Oregon legislature. This hate-crimes binge is playing with fire.

A federal district court recently blocked publication of Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone, a parody of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, ruling that the parody constituted plagiarism.

Section One--Reading Comprehension

Read the following literary excerpts. Pick the one that is not parody. Write an essay about why its publication should be enjoined.

a. "Ah's sceered of cows, Miss Scarlett. Ah ain' nebber had nuthin' ter do wid cows. Ah ain' no yard nigger. Ah's a house nigger."
   "You're a fool nigger, and the worst day's work Pa ever did was to buy you," said Scarlett slowly, too tired for anger. "And if I ever get the use of my arm again I'll wear this whip out on you."
   There, she thought, I've said nigger, and Mother wouldn't like that.
      --Gone With the Wind

b. "Help me out of these wet things, Pansy," Scarlett ordered her maid. "Hurry." Her face was ghostly pale, it made her green eyes look darker, brighter, more frightening. The young black girl was clumsy with nervousness. "Hurry, I said. If you make me miss my train, I'll take a strap to you."
   She couldn't do it. Pansy knew she couldn't do it. The slavery days were over, Miss Scarlett didn't own her, she could quit any time she wanted to.
      --Scarlett: The Sequel, by Alexandra Ripley

c. [H]e took them over to where the house we called Twelve Slaves Strong as Trees once stood. I have forgotten their name for it. What I remember is this: there were twelve columns across the front of that slave-built house. They stood for the original twelve dark men who cleared the land. And the lines, the flutes, on those columns stood for the stripes on those slaves' backs.
      --The Wind Done Gone

Section Two--American History

Read the following passages and decide which best summarizes the facts of the Civil War.

a. "De Yankees is comin'!" bawled Prissy, shrinking close to her. "Oh, Miss Scarlett, dey'll kill us all! Dey'll run dey baynits in our stummicks! Dey'll--"
      --Gone With the Wind

b. It was the Confederate Memorial, symbol of the proud, heedless courage that had plunged the South with bright banners flying into destruction. It stood for so many lives lost, the friends of her childhood, the gallants who had begged for waltzes and kisses in the days when she had no problems greater than which wide-skirted ballgown to wear.
      --Scarlett: The Sequel

c. If it was mine to be able to paint pictures, if I possessed the gift of painting, I would paint a cotton gown balled up and thrown into a corner waiting to be washed, and I would call it "Georgia."
      --The Wind Done Gone

Section Three--Critical Reasoning

Which of the following descriptions best completes the following analogy: mother is to child as elephant is to _______.

a. Mammy emerged from the hall, a huge old woman with the small, shrewd eyes of an elephant. She was shining black, pure African, devoted to her last drop of blood to the O'Haras.
      --Gone With the Wind

b. Scarlett stared down at the skull-like face of the dying old woman. "I love you, Mammy," she whispered. "What's going to become of me when I don't have you to love me?"
      --Scarlett: The Sequel

c. They called her Mammy. Always.... I heard tell down the years they compared her to an elephant. They shouted down to their ancestors: She was big as an elephant with tiny dark round eyes. But she wasn't big enough to own a name.
      --The Wind Done Gone

Section Four--True or False

Mark the following true or false. Use a hard black pencil to fill in the entire area of the little white circle of your choice.

a. To focus the social passions of African-Americans on what some Americans may have done to their ancestors...years ago is to burden them with a crippling sense of victimhood.
      --Journalist David Horowitz, in an advertisement in Brown University's student newspaper

b. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda.
      --Attorney General John Ashcroft, quoted in Southern Partisan

c. I could see in Other's face the first moment it came to her the possibility that Mammy did for her not because she wanted to, but because she had to. Maybe Mammy loved her and maybe Mammy didn't. Slavery made it impossible for Other to know. "She who ain't free not to love, ain't free to love."
      --The Wind Done Gone

Section Five--Logical Thinking

Cross out the one that is not free speech.

a. a hit list of abortion doctors published on the Internet
      --Ninth Circuit opinion, March 2001

b. a regulation promulgated by New York City public schools chancellor Harold Levy prohibiting the opinionated teaching of race and politics
      ---Peter Noel, The Village Voice, November 22-28, 2000

c. It's a pissed bed on a cold night to read words on paper saying your name and a price, to read the letters that say you are owned, or to read words that say this one or that one will pay so much money for you to be recaptured. It be better never to read than to read that page with your name on it.
      ---The Wind Done Gone

Twice recently, the New York Times has had occasion to pay homage to a Washington Post ombudsman. In the first case, it recognized the valuable roughing-up the job's current holder, Michael Getler, gives the paper's reporters with his once-a-week "what's wrong with the paper" salvos. Shortly thereafter, the paper noted in its obituary of the Post's first ombudsman, Richard Harwood, that "there are now 38 ombudsmen, about half at newspapers with more than 110,000 circulation." Not one of the papers, however, is named the Times.

That the Times is the English-speaking world's greatest newspaper has today become unarguable. The Post is a regional newspaper with national politics as its local news beat. The Wall Street Journal is a business paper with a few good news pages and an extremely nutty editorial section. The Los Angeles Times, well, damned if I know...

But the great, no longer gray, lady has many weaknesses, and her greatest is undoubtedly arrogance. The Times countenances virtually no outside criticism. This is important, not only because the paper sets the agenda for the entire media but also because, on many stories, its reporting is the only source that millions of people will ever see. This is particularly hard on those who, for whatever reason, find themselves seriously wronged by the paper. In most cases, barring an expensive lawsuit, if the most powerful newspaper in the nation decides to screw you on a question that is not strictly one of easily demonstrable fact, you stay screwed.

Not long ago, the paper's publishing correspondent, David Kirkpatrick, became embroiled in an extremely public dispute with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius author Dave Eggers. All that Times readers ever learned about the fracas from the paper's corrections page was that the reporter made an insignificant error on the location of one of Eggers's readings. But readers of Eggers's McSweeney's website and Jim Romenesko's Media News were treated to a gluttonous feast of argument, including the two writers' lengthy e-mail correspondence. The postings raised significant issues for the newspaper. For instance, Kirkpatrick wrote, "Despite public disavowals of making money from his work, Mr. Eggers has also made it clear that he does not much like sharing the proceeds." His only example was a lawsuit Eggers settled with his former agent. This hardly proves the case against an author who, Kirkpatrick notes elsewhere in the article, gives away much of what he earns. (The fact that Kirkpatrick is a casual friend of the agent in question does not help matters.) In addition, Kirkpatrick admitted--and apologized for--using comments Eggers told him were off the record. The reporter says he did so only after receiving permission from Eggers's publisher's publicist. Eggers insists this is false and would be journalistically indefensible if true. The publicist calls it a mix-up. Mightn't an ombudsman be able to offer both sides a fair hearing?

An ombudsman would also free Times editors from the painful choice of blaming either themselves or their reporters when they screw up. Currently, nonfactual errors are addressed only in the rare, and highly self-protective, Editor's Note. Even in its extraordinary 1,600-word note on its coverage of accused spy Wen Ho Lee--accurately termed by one wag "equal parts Chicken Little and Spanish Inquisition"--Times editors insisted that complaints were leveled exclusively by "competing journalists and media critics and...defenders of Dr. Lee," as if no disinterested or fair-minded reader would dare to question the paper's news judgments. Similarly, when Kenneth Starr's deputy Charles Bakaly III was acquitted of lying to a federal court about leaking secret information last year, Federal Judge Norma Holloway Johnson nonetheless found that Bakaly "was in fact the direct source, or at least a confirming source, for much of the information found in the [January 31, 1999] Times article," something Bakaly admitted. Yet in the story in question, Times reporter Don Van Natta Jr. had informed his readers that Bakaly "declined to discuss" the investigation with him and even quoted him refusing to do so. Since sourcing was crucial to all stories regarding Starr's investigation, the Times appeared to be deliberately misinforming its readers on a story of national consequence. You might think this would prompt some kind of explanation from the paper's editors. Alas, you would be wrong.

Why no ombudsman? Managing editor Bill Keller explains, "We think it makes more sense to have problems and complaints reviewed by people with the responsibility and authority to do something about them, namely, the editors of the paper rather than by a designated kibitzer." His boss, executive editor Joe Lelyveld, adds, "Generally speaking we don't like to cover ourselves--we find it a little too self-referential for our tastes."

Indeed, Metro section Op-Ed page columnist Sydney Schanberg was fired under the previous regime for covering the paper's role in local politics a bit too energetically, as former managing editor Seymour Topping admits in my book Sound and Fury. But the Times's own power is absolutely crucial to stories like the Lee and Bakaly cases. More recently, buried deep inside a story about the paper's choice of an architect for its new headquarters was the admission that part of its proposed site "is now in the hands of 11 property owners, but New York State would condemn it under its powers of eminent domain." Did anyone think to ask these property owners about how they feel about this? One of them, parking lot owner Leonard Weiss, is, unbeknownst to Times readers, suing to protect his property in court. (Isn't this the kind of thing that used to set off regular US invasions of Panama and Nicaragua?)

