The editors of the New Republic took a position similar to [John] Dewey's, except that they arrived at it even earlier. In his editorial in the magazine's first issue in November, 1914, Herbert Croly cheerily prophesied that the war would stimulate America's spirit of nationalism and therefore bring it closer to democracy. At first hesitant about the collectivist war economies in Europe, the New Republic soon began to cheer and urged the United States to follow the lead of the warring European nations and socialize its economy and expand the powers of the state. ...

As America prepared to enter the war, the New Republic eagerly looked forward to imminent collectivization, sure that it would bring"immense gains in national efficiency and happiness." After war was declared, the magazine urged that the war be used as"an aggressive tool of democracy.""Why should not the war serve," the magazine asked,"as a pretext to be used to foist innovations upon the country?" In that way, progressive intellectuals could lead the way in abolishing"the typical evils of the sprawling half-educated competitive capitalism."

Convinced that the United States would attain socialism through war, Walter Lippmann, in a public address shortly after American entry, trumpeted his apocalyptic vision of the future:

["]We who have gone to war to insure democracy in the world will have raised an aspiration here that will not end with the overthrow of the Prussian autocracy. We shall turn with fresh interests to our own tyrannies--to our Colorado mines, our autocratic steel industries, sweatshops, and our slums. A force is loose in America....Our own reactionaries will not assuage it...We shall know how to deal with them.["]

Walter Lippmann, indeed, had been the foremost hawk among the New Republic intellectuals. He had pushed Croly into backing Wilson and into supporting intervention, and then had collaborated with Colonel House in pushing Wilson into entering the war. Soon Lippmann, an enthusiast for conscription, had to confront the fact that he himself was only 27 years old and in fine health, and therefore was eminently eligible for the draft. Somehow, though, Lippmann failed to unite theory and praxis. Young Felix Frankfurter, progressive Harvard Law Professor and a close associate of the New Republic editorial staff, had just been selected as a special assistant to Secretary of War Baker. Lippmann somehow felt that his own inestimable services could be better used planning the postwar world than battling in the trenches. And so he wrote to Frankfurter asking for a job in Baker's office."What I want to do," Lippmann pleaded,"is to devote all my time to studying and speculating on the approaches to peace and the reaction from the peace. Do you think you can get me an exemption on such high-falutin grounds?" Lippmann then rushed to reassure Frankfurter that there was nothing personal in his request. After all, he explained,"the things that need to be thought out, are so big that there must be no personal element mixed up with this." Frankfurter having paved the way, Lippmann wrote to Secretary Baker. He assured Baker that he was only applying for a job and draft exemption on the pleading of others and in stern submission to the national interest. As Lippmann put it in a remarkable demonstration of cant:

["]I have consulted all the people whose advice I value and they urge me to apply for exemption. You can well understand that this is not a pleasant thing to do, and yet, after searching my soul as candidly as I know how, I am convinced that I can serve my bit much more effectively than as a private in the new armies.["]

No doubt.

As icing on the cake, Lippmann added an important bit of disinformation. For, he piteously wrote to Baker, the fact is"that my father is dying and my mother is absolutely alone in the world. She does not know what his condition is, and I cannot tell anyone for fear it would become known." Apparently, no one else knew his father's condition either, including the medical profession and his father, for the elder Lippmann managed to peg along successfully for the next ten years.

Isn't it lovely to see that the New Republic's long tradition of advocating for war, for"national greatness," for collectivization, and for leaving that nasty business of actually doing the fighting to others is almost a century old -- and now carried on with the same nobility and purity of spirit by its current Senior Editor?

For the future, I am almost tempted to recommend that, as a matter of genuine national security, every politician, public intellectual and journalist who loudly and insistently votes or advocates for war should be required to serve in the front lines -- if not as a soldier, then as a nurse or in some similar position. Perhaps then, we shall one day be safe from those who proclaim to know what is best for all of us, epecially when that"best" requires death and destruction in wars that have nothing to do with national self-interest or self-defense.

Besides, it would only be just.

No comment:

WASHINGTON, April 25 — A vast multitude of protesters marched here today in support of abortion rights and to highlight what organizers contend is the Bush administration's erosion of reproductive liberties. ...

