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By Michael F. Duggan

One can only assume that Western foreign policy makers and diplomats these days are not poker players.

If news stories from the past few days are correct, it is likely that US-made, long-range, tactical ballistic missiles fired from Ukraine, will soon be hitting targets deep inside Russia. The Kremlin is warning that this would be regarded as a direct attack by the United States and NATO on Russia and therefore, an existential threat. They are saying that it would mean a great powers war between the US/NATO and Russia.

In other words, the West would be pursuing a policy that could result in World War III based on the assumption that the other side, which has until now been portrayed as an unreasonable, murderous aggressor, will now act with caution, moderation, reason, restraint, and perhaps timidity. It assumes that all of the warnings coming from Russia are just bluffs. Thus the decision of whether or not to go to war is being surrendered to the discretion of a potential adversary.

But as any competent poker player will tell you, the problem with a strategy that assumes the opponent is always bluffing, is that it only works until it doesn’t. It only works if the opponent is bluffing. As the great Prussian realist, Otto von Bismarck, is supposed to have observed, “Russians are slow to saddle, but fast to ride.” If Western policy is based on the “rational choice” assumptions of game theory, then Western policymakers would do well to examine how well such theories served the US during the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, and unlike the Cuban Missile Crisis, there is little conspicuous evidence that the US and Russia are even talking to each other. What could possibly go wrong?

At this point, with Russia winning the war in eastern Ukraine, they may not retaliate directly and disproportionately against the West (especially, as other have noted, in light of the many other ways they can retaliate less dramatically). Why upend the chessboard if you are winning? But again, this assumes that people are predominantly reasonable, and as some commentators have observed, we now stand closer to thermonuclear war than at any other point in history. The US and Russia have a little under 6,000 nuclear warheads each, with 1,419 and 1,549 (respectively) deployed on land based missiles, submarine launched ballistic missiles, and on strategic bombers.

The relevant question to those who believe that Russia is bluffing is: What if you are wrong?

By Michael F. Duggan

The Summer Olympics is over. It seemed shorter this year, which is fine with me. I have always been ambivalent about the summer games. I never watch it on my own, and yet if it is on a television in a restaurant or bar, I cannot look away. If there was one thing that Jefferson and Nietzsche agree upon, it is the admiration for human excellence in all of its forms, and I concur. It is also a distraction of healthy competition in a troubled time, with “controversies” of little consequences outside of sports.

On the other hand, as a generalist, I find the idea of young lives obsessively devoted to single activities that come down to a few zero-sum moments of triumph or tragedy to be grotesque, and not infrequently a waste. Such focus to the exclusion of so much else in life is likely to cause harm. The loss to a young life in terms of opportunity costs (and later in dollars spent on psychiatrists) may be significant. I will still watch boxing and some of the daredevil sports of winter, but overall I take little interest in sports that are determined by the scoring of judges. Regarding the competitive sport of “breaking,” I will maintain a Buddha-like silence.

Of course I will not deny the pleasure of watching hard-fought competition between physical geniuses, people who can do things that I cannot, and achieving difficult success through physical prowess and training against the best opponents in the world. The problem, I suppose, is that outside of endurance, durability, longevity, and certain precision activities (e.g. diving, pitching, gymnastics), the physical exceptionality of humans is pretty mediocre. We are among the physical scrubs of the animal kingdom, and demonstrations of our physical prowess, such as they are, are among the lest interesting things about us.

Take Simone Biles: this phenom of women’s gymnastics can supposedly jump 12 feet, vertically, something that few, of the world’s other 8.1 billion people can do. And yet if she had the proportional abilities of an ordinary house cat, she would be able to leap 25-30 feet vertically. If she was a flea, she could clear the Eiffel Tower with room to spare.

And then there is swimming. The fastest swimmers in the 50 meter freestyle can move an around 5.6 mph (Michael Phelps once clocked an amazing 8.8 mph with a mono fin). By contrast an Indo-Pacific sailfish can move at speeds up to 68 mph underwater. The fastest human being can sprint to around 27.5 mph, relative to a cheetah’s bursts of 70 mph (or 10 mph slower than the underwater speed of some dolphins). A harbor seal (an animal roughly on the scale of a human) can dive to around 1,500 feet (more than 500 feet deeper than the Eiffel Tower is high) and can stay underwater for 30 minutes with no ill effects. How does unaided human performance compare to that? Even flies and gnats can do something we can’t without technology: flight. Ayuh, we’re a pretty pathetic animal, athletically speaking.

But within our limited parameters, there is also something that I call “annoying perfection.” On the one hand, the precision of platform diving is impressive to the point of disbelief (some of the dives look like they had been engineered by AU, and I still can’t figure out why some were judged higher or lower than others). On the other hand, if I saw another perfect physique (male or female) on the high board, I think I would have thrown a saltshaker at the TV set over the restaurant’s bar. And please don’t get me started about basketball, and other amateur events.

There is value in knowing the physical limits of what people can do (which might explain my youthful interest in the Guinness Book of World Records). Still, I can’t help wondering if athletics might have been more interesting during a time when sports was about naturals without all the added science and obsession.