I could go on, of course, but space restricts me to one final question: In a page-one report from Mexico, two top Timesmen combined to report that George W. Bush and Vicente Fox both wore "black cowboy boots that peeked out mischievously from beneath the bottoms of the pants." Excuse me, guys, but how in hell do boots peek "mischievously"? Why not "perspicaciously" or "sullenly" or even "prudently"? Or do such questions fall into the forbidden category of "undesignated kibitzing"?

Why beat around the Bush? Surrogate President Dick Cheney is
behaving like an oil-guzzling, intellectually irresponsible,
anti-environmental oaf.

How else to define one who summarily dismisses the promising advances
made in energy conservation while urging the more rapid depletion of
fossil fuel resources and construction of nuclear power plants?

Cheney is a mouthpiece for energy companies like Halliburton, his
former employer, which paid him $36 million in his last year of brief
service as its CEO in a field he previously knew nothing about. But the
company, which prospers when new power plants are built, got its money's
worth when President Bush added "energy policy czar" to Cheney's
extensive White House portfolio, leaving the president ample time to
greet Little League teams.

Ever grateful to the oil bigwigs who made him financially whole while
lavishly supporting the GOP ticket, Cheney barely took up his new civic
responsibility before launching a war on energy conservation. In his
words, the commitment to conservation, endorsed by a long line of
presidents of both parties, was valuable primarily as therapy for
tree-huggers: "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is
not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."

Nonsense. Conservation works, and according to the latest government
studies--pointedly ignored by Cheney--it could be a major factor in
staving off any future energy crisis.

As the New York Times reported in its lead story Sunday, "Scientists
at the country's national laboratories have projected enormous energy
savings if the government takes aggressive steps to encourage energy
conservation in homes, factories, offices, appliances, cars and power
plants."

The three-year studies by the five national science laboratories
undermine Cheney's shrill insistence that the country must pop for a huge
new polluting power plant every week for the next two decades, lest our
homes and factories go dark. The studies concluded that a government-led
conservation program could cut growth in energy consumption almost in
half, using proven technology already tested and in place.

Such technology is already saving energy and money at Cheney's
official residence at the Naval Observatory and at President Bush's new
ranch in Crawford, Texas. Inexplicably, what's good for them isn't good
enough for the rest of the country.

To ignore scientific breakthroughs on energy conservation is to lie to
the American people about the dimensions of the problem. This is not
leadership; this is fear-mongering that withholds from the American
public sound scientific information in order to justify eviscerating
conservation policy.

Indeed, the administration's 2002 budget kills much of President
Clinton's program to improve energy efficiency in building construction,
heating and appliances, savings that would have obviated the need for an
estimated 170 new power plants.

Cheney chose to attack conservation at the very time when California
embarked on a major plan to end its electricity shortage through lowering
consumer demand--a shortage that Cheney irresponsibly blames on
environmentalists who were insisting on pollution controls.

California's crisis is being created by the price-gouging of mostly
out-of-state energy suppliers that are taking advantage of a deregulation
plan hatched by former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson in cahoots with the
privately owned utilities. The utilities wanted to sell off what they
incorrectly figured to be the less-profitable energy production business,
including ever-troubled nuclear plants of the sort Cheney now embraces.
In return, they agreed to temporary caps on consumer prices.

The problem is that the feds control wholesale prices, which they
didn't cap. Last week, when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
finally recognized that it needed to exercise its legal authority to cap
wholesale prices, Cheney blasted it: "If I had been at FERC, I never
would have voted for short-term price caps."

California consumers should remember Cheney's refusal to rein in the
price-gougers come the next election.

Finally, whatever happened to the monarchs of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait
saved by former President Bush and then-Defense Secretary Cheney during
the Gulf War?

The monarchs sit atop the world's largest oil reserve. Wouldn't you
think that since they owe their continued existence to the Bush clan,
they might return the favor with lower oil prices? Instead, US
consumers are being punished at the gas pumps with some of the highest
prices in recent memory.

The dirty secret is that the Texas oilmen in the White House like the
price of foreign crude to be very high. That justifies increased US
production, even in pristine lands, and boosts energy profits, which
doubtless will fatten the coffers of Republican candidates in the next
election.

You can't say we weren't warned. Put two Texas oil guys in the White
House, and they are going to seize any opportunity to grease the palms of
their big oil backers while raping the environment.

Still, it is surprising that they are being so obscenely blatant about
it.

A grassroots movement for immigrant legalization is gathering strength.

Prevention and treatment require a focus on overall health and development.

For many indigent defendants, the right to a lawyer doesn't mean much.

The stage is set for a showdown over the fate of undocumented workers.

As he goes, so goes the Senate.

The morning after I returned to Chicago from the recent Margaret Mead Legacy conference at Barnard College, honoring the centenary of the anthropologist's birth, a newspaper columnist rang me at dawn with the demand that I explain "from a feminist perspective" why Tony Soprano is "this millennium's first
sex symbol." "Does this mean that we're all going backwards?" she asked with relish. Dumbfounded, I countered, rather crankily, with the request that she give me evidence that any women anywhere were claiming sexual attraction to a dumb, sexist and racist, unfaithful, badly out of shape, psychologically damaged organized crime capo. (Not that I don't love the show; who doesn't, even if I have to watch my own people get minstrelized to a fare-thee-well.) Nothing daunted, and with not a shred of shame that she in fact had no evidence, the columnist cleverly countered, "Well, if it were true, what would your feminist perspective be?" As Rayna Rapp of the New School had declared to the amused Barnard audience, I had that feminist anthropologist's "WWMMS moment": What Would Margaret Mead Say?

What would she say? We could easily remark about Mead what Walt Whitman, another New York-based celebrity, claimed of himself: She is large, she contains multitudes. Mead was professionally active for fully half of the last century and, by choice and her own never-ending efforts, very much a public voice for most of that time. She said a lot of different things in different decades, and she was received variously by her own professional colleagues and within a shifting American public sphere. The Barnard conferees, including the college President, Judith Shapiro, herself a feminist anthropologist, and Mead's daughter Mary Catherine Bateson, spoke on key aspects of Mead's work, on the ways in which she had inspired their own research, and on what her legacy might be in this millennium. They agreed that she and her cohort made a series of novel connections: envisioning the malleability of gender relations, seeing human corporeality, ritual and psychology as one, emphasizing the deeply enculturated nature of child-rearing and of adolescent coming of age. Elaine Charnov, director of the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and Faye Ginsburg of New York University both spoke as well of Mead's prescience in the use of ethnographic film and her general status as technological pioneer.

"But there is no Margaret Mead now," the panelists lamented with the partisan, largely female audience crowding the auditorium, and variously attributed that fact to her heroic uniqueness, to her intellectual coming of age being the "right time and the right place" for public sphere presence, to the rise of the New Right in the West and the triumph of global neoliberalism, to the renaissance of biological reductionism in the overwhelming American popular-cultural presence of sociobiology, to our collective retreat from public voice.

Mead became a popular icon over the course of the 1960s, and attained the status of Holy Woman in her last years, as the late Roy Rappaport commented (she died in 1978). And it is difficult to evaluate Holy Women, particularly in the long wake of a posthumous attack--by the Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman, in 1983--that quickly became a mass media firestorm. Margaret Mead and Samoa is a badly written and unconvincing claim that Mead, influenced in a "culturally determinist" direction by her nefarious adviser Franz Boas, falsely interpreted the Hobbesian world in which Samoan youth came of age as a gentle idyll. Freeman claimed that the true Samoa is characterized by a "primeval rank system" that dictates a "regime of physical punishment" of children and violent "rivalrous aggression" among men, "highly emotional and impulsive behavior that is animal-like in its ferocity" among chiefs, and a rape rate "among the highest to be found anywhere in the world." Scholars criticized Freeman's theoretical vacuity and empirical flaws, his ahistorical claim of an Eternal Samoa, his failure to realize that his key informants--older, high-status males--were no more a "true and accurate lens" of Samoan culture than were Mead's young female companions. Most especially, feminists noted the rank sexism of Freeman's focus on Mead's youth and size: The "liberated young American...only twenty-three years of age...[was] smaller in stature than some of the girls she was studying."