Karen Hughes, an adviser to President Bush, appeared on CNN today to provide a counterpoint to the anti-Bush sentiment on the Mall. She praised the president on his"very strong record for women," saying he has employed more women in senior-level staff positions than any other presidential administration.

She also said that abortion-rights activists were moving against what she said was popular momentum, particularly since the terrorist attacks of 2001, in favor of anti-abortion policies.

"I think that after September 11, the American people are valuing life more and we need policies to value the dignity and worth of every life," she said."President Bush has worked to say, let's be reasonable, let's work to value life, let's reduce the number of abortions, let's increase adoptions. And I think those are the kinds of policies the American people can support, particularly at a time when we're facing an enemy and, really, the fundamental issue between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life."

Other than that, carry on.

(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.)

Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman said, “The structure of the government…should not be overly large.”

Gee, maybe we in the United States should hope for occupation.

The two and a half weeks (since my update of April 5) might look like a lull in the crisis at the University of Southern Mississippi. After all, it was on April 1 that the Mississippi College Board met in executive session and decided to put former State Supreme Court justice Reuben Anderson in charge of the appeal hearing for Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer, the two tenured professors summarily fired by USM President Shelby Thames back on March 5. And the Glamser-Stringer hearing won't take place for another 5 days.

In fact, a lot has been brewing and percolating. As always, the best place to go for news about the crisis is the Fire Shelby site. The discussion forum on Fire Shelby has been getting"trolled" more often during the last couple of weeks, but that's happening because Thames and his cronies have come to realize the danger the site poses to them.

So here's the rundown:

On April 7, the USM Faculty Senate's Ad Hoc Committee on Credential and Hiring and Tenure Processes issued a preliminary report on Angela Dvorak's qualifications to evaluate professors for tenure or promotion. Using information obtained from the USM Web site and other sources, the committee concluded that Dvorak had not been an Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, as she claimed. Rather, she had been granted tenure in the University of Kentucky system, because she was the President of Ashland (KY) Community College. (Glamser and Stringer were fired for raising the very same objection.) The committee could not use the vita that Dvorak had submitted at the time of hiring as a source; she refused to provide it except in a face-to-face meeting with the committee, which would have to agree not to make copies of the document, and it wisely refused to accept such conditions. The Faculty Senate has also had to make a Freedom of Information Act request to find out whether a proper job search was conducted when Dvorak was hired (to date, the Thames administration has not delivered the requested information; it has until April 29 to do so). The committee further established that Dvorak held no tenured faculty position at USM (an important matter to settle, because various faculty titles have been attributed to her on the university's Web site). Consequently, she has never earned tenure at a 4-year institution, and is therefore not allowed, under USM's Faculty Handbook, to evaluate anyone for tenure, or promotion to Associate Professor. A fortiori she is not qualified to evaluate anyone for promotion to Full Professor, a rank she has never been promoted to herself.

On April 16, the full Faculty Senate voted 31-9, with one abstention, to approve a resolution stating that Dvorak is not qualified to participate in tenure or promotion for USM faculty members; in fact, that playing this role puts her in violation of the university's Faculty Handbook. Dvorak complained,"There's nothing in my job description that requires me to be a tenured professor." Leaving no doubt about her allegiances, USM spokesperson Lisa Mader declared,"It makes me sick to see her treated this way." Meanwhile, Dvorak carried on about being unfairly deprived of the opportunity to talk (or bully) her way out of the scrape she was in:"I'm worn out"..."I've never worked with people who wouldn't sit down and talk with me.""

My information concerning the next three items is derived from the Fire Shelby message board, which is not set up to allow linking to separate messages.

Reliable sources say that Thames, in his usual thoughtful, self-controlled fashion, responded to the report of April 7 with a plan to dissolve the Faculty Senate, but was dissuaded at the last moment by one dean. Supposedly, too, reporters from a couple of Mississippi newspapers have interviewed faculty members and administrators, and are in a position to run this explosive story, but have held back.