So much of this perfection and the hair-splitting differences of new world records and sports victories of recent years come as the result of scientific training, diets, and a big-money, institutional approach to training (and today’s athletes who cheat are marginally better after taking performance-enhancing drugs, than the greats of yesteryear, some of whom used performance-hindering drugs, like alcohol [See Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle]).

There is also the ridiculous, disproportional count of medals by nation, a kind of metallic arms race, and the inspirational stories of the athletes themselves (except for Sea Biscuit, there are few things more beaten-into-the-ground than the genre of the inspirational sports story, especially if it has a slo-mo footage and a guitar or piano soundtrack). If I saw another picture of some athlete biting a gold medal, or heard another against-the-odds story about overcoming obstacles in the pursuit of excellence that make Victorian melodrama look understated… where’s that saltshaker?). The real story is that large nations with well-endowed programs seem to have an exponential advantage over small, poorer countries. This is why I find myself cheering for smaller nations rather than the ones who throw big bucks into the sports perfection business, like the U.S. and China. Cheering for a large, vastly-favored nation, sometimes feels a little like cheering for the Roman Empire (or, given the relative resources of modern world powers, perhaps the absurdity of cheering for them is its own metaphor). For the men’s 10 meter platform dive, I ended up pulling for the Mexican diver, who came in fourth.

Well, it’s over until next time. Sorry for such a grouchy posting. I’m not really against sports. On to that other contest in November.

By Michael F. Duggan

During the summer of 1943, the Germans and Soviets fought the Battle of Kursk, the largest battle in history. Like so many battles on the Eastern Front, it was a contests of salients, counter-salients, and the reductions (and attempted reductions)of salients.  The Germans lost fewer men, but the battle was a strategic victory for the Soviets.  It was the last German offensive on the Eastern Front.  It was also the largest tank battle and the costliest aerial battle ever fought.  

Eighty years ago this December, the Germans launched an offensive on the western front, in the Ardennes.  The strategy, to strike hard where the enemy did not expect it, was initially successful. Although it took the Allies by surprise, and the Germans appeared to be making a beeline for Antwerp, it was stopped, and the salient was reduced. It was the last German offensive of the war.  A fraction of the size of Kursk, it was the costliest battle for the Allies in western Europe in the Second World War. 

In the summers of 1862 and 1863, Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia went on the strategic offensive and crossed the Potomac River, the border between North and South in the U.S. Civil War. The result of his taking the war into Union territory, were the battles of Antietam (September 17, 1862) and Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863). Antietam was the bloodiest single day in U.S. military history, and Gettysburg was the largest land battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere.

In the spring of 1918, German forces smashed through the allied lines in what is called the Michael Offensive. It was a brilliant initial effort that outran its planning, supplies, and logistics and the Germans were pushed back and the lines, restored.

This week Ukraine launched cross-border operations into the Kursk oblast of western Russia.  Unlike the Ukrainian spring and summer offensive of 2023, this one was not advertised. Striking when and where it was not expected, the attack was brilliant in its operational planning, execution, and surprise, and caught the Russians completely off guard (how is it possible that a stretch of the Russian-Ukrainian frontier was so thinly protected; how is it possible that Russian intelligence did not see it coming?). Although nowhere near the scale of its WWII predecessor (this one appears to be a divisional-size operation) it is the largest Ukrainian incursion into Russia of the present war and has created an irregularly-shaped salient several miles deep. 

Unlike the Kursk offensive of 1943, the Ardennes offensive of 1944, and the Confederate offensives of the Civil War, the attack does not appear to have a specific military objective other than the hope of drawing Russian troops away from hot spots on the front (one wonders how Ukraine can afford such an operation given Russian advances in the Donetsk region, especially in the area east of the city of Pokrovsk). Otherwise the area involved seems to be of no military value, and the attack is unlikely to have any impact on the outcome of the war. Its purpose appears to be psychological and to send the simple message that Ukraine can still hit back. The war will not be won in the north by attacking Russia there, but such diversions contribute to defeat by thinning out manpower and sending resources to what now amounts to another costly front.

This attack is different from all previous attacks of the war. This is a ground assault on Russian soil. The attack might have caught the Kremlin off guard, but surprise does not by itself guarantee a collapse in morale (did the U.S. give up after the Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor attacks? Did Israel give up after the October 7 attacks?). Given the symbolic importance of Kursk in Russian history, does anybody think that the they will fight with less intensity and determination now?

By Michael F. Duggan

It is good that the United States and other Western nations were able to get their people out of Russia. Still, it seems a little odd that the Russians exchanged were all spies and assassins where the Westerners were all wrongly-accused innocents.

By Michael F. Duggan

Anyone who is not stupid, a delusional loyalist, or otherwise in denial, knows that last week’s debate was the death knell of the Biden presidency, regardless of whether he runs or not. It appears that one of those in denial is the president himself.