But public reception of, as opposed to in-house reaction to, Freeman's book was most importantly about the extraordinary fit between his line of attack and newly dominant New Rightist politics. Margaret Mead and Samoa provided a Heaven-sent opportunity for the press to rant against the "liberal feminist culture" and "lifestyle experiments" with which it newly identified Mead, conveniently forgetting its fervent eulogies of her of only half a decade earlier. As the late David Schneider noted at the time, Freeman's book was "a work that celebrate[d] a particular political climate by denigrating another." Freeman's vision, at one fell swoop, allowed commentators to deny female intellectual capacities across all societies; to naturalize male dominance, male sexual violence and aggression; and at the same time, to slur Samoans--and with them all so-called primitives, that is, all people of color--as violent, nasty savages. Logically self-contradictory and empirically bankrupt though it was, Freeman's narrative was wonderfully composed to fit American Reagan-era contentions of the foolishness of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as you "can't change human nature," and Western, upper-class, male, heterosexual, and white dominance are natural after all.

Freeman's frisson in popular culture is now long past, victim of the increasingly rapid biodegradation of American popular consciousness. I routinely ask gender studies and anthropology classes if they have heard of Freeman or his book, and very few respond affirmatively, even when they have a niggling sense that there is some sort of blot on Mead's reputation. Only American New Rightists remember and believe in Freeman's attack on Mead: A Lexis/Nexis search for all articles referring to the two since 1990 revealed only a handful of sneering articles in rightist outlets, whereas a general search using Mead's name alone garnered thousands of "hits."

But while specific media scandals always fade, popular-cultural troping of anthropology and anthropologists is unceasing, and distorts whatever information members of the discipline may have to offer considering power and culture in human societies. The issue is more crucial than is often realized, because popular apprehensions of anthropology and anthropologists are importantly interwoven with changing American constructions of Others--those deemed somehow apart from the norm by virtue of race, gender, nationality, class, religion, sexual identity. "Culture" and "biology" are the two key domains through which Americans historically have laundered politics from public sphere inspection. And anthropology, sententiously self-described as the most humanistic of the sciences, the most scientific of the humanities, has thus evolved into a cynosure of political approbation and attack, both refuge and refuse in contemporary contestations over power.

II.

I have recently identified a series of anthropological "Halloween costumes" into which, since the 1960s, American popular writing, film, television, cartoons and advertising have tended to squeeze all anthropological knowledge. Each costume--Technicians of the Sacred, Last Macho Raiders, Evil Imperialist Anthropologists, Barbarians at the Gates and Human Nature Experts--reflects minor strands in some past or present anthropological writing. More important, each enacts a retrogressive politics with reference to culture and power on the US and global stage. The costumes, in other words, act as Procrustean beds, amputating those pesky limbs of anthropological knowledge that flop outside their predetermined grids.

Technicians of the Sacred, for example, posits anthropologists as time travelers who bring back to us visions of Noble Savages living nonviolently and cooperatively, practicing sexual equality, respecting the environment and engaging in religious worship somehow more "spiritual" than ours. Such a seemingly benign vision, however, yanks contemporaneous populations out of our shared stream of world history and prevents us from understanding the ways in which they lack political power on local and global stages. Last Macho Raiders imagines anthropologists as a guild populated by cool Harrison Ford lookalikes, virile, positive imperialists. This particular Halloween costume has long had little appeal to most members of the guild but remains widely used in popular culture. The Evil Imperialist Anthropologist, on the other hand, who is simply a Last Macho Raider seen from the viewpoint of the Raided, has roots in some Third World and Native American writing of the 1960s, became a stock postmodern character in much academic writing in the 1980s and spilled over into popular culture. Barbarians at the Gates envisions anthropologists as foolish multiculturalists, misguided salespeople hawking inferior--non-Western--cultural materials to a gullible American public. In other words, it is a rightist, racist framing of the Technicians of the Sacred trope, and has been heavily purveyed in New Rightist writing through our recent culture wars. And Human Nature Experts paints anthropologists as pure scientists--gatherers of facts alone. Of course we need to stand for empirical reality, but this particular trope functions in the public sphere today almost solely as a rationale for sociobiological arguments, as if all fact and logic were the sacred possession of that contemporary version of biological reductionism alone, and the active armies of distinguished anti-sociobiology scientists were a mere rumor in the wind.

We might say, then, that Freeman, in an act of simultaneous attack and self-aggrandizement, dressed Mead as a Barbarian at the Gates and himself as a Human Nature Expert. Ironically, though, Mead herself, over the decades, had no small hand in the fashioning of the Human Nature Expert costume. At the same time, the Halloween costumes are most definitely not unisex, and Mead, like the rest of us, never escaped her gender. Looping back to the years of Mead's intellectual coming of age and first writing helps us to trace the changing lineaments of "culture" in American politics, particularly that shifting overlap of gender and race that is so crucial to the framing of rationales for and protests against contemporary lines of stratification.

III.

In the 1920s, counter to the assertions and interpretations of more recent commentators, Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa was written, and was read, not as a paean to free love or women's rights or even the romantic lives of "noble savages," but rather as a scientific account of certain differing cultural features in a "more simple" society that "we," meaning middle-class white Americans, might wish to adopt in order to raise "our youth" in a less stressful manner. Mead defined herself early on, as I have written, as an objective scientist, a professional social engineer. Despite her sometimes somewhat overblown lyricism--"A group of youths may dance for the pleasure of some visiting maiden," "lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees"--Mead ultimately is no Technician of the Sacred, no romantic antimodernist. Her 1920s Samoa is a "shallow society" where "no one plays for very high stakes," of use to "us" as an object of scientific study: it is a "human experiment" under "controlled conditions."

While Mead worked almost solely with girls and women, and certainly wrote, as a contemporary reviewer put it, with the "clean, clear frankness of the scientist" about their sexual experiences, she did not draw explicitly feminist lessons from her fieldwork. Like many young women of her postsuffrage era, to whom feminism seemed both passé and potentially professionally damaging, Mead took advantage of the doors opened by the women's rights activism of her mother's and grandmother's generation (and indeed, by her own mother and grandmother) but did not herself join that ongoing movement. Nancy Lutkehaus of USC pointed out at the conference that Mead became a public intellectual in the 1920s because of her fortuitously advantageous position in time and space: based in New York, writing about the South Seas at a point when that region had caught the American public imagination, and indeed at just the point that newspapers and magazines were proliferating across the American landscape. And, I would add, because she wrote then not as a radical but as a modernist, advocating changes for the white middle classes--coeducation, less authoritarian childrearing, greater frankness about the facts of birth, reproduction, and death--already in the works in the Roaring Twenties.

But scientist or not, Mead was at times portrayed in the press as many anthropologists, especially female anthropologists, have been since: with a certain condescending, inappropriately sexualizing humor, identified with her inevitably stigmatized subjects. Lutkehaus has unearthed 1920s newspaper stories claiming that Mead went to Samoa to study the "origins of the flapper." And in the 1930s, a popular magazine coyly described Mead as "a slender, comely girl who danced her way into the understanding of the Melanesian people and became an adopted daughter and a sort of princess of the Samoans. When they anointed her with palm oil and indicated that a dance was in order, she did a nice hula and they declared her in--indicating the adaptability of the modern young woman if she just has a chance to step out."

It was one of the first steps on the long road toward my Sopranos interlocutor--herself, as we shall see, merely part of a vast contemporary phenomenon.

IV.

Mead's early anthropological work reflected both developing British and American concerns: She did careful kinship and social organizational research in Samoa and New Guinea, and studied what she construed to be varying cultural temperaments--characteristic psychological states--and their connections to sex roles and life cycles. But by 1935, when she published the widely read Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, her analytic twig was permanently bent in the Americanist psychological, "culture and personality" direction. Sex and Temperament, rather than Coming of Age, is the work in which Mead makes her clearest arguments concerning the plasticity of human sex role arrangements: "Many, if not all, of the personality traits that we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of head-dress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex.... We are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable."

This is the modal Mead, the ur-popular culture anthropologist who was rediscovered by Second Wave feminists, assigned all over the academy and read aloud in consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s. It is important to remember, though, that every generation reads selectively. Mead's "gender malleability" statements are, in fact, lodged inside a larger argument against women's equal rights as represented by the contemporary Soviet Union. Mead saw in the opening of all occupations to women there a "sacrifice in complexity" of culture: "The removal of all legal and economic barriers against women's participating in the world on an equal footing with men may be in itself a standardizing move towards the wholesale stamping-out of the diversity of attitudes that is such a dearly bought product of civilization."

Ironically, the very popular troping of anthropology for political purposes has contributed to the discipline's unpolitical reputation. Explicitly political statements in anthropological texts vanish in the course of reading, the discipline's pioneering anti-racism and near-implosion over Vietnam have succumbed to the culture of forgetting, and the long-vital left tradition in anthropology worldwide is popularly and often even professionally invisible. When I gave an early talk on Mead for a group of women's studies professors, a senior political scientist exclaimed afterward that she was surprised to learn that Mead "had any politics." All God's anthropologists got politics, most especially the very public Margaret Mead.