Thames and his laywers waited until the due date (April 14) to reveal the formal charges to Glamser and Stringer, who by then had agreed to a public hearing. Despite fervent rumor mongering out of the Dome (the central administration building on the main USM campus) about how G and S had stolen Dvorak's Social Security number, or pretended to be official representatives of USM, Dvorak's vita is a public document, as is any information necessary to impeach it, and there is no reason to think G and S did anything but consult public sources. Preparations have been made for a major media presence at the April 28 hearing (spaces will be reserved for 6 satellite trucks), but it has been placed in a relatively small room (seating a total of 100, with only 35 seats available to attendees from USM). Now that he is no longer able to conduct a show trial, it appears that Shelby Thames does not want more than a handful of professors or students in the hearing room.

It has further emerged that Dvorak's first job in Mississippi, as Vice President of Mississippi Technology Alliance in 2000-2002, placed her in an organization which also included Shelby Thames as a member of the Board of Directors. Another Director of MTA was Carl Nicholson, a member of the Mississippi College Board who has been a consistent sponsor of Shelby Thames. Exactly what this foundation and a related body called the Institute for Technology Development did, besides pay the salary and benefits of Dvorak and a couple of other executives, remains to be determined. In a speaker bio for a recent speech at a conference, Dvorak maintained that,"During her tenure [er, unfortunate choice of words, but she means while working at MTA and ITD] Dr. Dvorak made over 200 public presentations, conference papers, and keynote speeches." I guess old habits die hard.

And the Student Government Association at the main campus in Hattiesburg, whose leaders have steadastly refused to criticize Thames, has been the recipient of an unexplained 123% increase in its annual budget.

While the standoff continues, faculty vacancies are growing. USM is now short by 112 faculty positions; the exact figures are hard to find out, as is unfortunately typical at state universities, but apparently the number of faculty remaining is around 540. Some of those who are leaving have openly cited the Thames regime as a reason for their decision. Some departments have been gutted. Two top administrators have been interviewing elsewhere: Joe Paul, the VP for Student Affairs, and Tim Hudson, the Provost, who had obviously been out of the loop on many of Thames' decisions. The public reactions by Thames and his spokesflack, Lisa Mader, can only be described as desperately creative:"it is a credit to this university that competing institutions look to the University of Southern Mississippi for outstanding candidates for leadership positions."

In a post already bulging toward epic length, I've had to leave out further subplots, pertaining to assorted crosscurrents in local politics, the tension between supporters and opponents of gambling casinos in the state, and to the apparent rationale behind the recent appointments of 4 new College Board members by new Governor Haley Barbour. These are better taken up by someone with native-level knowledge of Mississippi politics.

Those safely out of range of Thames' mismanagement may be intrigued by the story because of its three-ring circus quality. But the USM struggle has a deeper meaning. What Thames and his cronies are seeking, in their uniquely ham-handed way, is the same thing that many an upper administrator at many a research-oriented state university dreams about. When his fits of rage and bouts of foot-in-mouth disease aren't distracting him, Thames is working to make USM into an adminstrative university: an institution whose mission is to employ administrators, and whose other employees are on hand to support administrators, or bring in the revenue to build and sustain maximum administrative employment. Grant-funded researchers are to be recruited, because their grants and contracts are a source of revenue to the administration, and undergraduate students will be tolerated so long as the tuition payments and state subsidies they bring in cannot be replaced by new income streams. But during the transitional period during which undergrads continue to encumber the campus, they are best taught by instructors on year-to-year contracts, who will put down no roots and raise no objections.

The march toward an administrative university continues apace. Thames, like many applied science and engineering bigots, is said to regard the art program as a drag on USM. Now we learn that the Art Department is to exiled from campus to a renovated high school in downtown Hattiesburg. And while unfried budget numbers are, as usual, impossible to come by, knowledgeable insiders report that Thames has been taking lines in the budget that belonged to now-vacant faculty posts and reclassifying them as administrative lines. Not only does this enable him to put more yes men and hatchet women on the payroll, it furthers the all-important task of diverting resources from faculty to adminstration.