Those politics varied considerably over the long decades of Depression, war, decolonization and cold war, and the 1960s and 1970s conjuncture of Vietnam, civil rights, the Second Wave of feminism and associated gay rights organizing. The one common thread across the decades, though, was Mead's adherence to Progressive social engineering, and thus her profound commitment to the notion of disinterested science and the rule of experts. In terms of gender, from the 1930s until the early 1970s, when she did take on a liberal feminist stance, Mead embraced the conservative Freudian notion of the universal "constructive receptivity of the female and the vigorous outgoing constructive activity of the male." While Mead continued to argue against isolated, narrow nuclear families, and for careers for better-off women as long as they were "womanly" both at home and at work, it is no wonder that Betty Friedan in 1961 spent almost an entire chapter of her celebrated book attacking Mead's pernicious "super saleswomanship" of the Feminine Mystique. It is equally unsurprising that Second Wave feminists, in rediscovering both Friedan and Mead for their own purposes, read Friedan as selectively as they (we) did Mead.

Similarly, Mead's war work for the American government extended into both her very successful postwar advocacy of federal funding for anthropological research and her cold warrior stance against, among other actions, antinuclear and anti-Vietnam War protests. (The latter issue led to a huge fight at the 1971 American Anthropological Association meetings, during which Mead was hissed by an antiwar audience of 700.) These political actions were overwhelmed, in popular culture, by Mead's highly public approbation of "questing youth" from the mid-1960s forward, and the liberal feminist alliances of her last years. She even had her own character in the first stage version of Hair, who celebrated male "long hair and other flamboyant affectations," and whose song ended in the recitative, "Kids, be whatever you are, do whatever you do, just so long as you don't hurt anybody."

V.

Hair's sendup of Mead followed her thinly disguised appearance as a famous older female anthropologist in Irving Wallace's sleazy 1963 potboiler, The Three Sirens: "She thought of the place: the temperate trade winds, the tall, sinewy, bronze people, the oral legends, the orgiastic rites." The sexual imputations in both texts return us to consideration of my morning journalist and Tony Soprano. Like all occupational groups, anthropologists have traditions of internal self-reference, but ours have intersected in particularly damaging ways with the changing Zeitgeist. From Clyde Kluckhohn's 1940s boast that we were all "eccentrics" "interested in bizarre things," to Clifford Geertz's 1984 reference to anthropologists as "merchants of astonishment," many of us have enjoyed exoticizing ourselves, playing, as I have written, the court jesters of academe. While some of this self-exoticization has always arisen from identification with oppressed populations, the overall effect of the court jester construction is dire. Anthropologists have become the American public's "exotics at home," identified with our demonized, trivialized subjects, or rather, those who are presumed to be our sole subjects--non-Westerners around the globe, the poor, the nonwhite, and sexual minorities in every country. And, of course, in double irony, the numbers of nonwhite, non-Western and/or gay anthropologists, never insignificant, grow larger every year. By a process of infinite recursion, the stigmatized figurings of subjects and researchers repeatedly rub off on one another, denying dignity, history and human rights to domestic and foreign "exotics," and stripping anthropologists of the intellectual authority with which to contribute to progressive politics.

Ironically, the "exotics at home" complex also reifies the discipline's long historical game of peekaboo with Americanist research. Mead's own master's thesis concerned the link between exposure to English and IQ test results among Italian-American schoolchildren in New Jersey (Tony and Carmela's grandparents!), and significant numbers of anthropologists have done United States fieldwork in every decade since. All of the Barnard conference senior panelists, for example, are engaged in Americanist research. But in the grand adaptive radiation of disciplinary institutionalization as American universities grew over the twentieth century, anthropology was defined in contradistinction to sociology as the study of non-Westerners (and based on ethnographic rather than quantitative methodology), perpetrating falsehoods about actual work being done in both fields. Since at least the 1940s, anthropologists and middlebrow media have repeatedly "discovered" that anthropology is "just now coming home." In 1974 Time declared that

the gimmick is that anthropologists, after decades of following Margaret Mead to Samoa and Bronislaw Malinowski to the Trobriand Islands, have staked out new territory.... U.S. anthropology, it seems, must recognize that the primary tribe to study is the Americans.

But then, fifteen years later, the New York Times Book Review declared:

Pity the poor anthropologist. She has trekked the highlands, machetied the jungles, sifted the sands for new tribes to study. But the Ik have been exposed, the Tasaday tallied. What's left? Increasingly, today's would-be Meads and Benedicts are turning in their bush jackets for tweeds, for some easy poking around in their own backyards--where, lo and behold, they unearth practices as alien to Western norms as any found in the heart of New Guinea.

And so it goes. While such consistent failure to engage with empirical reality, and the condescending notion that US fieldwork must of necessity be merely "easy poking around," are extremely annoying to those of us who have done arduous research in American settings, I want to make a different point. That is, the culture of forgetting involved here enacts what I have labeled the anthropological gambit, or the pseudo-profound claim that "we" are like "primitives." The attribution of "our" characteristics to "them," and vice versa, is always good for a laugh in popular culture. "We" are only the Ik, the Tasaday, the Trobrianders. An X is only a Y.

As if to prove the point, the day before I left for the Barnard conference, the New York Times happily declared that "some distant day, anthropologists may discover what was surely the tribal art of 20th century American suburbia: paint-by-number paintings."

There is nothing innately wrong with cuteness--it is after all a matter of taste. The point, though, is that the gambit, which is ubiquitous in the public sphere, is inherently political, engages in hidden rhetorical work. It certainly represents Edward Sapir's "destructive analysis of the familiar," one element of a liberatory cultural critique in use in the West at least since Michel de Montaigne's ironized cannibals. But it does so in a profoundly ahistorical, noncontextual way, and so places Others at temporal distance to ourselves and effaces the questions of history and power on both poles of the contrast.

VI.

Finally, anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict pioneered an open-minded consideration of the varieties of cross-cultural human sexuality. Esther Newton, who recently published a memoir magnificently titled Margaret Mead Made Me Gay, spoke compellingly at the conference on the impact of her adolescent reading of Mead's "defense of cultural and temperamental difference." But that reputation for sexual frankness, combined with femaleness, the anthropological gambit and exoticism at home, has also long made women anthropologists, as I have noted for Margaret Mead, vulnerable to sexually insinuating popular-cultural costuming. In the rollicking postwar musical and film On the Town, recently revived on Broadway, a sex-crazed debutante "anthropology student" character throws herself at one of the sailors on leave because he "exactly resembles Pithecanthropus erectus, a man extinct since six million BC." The television series 90210 had a sluttish "feminist anthropologist" character, and Sarah Jessica Parker, in Sex and the City, calls herself a "sexual anthropologist." The way things seem to be going, we might want to specify another media Halloween costume for the feminist anthropologist: bustier and fishnets.

Feminist anthropologists tend to be a pretty tough bunch and certainly can take care of ourselves. (One of the conference participants pointed out to me with great glee that she was wearing fishnet hose.) The real issue is the one with which I began: the deadly intersection of the distorting Halloween costumes, the anthropological gambit and garden-variety sexism in the public sphere preventing the popular dissemination of actual knowledge on gender, culture and power. Consider my own experience. I write about gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class formation in the American past and present, particularly in American cities, and I have done popular writing on racial injustice (and its connections to gender) in the present. But when does the Fourth Estate contact me? Let's just review instances from the past few years.

A 20/20 reporter called, wanting a professor to explain on-camera why "some men are sexually attracted to very obese women." (He kept trying to assure me that the show "would not be sleazy." Right.) A public radio show host invited me to do a Valentine's Day show with her on love and courtship ritual. A local television newswoman wanted my "anthropological" analysis of why women were buying Wonderbras. A Newsweek reporter asked for my thoughts on why, despite so many decades of feminism, American women still enlisted the aids of hair dye, makeup, plastic surgery and diets. Didn't that prove that we were genetically encoded to try to attract men to impregnate us and protect our offspring? A young stringer for Glamour called, looking for "expert" analysis of why women are attracted to certain types of men. An Essence reporter wanted my thoughts on why Afro-American women, according to her, repeatedly and irrationally fell for "thugs." And last fall, a Good Morning America producer begged me to appear on a show with the theme "Is Infidelity Genetic?"

So I wasn't entirely surprised by the Tony Soprano call, with its silly implications of a homogeneous feminism obsessed with mass media portrayals of sex roles. And I don't think even the Whitmanesque Margaret Mead, today, would have an easier time of it. In her memorable last years, Mead could and did play the progressive Sibyl, the wise elder using her vast cross-cultural knowledge to comment favorably, to a largely adulatory press, on the increasing social liberalization that we saw around us. But that was before Jimmy Carter, with whom Mead was closely politically allied, lost disastrously to Ronald Reagan in 1980. It was before the New Right, before the race and gender backlashes of "the underclass" and "feminazis" and the internal problematics of identity politics, before the second, more successful rise of sociobiology, before the global rightward tilt and recent neoliberal triumph, before the corporate consolidation and increasing tabloidization of the media. And, of course, it was before the "turn to language" complexified the ways in which we all envision science, culture and knowledge.

We no longer unproblematically invoke "science," but consider it a culturally contingent, powerful process. Emily Martin of Princeton and Rayna Rapp spoke at the conference about their ongoing and highly regarded research on gender in the production and consumption of scientific knowledge. But both scholars also work actively and even teach with bench scientists. Similarly, many of us work to reposition our analyses, no matter what their regional focus, both to reduce the United States and to enlarge it, always with the goal of accurately apprehending gender, culture, history and power. That is, we no longer simply observe the world from the perspective of the West, but instead consider the long regional and global histories of contact, trade, power politics, racial and ethnic formation and shifting political boundaries of which the United States and other Northern and Southern nations are part. At the same time, we no longer attempt to see the United States just as one among many nations--as in "an X is only a Y"--as it is still and has been the locus of global imperial power since the end of the Second World War.

These less Olympian, more nuanced understandings are a harder sell in the public sphere, but along with other progressives, we continue our Sisyphean engagement. And Mead's image, although not entirely according to her intentions, continues to inspire radical visions of American and global potentials: of international understanding, of gender, race, class and sexual equalities, of a different, more egalitarian world. Marcyliena Morgan of UCLA, for example, reported that the hip-hop-involved adolescent Afro-American girls with whom she works see Mead as "a liberating force." As Rayna Rapp ringingly concluded, "Collectively, we are surely on the case."

When I was an editor at Harper's, I would regularly receive essays from professors hoping to reach beyond the boundaries of their disciplines and communicate with a wider public. Although I confess I opened many of these submissions with a sense of dread, more often than not I was pleasantly surprised by their eloquence and relative accessibility. Contrary to the old saw about academics and impenetrable prose, most of these writers knew how to wear their learning lightly, and their essays were a testament to the proposition that clear thinking and good writing are as likely to be found within the university walls as beyond them.

Occasionally the results were not so happy. I recall one piece by an ambitious young scholar whose prose, he assured me, was 100 percent jargon-free. And, sure enough, it was. The problem, however, was that while he had diligently expunged words like deconstruct, hegemony and problematize--I suspect his computer came equipped with a "find and replace jargon" function--their conceptual ghosts remained. When stripped of his theoretical armor, he limped along unimpressively in an intellectual no-man's land and didn't, it became apparent, have much to say.

Like many academics in recent years, he was consumed by the desire to become a public intellectual. At one point the frenzy for relevance got so out of control that an English professor with a letter to the editor in the local newspaper might boast of having made a "political intervention." (I heard of one professor who had the PI honorific embossed on his business card.) With the proliferation of outlets like cable television and the Internet, intellectuals generally have less difficulty reaching the public than they once did. A trickier task is attracting an audience while maintaining intellectual credibility. Whether motivated by jealousy or dismay, one's colleagues may not look so kindly on one's newfound vocation. If being a public intellectual has never been easier, remaining a private intellectual has never been more difficult.

One might read Marjorie Garber's new book, Academic Instincts, as a meditation on this tension. "In their heart of hearts, scholars long for public and even popular recognition. The Holy Grail of the 'crossover book,' one that impresses one's colleagues but also appeals to the intelligent general reader and perhaps even makes the best-seller list, is a recurring dream in the profession," she writes. The William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and director of Harvard's Humanities Center, Garber knows whereof she speaks. Recently described by the New York Times as "one of the most powerful women in the academic world," Garber divides her books between cutting-edge presses like Routledge and commercial houses like Random House and Simon & Schuster (which paid a $180,000 advance for Vice Versa, her study of bisexuality). She is an extremely prolific and often graceful writer whose work appears in The New Yorker, the New York Times and The London Review of Books.

The author of three well-received scholarly studies of Shakespeare and a half-dozen works of eclectic criticism, Garber is the reigning queen of cultural studies. Whether opining on cross-dressing, bisexuality, the erotic relationship between sex and real estate--or between dogs and their owners--Garber is so compulsively witty, so imaginative and wide-ranging, that she raises intellectual improvisation to an art form. She is the dinner guest every hostess covets, the indefatigably charming conversation partner who, no matter how obscure the topic, keeps things going.

Garber established her modus operandi in her first crossover book, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety (1992). "The tendency [of the critic] has been to look through rather than at the cross-dresser, to turn away from a close encounter with the transvestite, and to want instead to subsume that figure within one of the two traditional genders," she writes. Not Garber. Never having seen a distinction she couldn't subvert, she conducts a properly transgressive analysis of cross-dressing, swiftly dispenses with the false sexual binarity separating the concepts of male and female, and declares victory. And what a victory it is. According to Garber, transvestism represents a category crisis--not only for human sexuality but for the very notion of a category itself. Once considered little more than a cultural oddity, in Garber's hands cross-dressing prophesies nothing less than the end of epistemology. The New York Times praised the book as "a provocative piece of cultural criticism." The Holy Grail was hers.

With Vice Versa (1995), Garber ratcheted things up a notch by exploring the false binarity in the "eroticism of everyday life," the Ding an sich of cultural studies. If her strategy seemed somewhat familiar--bisexuality is "an identity that is also not an identity, a sign of the certainty of ambiguity, the stability of instability, a category that defies and defeats categorization"--her subject felt more substantial. "Is bisexuality a 'third kind' of sexual identity, between or beyond homosexuality and heterosexuality? Or is it something that puts in question the very concept of sexual identity in the first place?" she wondered.

If nothing else, Garber's lively romp through the lives of cultural figures who one had thought were steadfastly straight or gay--John Maynard Keynes, Harold Nicholson, John Cheever, Leonard Bernstein, Marlon Brando, Erik Menendez, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frida Kahlo--was extremely entertaining. Although her overheated prose sometimes resembled fashion magazine advertising copy ("Borderlines are back: Ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual minorities assert their visibility and, thus, their power"), her point was serious. After all, the world is full of sexual and romantic entanglements that defy standard categories; sexual identity does seem to operate along some kind of a continuum. Reading Vice Versa, one suspected that bisexuality--even if not present absolutely everywhere, as Garber intimated--was surely vastly underrepresented in a world bound by the assumptions of identity politics. While Garber's thesis was not particularly radical (Gore Vidal quipped that it was "about three centuries overdue") and her reasoning occasionally flimsy (does a single heterosexual dalliance really transform a lifelong homosexual into a bisexual?), these were important issues about which she was genuinely concerned.

Unfortunately, things went downhill from there. Two of Garber's later works, Dog Love (1996) and Sex and Real Estate (2000), are the kinds of literary follies men of leisure might write on a dare. Though prodigiously researched and fluently written, neither offers an argument for anything beyond its author's intellectual ingenuity. Writing in The New Republic, Zoë Heller described Sex and Real Estate as "so serenely silly--so untroubled by any whiff of a serious idea--as to invite a kind of awe." Sentiments like these have made Garber, along with Berkeley's Judith Butler and NYU's Andrew Ross, the whipping girls and boy of cultural studies.

Garber doesn't identify it as such, but Academic Instincts is clearly a response to her critics. The book is advertised as an exploration of the pleasures and pitfalls of the academic life that opens the door to an important nationwide and worldwide conversation about the reorganization of knowledge. Published by the staid Princeton University Press, sporting a cover illustrated by Raphael's School of Athens (although "digitally enhanced" with a photo of Garber posed with her golden retrievers, Wagner and Yofi), the book is a valiant attempt to convince her colleagues that she can do the job after all. Although filled with her standard potpourri of pointed observations and illuminating examples, the text positively bristles with arguments. But after describing the book in her preface as an analysis, an intervention and a credo, Garber hastens to add that it is also a love letter. And indeed, although seemingly structured with the precision of a work of analytic philosophy (three slender chapters on persons, institutions and language), Academic Instincts is ultimately informed by Garber's favorite psychoanalytic theme: the ineluctable desire everything has for its opposite--a process during which it, inevitably, subverts itself, thereby undermining the very distinction it sought to overcome.

Garber navigates her tripartite structure brilliantly, ferreting out traces of desire in every corner of the dusty academy. Professors are jealous of amateur thinkers' independence (and vice versa); each academic discipline covets its neighbor's superior insights (literary studies envies philosophy, which in turn envies law and/or science); and on the level of language, each discipline attempts to create a technical vocabulary specific to its area of expertise (a k a jargon), while at the same time longing for "a universal language understood by all."

According to Garber, these feuds are essentially unstable, rife with a "doubleness" that precludes any side from ever triumphing over another. As with cross-dressing, and bisexuality before it, Garber's point in Academic Instincts is that we should not--we cannot!--help but look beyond the false binarity of these intellectual constructs and appreciate the exhilarating cacophony of "the conversation of mankind," a phrase she borrows from Richard Rorty (who is, in turn, echoing Michael Oakeshott). "The point is not to choose the right inflection for each term but to show how intellectual life arises out of their changing relationship to each other," she writes. More succinctly, Garber's point is never to choose anything.