A lot depends on the outcome of this struggle, and there are enough juicy tales in it to hold the attention of crack investigative reporters--so where the hell are the national media? If the New York Times paid half the attention to USM that it is giving the grad student strike at Columbia, there might be adequate public pressure to get the state to audit the books of several USM units that have become locally notorious for their squirrelly and unsavory financial practices. If even the Atlanta Constitution deigned to notice what was going on, a couple of states to the west, lots of other media outlets would want in on the act. Not to take anything away from the Mississippi newspapers, which have performed much better than their counterparts in South Carolina or some other parts of the country would have done, but one of the reporters at the Hattiesburg American is obviously biased in favor of Thames, and (as is the case with reporters nearly everywhere) most are doing a lot of things at once, and find it easiest to write stories when their information has been handed to them on a plate. The serious investigative work continues to be done by volunteers at the Fire Shelby site, whose impact can be gauged from the citations it is now getting in news stories, and the derogatory public references it is now getting from Thames supporters.

Which brings me an editorial in today's Economist discussing Tony Blair's recent offer to put EU membership to a vote in the UK. I know some libertarians on this page will scoff at this, but I think it's a good idea. First off, I think it might be part of a larger trend towards democracy on the continent which, although certainly worse then a republican form of government, is waaaaaaay better then the plutocracy that currently dominates most European countries. Second, I can't imagine that once voters see what's really in the EU constitution, and interests start to discuss it publicly, that it will pass.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, it would strengthen the power that the federal units, the nations themselves, would have in the system. That's the only way something like the EU can work. If the EU bureaucracy has grown recently like a football player on steroids, turning the EU entry decision over to voters might get the nations themselves in the weight room with a fighting chance to make this work.

Juan Cole testified on an expert panel before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on Tuesday -- and who do you think was added as an"expert" at the last minute? Richard Perle, that's who. Cole has a fascinating report about the proceedings, including this:

Perle's entire testimony was a camouflaged piece of flakking for Ahmad Chalabi. ...

In fact, Perle kept talking about"the Iraqis" when it was clear he meant Chalabi. He said the US should have turned power over to"the Iraqis" long before now.

But here's an interesting contradiction. I said at one point that I thought Bremer should have acquiesced in Grand Ayatollah Sistani's request for open elections to be held this spring, and that if they had been, it might have forestalled the recent blow-up. I had in mind that Muqtada al-Sadr in particular would have been kept busy acting as a ward boss, trying to get his guys returned from East Baghdad & Kufa, etc.

Perle became alarmed and said that scheduling early elections would not have prevented the"flare-up" because the people who mounted it were enemies of freedom and uninterested in elections. Perle has this bizarre black and white view of the world and demonizes people right and left. A lot of the Mahdi Army young men who fought for Muqtada are just neighborhood youth, unemployed and despairing. Some are fanatics, but most of them don't hate freedom-- most of them have no idea what it is, having never experienced democracy.

But anyway, what struck me was the contradiction between Perle's insistence that the US should have handed power over to Iraqis months ago, and his simultaneous opposition to free and fair elections. The only conclusion I can draw is that he wants power handed to Chalabi, who would then be a kind of dictator and would not go to the polls any time soon.

It is deeply shameful that Perle is still pushing Chalabi, and may well succeed in installing him. Chalabi is wanted for embezzling $300 million from a Jordanian bank. He cannot account for millions of US government money given him from 1992 to 1996. He was flown into Iraq by the Pentagon (Perle was on the Defense Advisory Board, a civilian oversight committee for the Pentagon) with a thousand of his militiamen. The US military handed over to Chalabi, a private citizen, the Baath intelligence files that showed who had been taking money from Saddam, giving Chalabi the ability to blackmail large numbers of Iraqi and regional actors. It was Chalabi who insisted that the Iraqi army be disbanded, and Perle almost certainly was an intermediary for that stupid decision. It was Chalabi who insisted on blacklisting virtually all Baath Party members, even if they had been guilty of no crimes, effectively marginalizing all the Sunni Iraqi technocrats who could compete with him for power. It was Chalabi who finagled his way onto the Interim Governing Council even though he has no grassroots support (only 0.2 percent of Iraqis say they trust him).

Perhaps there is nothing more dangerous for a president to think.