With Raphael's School of Athens as her talisman ("a transcendent, multitemporal, interdisciplinary moment in which everything in intellectual life is in the process of being discussed, negotiated, and remade"), Garber does what she does best: she champions a relatively uncontroversial thesis--human sexuality is multifarious, dogs are man's best friend, people love their homes, vigorous discussion enhances intellectual life--with a panache that makes it feel at once daring and completely palatable. (I wouldn't be surprised if Harvard's wizened Board of Trustees slipped in a copy of Academic Instincts with its next request for alumni donations.)

While her point may not be novel, the way she argues it is fascinating, both for itself and for the style of thinking it represents--a style that has become all too typical in cultural studies. Imagine Garber's mind as a kind of intellectual black box from which every either/or proposition that enters exits in the form of a both/and conclusion. Once inside the black box, the either/or proposition is processed through a maze of checkpoints--fake segues, tendentious comparisons, deceptive syllogisms, overbroad generalizations, misleading historical precedents, witty wordplay and sheer chutzpah--before being spit out as elegant yet inoffensive soundbites in the conversation of mankind.

"When you stop and think about it..." is one of Garber's classic introductory phrases--a rhetorical sleight of hand whose effectiveness depends precisely on the reader's not pausing to consider the validity of the what follows. Then, before you can think, Garber is off and running, burying the reader under a mountain of "evidence," occasionally pausing to reload ("It is interesting to note," "It is interesting to recall") before continuing the onslaught.

Take, for example, her argument that the professional wants to seem like an amateur, since amateur status is thought to guarantee virtue. "Politics is a dirty business, and a professional politician an object of suspicion. Better to have a background in something, almost anything, else," she writes. "Like sports, for example," and we're off on the trail of athlete-turned-politicians Bill Bradley and Jack Kemp. "Or consider, at least in the state of California, politicians from the world of entertainment," which is followed by a consideration of Ronald Reagan and Clint Eastwood.

But if you really do stop and think about it, Garber's examples usually fall into two categories: the trivially true and the false. American politics has always been a profession one joins from the outside. Unlike law or medicine, no advanced degree is required, so every new officeholder is an amateur, an outsider--whether he comes from the world of sports, entertainment or business. Therefore being an amateur is a necessary, but not a sufficient, requirement for becoming a politician. Generally, it helps to have been successful in your previous profession; failed actors and mediocre athletes don't tend to get very far in politics. While a candidate's amateur status is hardwired into the structure of the political system (although some wield their "outsider" credentials better than others), the far more important factor, which Garber willfully overlooks, is "success."

The last and most argumentative chapter of Academic Instincts is about jargon, which Garber refers to as "Terms of Art." Jargon is the cultural theorist's Achilles' heel, the point at which the tension between the public and private intellectual is greatest. The purpose of jargon is to make intradisciplinary communication more efficient. Thus, jargon is only a problem for the specialist who wants to cross over and speak to noninitiates about his field. Who has ever criticized a chemist for communicating with fellow chemists in the language of the periodic table, or mathematicians for speaking with algebraic or geometric terms? Objections like these literally don't make sense.

So why don't would-be public intellectuals--professional academics who covet the breadth and audience of an amateur--simply eschew their disciplinary jargon? The reason is that jargon actually plays a double function; as the linguist Walter Nash writes in Jargon: Its Uses and Abuses (1993), it is not only "shop talk" but also "show talk," a means of impressing, sometimes mystifying, the uninitiated. The funny thing about jargon for academic public intellectuals is that it is something--as the old saying goes--they can neither live with nor live without. It makes them both understood (within their profession) and not understood (outside it). And this "intelligibility gap" is the very essence of modern professionalism. Without it you're just another thinker, autodidact or generalist who is at home nowhere and everywhere. With it, you're a fully credentialed specialist, the credibility of whose pronouncements is augmented by your disciplinary and institutional prestige. As with all either/or propositions, Garber wants to have jargon both ways: as a sign of marginality (and hence moral superiority), and of professional expertise.

According to cultural historian Peter Burke's introduction to Languages and Jargons (1995), the word jargon has an extremely long and wide-ranging history. A medieval word, originally found in Provençal and French in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Chaucer used it to describe the twittering of birds. In the fifteenth century, it indicated the language of a marginal or foreign culture (Kafka later called Yiddish jargon). By the sixteenth century it meant gibberish (gargle and jargon are derived from the same root). In an odd twist, there was even a period when it could be used to specify a form of intercultural lingua franca. But by the early eighteenth century, it took on its primary modern meaning as the vocabulary of the professions. Hence the Oxford English Dictionary defines jargon as "any mode of speech abounding in unfamiliar terms, or peculiar to a particular set of people, as the language of scholars or philosophers, the terminology of science or art, or the cant of a class, sect, trade or profession." With the rise of industrial society and the proliferation of professions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was a veritable explosion of jargons.

This complex history makes jargon a perfect candidate for Garberian analysis. There aren't many shades of meaning that haven't been ascribed to the word in the past 800 years--an ambiguity that Garber uses to suggest that what passes for jargon today "is in the ear of the listener."

Although exhaustively argued, Garber's defense of jargon is relatively simple. Since language is a living thing, yesterday's jargon words may very well be today's normal or standard speech. Then comes the deluge: For Adorno, author of The Jargon of Authenticity, the words "authenticity," "genuineness," "transcendence" and "belief" were jargon. Orwell considered "romantic," "plastic," "values," "human," "dead," "sentimental," "natural" and "vitality" to be jargon. ("It would be interesting to know what kind of response Orwell might have had to the movement that has grown up in his name," Garber asks coyly.) Shakespeare alone introduced more than 1,500 words, including "label," "lapse," "dialogue," "design," "accused," "addiction," "rival" and "anchovy" into written English. "Could we imagine doing without them?" Garber asks.

Well, certainly not "anchovy," although we could probably make do without most of the others. But isn't Garber's suggestion a straw man? Who in his right mind argues that we should dispense (her word) with them? Words like "values" and "belief" are indeed vague and clichéd, the kinds of dead language that good writers avoid in order to keep their work from feeling stale. But are they jargon in any recognizable, modern sense of the definition?

Quicker than you can say Aufhebung, Garber has surveyed jargon's linguistic history, broadened its definition, resolved the tension between technical and nontechnical language and transcended what she calls the "paradox of jargon." She does this by constructing a syllogism so slippery it would make Socrates blush, and then dares us to question her faulty logic: (1) Jargon encompasses two conflicting kinds of language: the technical and the banal. (2) Jargon is any kind of language that has been overused and now substitutes for thought. (3) Neologisms, because they are invented to suit the specific needs of thinking, are the only words that aren't jargon. (4) But since neologisms are precisely the kinds of words that are most frequently recognized as jargon... (5) Then all language is jargon.

With its pristine pedigree, jargon turns out to be the public intellectual's best friend--a friend whose moral power, curiously, comes from having all the right enemies. "Too stale; too new. Too foreign; too familiar. Too pedantic; too demotic. Too plain; too fancy. With all these contradictory strikes against it, clearly jargon must be doing something right," Garber writes. Jargon is everything and nothing, a sign of the certainty of ambiguity, the stability of instability, a category that defies and defeats categorization itself.

And this is Marjorie Garber's genius. Cheerfully embracing the irreconcilable, she beats her critics to the punch. What can you possibly say about a thinker who is so comfortable with intellectual incoherence, as long as it carries a whiff of subversion?

"Funny and scary," quoth Quentin Tarantino, "two great tastes that taste great together!" He was referring to his own Pulp Fiction, but the quip could be applied equally to the dark-horse art-house hit of the moment, the refreshingly Tarantino-free With a Friend Like Harry. Everybody's buzzing it as France's answer to Strangers on a Train. No wonder: It's about a stranger (Harry, played to giddy perfection by Sergi Lopez) who, bumping into a man on a road trip, offers unrequested help in bumping off pesky relatives, as in Hitchcock's film. The "fat bastard" (as Strangers on a Train co-writer Raymond Chandler called Hitch to his face) is director Dominik Moll's favorite director, and he admits he named his hero Harry to evoke The Trouble With Harry (as well as Harry Lime and Woody Allen's Harry Block). This Harry's surname is Balestrero--Henry Fonda's character in The Wrong Man.

But just put Hitchcock out of your mind, OK? Because With a Friend Like Harry is no movie brat's bloodless Hitch homage. Moll went straight to the source to make this picture: He steeped himself in Patricia Highsmith, author of the original Strangers on a Train and the novels about Tom Ripley, a killer who steals his best friend's identity and traffics in other people's fraudulent art (a role played with stony gravitas by Dennis Hopper in The American Friend, slickly by Alain Delon in Purple Noon, in gay earnest by Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley and no doubt innovatively by John Malkovich in the forthcoming Ripley's Game). Moll's character Harry is like Highsmith's pragmatic psychos, and he's got a ripe, Ripleyesquely eccentric obsession with the high school buddy he accidentally reunites with, Michel (Laurent Lucas, a pouty mouth drooping beneath a pudding-bowl haircut and dead eyes). With a Friend Like Harry scores by echoing Highsmith's tone (muted horror, deadpan glee), her agnosticism about human motives and her style, as implacable as a sleepwalker in a meticulously real world.

When Highsmith first wrote a Ripley novel, she recalled, "I felt that Ripley was writing it--it just came out." That's just how With a Friend Like Harry unspools--as if Harry directed it, leaving us as passively fascinated as his ambiguous victim, Michel. There's a hint of what's up in the credit sequence, an aerial shot of the beat-up car of Michel and his wife, Claire (Mathilde Seigner), rolling down the hot highway with no air conditioning on an anhedonic holiday with their three authentically squalling toddlers. The highway railings look like film sprockets--Michel and Claire don't know it, but their vacation is trapped inside somebody else's movie! The titles cast shadows on the car and road. The whole film is a contest between the quotidian life of harried parenthood and Harry's cold shadowland of the instant fulfillment of every writer's secret wish.

Michel is a thwarted writer, you see. He precariously supports his burdensome clan by teaching French to the Japanese in Paris, but in school he wrote the ambitious, passionately numbskulled poem "The Dagger in the Skin of Night" and the abortive sci-fi novella The Flying Monkeys, about gibbons with propellers on their heads who "did chores and spied on people." He hasn't thought about his diaper-dampened literary dreams in years, but when Michel stops at a gas station and Harry recognizes him, Harry forcibly reminds him of literature's loss.

It's an uncomfortable scene: The men's room walls seem to close in, Harry's urgency is odd, he seems alien--a Spanish actor in a French flick, though his performance won him a Cesar, the French Oscar, for Best Actor. Michel has no memory of his alleged classmate. As Harry itemizes their shared past, you feel sweaty and mesmerized, like Michel. Harry has puckish little parentheses tugging at the corners of his mouth; his smile is like a sunlamp. The windshield wipers on his spotless Mercedes no doubt go, "NICE-guy-NICE-guy." Yet his affability bear-hugs you. Harry makes like a good cop with a bad cop's will to power. Yet what writer can resist someone who quotes you from the school lit mag verbatim, urges you to be true to your gift, hands out cash like a one-man MacArthur Foundation (Harry's rich) and offers your testy wife and keening kids a ride in a car renowned for silence and climate control?

The scene walks the scary-funny razor with weightless aplomb. Pretty soon Harry and his young squeeze, Plum (Sophie Guillemin), a ruby-lipped, passive pinup, get themselves invited to the picturesquely decrepit country manse Michel is refurbishing on a shoestring. Moll, an inexperienced director trying out the enchanting toy of Cinemascope, gets the goods: That mansion looks sensational against the looming woods and Magritte sky, a dark stone god brooding with one window ablaze like an angry eye. These shots, plus aerial shots of sinuous roads engulfed by greenery and driver's-eye views of the car approaching the mansion by night, are as resonant as the more pompous tableaux that introduce each chapter of Breaking the Waves.

Inside, the manse is as psychically cramped as the men's room where Harry met Michel. It's an obscurely threatening place and also a place of silliness, like the absurdly low-ceilinged office in Being John Malkovich; when Michel finds Harry raiding the fridge late at night--Harry boasts that he always eats an egg after each orgasm--we might as well be in Fawlty Towers. Many shots skillfully exploit the anxiety potential of narrow hallways without looking like self-conscious lifts straight from the Fat Bastard.

The whole house is drab, barren, ramshackle--except the bathroom, which Michel's parents redecorated in blinding fuchsia, to surprise him. And control him. Moll shows us Michel on the phone, ineffectually protesting the imposition of Dad's bad taste. Not that Michel lacks bad taste of his own; he just needs somebody to push him around. Dad (Dominique Rozan) is an amusing patriarchal caricature, an impenitent groper of dames, even his daughter-in-law, and he's a mad dentist as well. When Michel visits their apartment, Dad insists on drilling his teeth in the den. Apparently, Michel won't be jawboning his father into any power reapportionment anytime soon. Back in his own home, when Michel decides to resuscitate his neglected novella, he curls up in that fuchsia bathroom like a fetus and writes all night. Michel is a slave to his ambition and dream of freedom.

Life in the mansion with Harry as Boswell in residence has a dreamy quality--when Michel has a narcissistic dream about the flying monkey from his novella, it's no less creepy-comic than his waking hours. To keep it all from lapsing into abstract satirical fantasy, Moll buttresses the dreamlike scenes with rigorously realistic snippets of domestic life. Claire evinces a new interest in Michel--she'd never suspected him of poetry--and even bonds with Plum. The girls are crazy for Plum, who yearns for kids of her own. "I wish I were a normal person," mourns Plum. This is affecting, because up to now Plum has registered so strongly as a walking symbol, an inflatable ecstasy receptacle, a lurid David Lynch critter. To find out she was human all along is appalling. Suddenly, Harry and his damn eggs don't seem so funny. At dinner, when Harry viciously puts down Plum and she leaves the table, we wince for real. Pain hurts, even if you're just a dimwitted symbol. It has dawned on Claire that Harry's influence is not wholly benign.

As Harry gets scarier, clearing out the human deadwood obstructing Michel's literary vocation, the movie starts to part company with its illustrious forebears. It gets more trivial as Harry's mental problems get more serious. Harry snickering and feinting and being unpredictable is unnerving; Harry howling mad isn't worth listening to. You want to throw a shoe at him. The sad fact is, every psycho is a sphinx without a secret, and only the greatest storytellers can concoct a narrative illusion that satisfies our craving for meaning where life provides none. Even if it's only to rub our noses, as haughty Highsmith does, in the meaninglessness of life and death, and the likelihood that God, if He's up there, evidently resembles Ripley.

Moll's implicit commentary on the nature of fiction and the ruthlessness of art is not a patch on Highsmith's. The movie ends like a firecracker that emits a respectable spurt of sparks instead of exploding. Maybe Moll just isn't interested in climaxes featuring what French critic Claude Chabrol called the "world of vertigo and paroxysm" that Hitchcock (and most Highsmith adapters) favor. Call me Anglo, but I could use more paroxysm here. Still, if With a Friend Like Harry is no match for Strangers on a Train cinematically, the Fat Bastard himself would admit it's better written and acted. The David Sinclair Whitaker score is solid (they say he composed for the Hammer horror movies), the use of Dolores Del Rio's 1928 song "Ramona" as Harry's leitmotif works, the editing rhythms are impeccable and the movie somehow manages to raise hopes sky-high, faintly disappoint and then linger in the back of your mind for days, an unremovable burr. It's a giggle and a brrrrr. By modern standards, it's a masterpiece.

"Business complications do strange things to our patriotism and to our ethics," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in 1945. It has taken half a century, but historians are responding to her indirect appeal to confront US corporations that supported Nazi Germany.

In the past decade, particularly in Germany, a number of historians such as Ulrich Herbert and Karl Heinz Roth have turned away from cold war academic debates and traditional approaches to pursue research from the bottom up, studying regions and cities where Nazi crimes occurred, recording oral histories and writing about forgotten victims. Such studies have led to the corporate institutions that benefited from human suffering.

Corporate policies and practices during World War II, often extreme but not isolated, point to related activities of multinationals today. The ways used by big business "to pursue profits and interests abroad by the means they see fit, regardless of the costs to foreign peoples, have not been reformed," writes Nicholas Levis, co-author of Working for the Enemy.

Working for the Enemy and IBM and the Holocaust are two new works flowing from this stream of historiography, and they demonstrate that while US corporate giants such as Ford, General Motors and IBM were among the powers that be, patriotism and ethics held little place in their worldview. So-called corporate neutrality as expressed in 1938 by Alfred Sloan, president of GM, meant that an international business "should conduct its operations in strictly business terms, without regard to the political beliefs...of the country in which it is operating." Following this approach, James Mooney, GM's most important executive in Europe before the war, worked closely with the Nazis, and Henry Ford before and during the war oversaw the production of hundreds of thousands of vehicles for the Third Reich.

As Edwin Black confirms in IBM and the Holocaust, the driving force behind IBM's support of the Nazis was its chairman, Thomas Watson, who had risen from a horse-and-buggy peddler to head IBM and become America's leading corporate statesman. Watson was one of Hitler's foremost defenders here. He valued Germany as an important market, the largest after the United States. During the 1930s he traveled frequently to Germany, micromanaging Dehomag, IBM's subsidiary. When worldwide anti-German protests and boycott actions raised questions about dealing with the Third Reich, Watson's "corrugated scruples" avoided any moral dilemmas.

Throughout the 1930s IBM's German profits soared as Watson greatly expanded Dehomag's operations. In recognition of Watson's support, Hitler awarded him the Merit Cross of the German Eagle in 1937. (Henry Ford and James Mooney also received medals from Hitler.)

IBM and the Holocaust is an ambitious book. The result of arduous research, it reveals in detail how IBM's Hollerith punch-card machines facilitated and hastened the Holocaust. (The process, a forerunner of the computer, was invented in the 1880s by Herman Hollerith, an American of German ancestry. A Hollerith card contained standardized holes, each representing a different variable to be measured. The card would then be fed into a "reader" machine, which tabulated the specified series of punched holes.) "From the very first moments and continuing through the twelve year existence of the Third Reich," writes Black, "IBM placed its technology at the disposal of Hitler's program of Jewish destruction and territorial domination."

As early as the German census of 1933, in "an unparalleled accomplishment for IBM," the Holleriths provided "profession-by-profession, city-by-city, and indeed a block-by-block revelation of the Jewish presence." Besides counting people, IBM's Hollerith machines performed a number of functions, including scheduling trains, tabulating aircraft engines and counting bank transfers.

But it was in the deportations to concentration camps that IBM technology was put to its most terrible use. At the Wannsee conference, where the Final Solution was implemented, two Hollerith experts were present. A Hollerith department operated at nearly every concentration camp, and Holleriths tracked forced laborers at Flossenburg and other slave-labor camps. "Without IBM's machinery, continuing upkeep and service, as well as the supply of punch cards, Hitler's camps could have never managed the numbers they did," Black concludes. To illustrate the importance of the Holleriths in aiding the Holocaust he offers two case studies: Holland and France.

In 1941 the Nazis conducted a census in Holland assisted by Hollerith machines and 132 million punch cards sent by IBM in the US that same year. After the census was compiled, punched and sorted, the authorities demanded that all Jews wear the Jewish star. "But it was not the outward visage of six gold points worn on the chest," Black points out, "it was the 80 columns punched and sorted in a Hollerith facility that marked the Jews of Holland for deportation to concentration camps."

In contrast, France lacked a tradition of census-taking that identified religion and "simply did not possess the punch card orientation of many other European countries, such as Holland and Germany." (Blocking the counting further was a mysterious government employee and director of the French tabulating system named René Carmille, who eventually was found out as a member of the resistance, arrested by Klaus Barbie and sent to Dachau, where he perished.)

The final numbers, Black writes, point up the differences between the efficiency of the Hollerith census in Holland and its inefficiency in France. In Holland approximately 73 percent of the Dutch Jews were deported and died; in France approximately 25 percent of the French Jews met similar treatment. (Not discussed by Black are the many other factors in each country that determined the fate of the victims.)

Whether overseen by Nazi executives or Watson's own, IBM Europe thrived throughout the war. Even after the United States entered the war, according to Black, "IBM as a company would know the innermost details of Hitler's Hollerith operations, designing the programs, printing the cards, and servicing the machines." IBM subsidiaries traded directly with Germany and Italy. "It was business as usual throughout the war." But Watson and his New York directors erected a wall of credible deniability.

IBM obfuscated its contacts and trade with the Nazis by creating smokescreens that included intermediaries, false dates and missing documents. Watson, who overnight became a leading advocate of the Allied war effort, was so well connected to the US government, particularly the State Department, that when IBM was investigated by the FBI for its Nazi connections and by a Justice Department official for possible monopolistic practices and trading with the enemy, the investigations were soon called off. IBM was untouchable. "The firm had now become a strategic partner in the war against the Third Reich--even as it continuously supplied the enemy, as before, through its overseas subsidiaries," Black writes. By 1943, "both sides could not afford to proceed without the company's all-important technology. Hitler needed IBM. So did the Allies." When the war ended, IBM reaped the embargoed profits from its German- and Axis-controlled operations.

Fast-paced, IBM and the Holocaust is occasionally hyperbolic in its language and conclusions and at times unsubstantiated. For example, Black writes: "During IBM's continuing wartime commerce, the world was always aware that the machinery of Nazi occupation was being wielded to exterminate as many Jews as possible as quickly as possible." But source material is usually elusive--either nonexistent or closed--as was apparent in my recent efforts to research the Nazi connections of Kodak and (with German historian Hersch Fischler) of Bertelsmann, ironically the publisher of IBM and the Holocaust. Surprisingly, some reviews of the book have been hostile. For example, Gabriel Schoenfeld, senior editor of Commentary, writing in the New York Times Book Review, charged Black with forcing "his evidence into a box" and criticized him for avoiding "the subtle hues of genuine scholarship." He also launched an ad hominem attack on Black for writing "techno-thrillers, and articles for a variety of popular magazines like Mademoiselle and Redbook." One reason for such reactions may be that Black's previous book, The Transfer Agreement, was about a 1933 pact between Zionist leaders and the Nazis, which allowed Jews to go to Palestine in exchange for lifting a boycott of German products. Still a controversial subject, some critics may blame Black for even writing about it. It's unfortunate that Black is attacked in such a way, as IBM and the Holocaust is an important contribution to Holocaust studies.

Working for the Enemy is less popularized in its approach. A US writer living in Germany, Nicholas Levis invited three German historians to examine for English-speaking readers the history of Ford and GM in Germany. Comprehensive, it provides, among other things, a plethora of information and moving first-person testimonies from former forced laborers. The book works from several angles. The first two chapters present the wartime histories of the German Opel division of General Motors and the German Werke subsidiary of Ford; the next chapter focuses on a resistance worker at Opel and the final sections include oral histories, an in-depth study of Ford's use of forced labor, and an overview of current reparation claims.

Estimates of the total number of civilians and POWs subject to forced labor under the Nazis in World War II vary from 10 million to 12 million. The vast majority of the German Reich's slaves were rounded up in the Soviet Union and Poland. Returning home after the war as "displaced persons," many were treated as collaborators or fell silent about their wartime experiences. With the end of the cold war and with lawsuits filed by former forced laborers against German companies as well as against Ford and GM, the subject finally gained public attention.

As early as 1940, Ford Werke was using French POWs as forced laborers. Karola Fings, a leading German historian of forced labor, writes in her chapter that by June 1943, about half of Ford's 5,000 employees were forced laborers, and at the main Ford factory in Cologne, the racist order of the Nazis was applied. As one former forced laborer recalled, "The French weren't treated so badly, but Poles and Russians and Yugoslavs, those were the so-called subhumans."

Conditions in one camp were described by a woman inmate: "In the middle of the barrack there was iron oven. At night it was locked up and some iron bucket would be set [on the floor]. That was our toilet. Around the camp there was a barbed wire fence, guard posts everywhere." Other inmates described beatings and pervasive hunger.

Ford was an important partner of the Wehrmacht up to and during the war. For example, fully a third of the 350,000 Wehrmacht trucks in 1942, some 120,000, were built by Ford. "It can be stated," Fings writes, "that Ford Werke's course in the 1940s was followed with the full knowledge and support of the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn." When the war ended, many of the same executives who had been in charge of Ford Werke after a brief hiatus returned to their old jobs.

General Motors' Opel division was in many ways a mirror image of Ford's Werke subsidiary: Headquarters was in touch during the war with its subsidiary; the company was an integral part of the German war machine (manufacturing, among other things, trucks, tanks and aircraft); it made high profits and it used large numbers of slave laborers. (POW forced labor began in 1940, and American executives of GM witnessed it.) During the war, the SS guarded the forced laborers, a number of whom were women.

The crimes of GM, Ford and IBM were uncovered only through investigations by the authors and other researchers, whose persistence was matched by the persistence of the corporations in cover-up and denial. For example, when Bradford Snell, a young Senate staff attorney, told a Senate subcommittee in 1974 that without the support of Ford and General Motors the Nazis would never have been able to pursue the war as long and as successfully as they did, and that "communications as well as matériel continually flowed between GM plants in Allied countries and GM plants in Axis-controlled areas," GM's lawyers succeeded in discrediting his claims then as "totally false." When Ford Werke was approached by scholars to release documents, it claimed it had no documents of relevance. When a number of companies announced their willingness to participate in the German forced-labor reparation funds, Ford Werke held out, relenting only after its name appeared on a list released by an American Jewish organization. IBM finally gave Edwin Black what he terms "proper access," but only after a number of refusals. "Since WWII, the company has steadfastly refused to cooperate with outside authors," Black writes.

Although primarily about the 1930s and 1940s, IBM and the Holocaust and Working for the Enemy underscore the myriad human rights implications of today's corporate policies in a global economy.