There is a rapidly closing window to replace Biden. The problem is that he has worked his whole life for this job and will likely not give it up voluntarily. I suspect that Vice President Harris, whose numbers are not impressive, is another who will not go quietly, even for the good of the country. The Democratic leadership must therefore launch the metaphorical equivalent of a coup—they must present a united front backed by numbers in order to force him to leave. Call it an intervention.

The only way to do this is to show that millions of Americans who were inclined to vote for him before the debate, will now either stay home or vote the other way. National support for Biden is hemorrhaging independents. He must be shown unambiguously that he cannot win and that the reason is something that is fundamental—a problem that cannot be hidden or fixed. As others have suggested, the Democratic heads must approach him through his wife, Jill.

The argument to Biden: You defeated Trump in 2020, but there is no way for you to win this time. If you stay in the race, you will squander your historical legacy and will be remembered as the man who gave the presidency, and the future of the nation, back to Trump when an alternative was possible. You will be seen as a tragic figure who wanted to do good, but whose flawed judgment led to catastrophe. The only possible way to avoid a Democratic defeat is to step down as the hero of 2020-24 and turn the race over to someone who might be able to win.

If he does not step down, the Democrats are screwed, even down-ticket.

By Michael F. Duggan

Caleb Carr is gone at 68. The military historian and author of The Alienist crime drama series, died of cancer on May 23.

I liked his gritty historical crime fiction about the mean streets of New York City in the 1890s. Time will tell if he will be considered an important writer, but The Alienist, his magnum opus, is a real page turner and is based on a brilliant historical-fictional premise, terrific characters (including historical figures like J.P. Morgan and a somewhat muted Theodore Roosevelt). It also evinces deep psychological understanding and insight. It was an international best seller in 1994. An abusive childhood at the hands of his father, the Beat generation editor and convicted killer, Lucien Carr, likely made him the distinctive—unique—if eccentric figure he became.

Carr tended to overwrite, in my opinion, and yet his style is not oppressive. It gallops like a runaway horse in the Bowery. His writing has more in common with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and other 19th century storytellers than it does with more modern authors, like his father’s hipster pals. Like Nietzsche, he deals with the budding world of modernity, but he does not feel comfortable with the brave new world, and the late 19th century of Jacob Riss and Maggie of the Streets serves him well as a dark, in between time.¹ Like Holmes’s gas lit London, Carr’s early electrified New York is modern enough for reason and science to eventually triumph, but his world of inner and outer landscapes is more realistic than those earlier stories, darker, more problematic. He gives us more of the city’s shadow than sunshine. Still, it is no coincidence he was approached by the estate of Conan Doyle to write a new Sherlock Holmes adventure. The result was The Italian Secretary (2009).

The three Alienist books and the cable TV series made from the first two, are dark, nightmarish, the first dealing with a Ripper-like serial killer of young male prostitutes. Having watched a number of Carr’s interviews, it was impossible for me to reread the first book or watch the TV version without seeing Carr or elements of his life in his characters. I don’t like to psychologize authors, and yet I constantly saw him in the victimized children (to include adult protagonists and antagonists). I saw in his adult characters as both good and flawed parents trying to be better, or else monsters who create subsequent generations of abusers, if they do not kill them outright (by his own account, he was attracted to Theodore Roosevelt by the exotic fact that he was a good father). Dark stuff, and yet it is still life-affirming. Even with all of their blood, violence, and psychopathic bad guys, good wins out in the end. Carr did not like autobiographical novels, and yet his are filled with almost distracting echoes of the violence and desperation of his own early life. Robert Graves writes that poetry is psychotherapy, and yet, great literature must rise above the revelations of one’s own talking sessions.²

Overall I like Carr’s books and found him to be an interesting person. A self-described misanthrope, he once created a stir with the observation that if a few more things had gone wrong with his early life, he might have become a serial killer himself. The deep psychological insights and preoccupations of this books lead one to the conclusion that this is not a casual remark. He was an historian before he was a fiction writer, and he has the habit of providing a little too much specific period detail in his fictional depictions (in stark contrast to the modernist spontaneity of the Beats). I will leave it for others to determine whether his books are art or, like most murder mysteries, entertainment.

Carr’s final work was about a Siberian cat named Masha who lived with him for 17 years and predeceased him. In an interview shot in the fall of 2023 for CBS Sunday Morning, he said that he had promised Masha that he would someday make her famous “because you deserve to be a legend,” and that he hoped to live long enough to see the book published. My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me, came out in April, a little over a month before Carr died.³

1. In his June 5, 2005 interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Carr observes that “The modern world is a very uncomfortable place for me.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCrt8Pir7jA ↩︎
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BQRyzQm2Vk ↩︎
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zqGaXl1Zg0 ↩︎

By Michael F. Duggan

I saw Oppenheimer when it came out last year and bought the DVD a couple of weeks ago. It is a long and complex film, and I remember thinking in the theater that it would be a perfect “two night” movie to watch at home (it is a large film and should be seen at least once on the big screen). I have since watched it four or five times on the small screen.

It is a tale of two Kafkaesque hearings, the 1959 Senate confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss (“Straws”) to become (or not) Eisenhower’s second Commerce Secretary, and the hearing at the Atomic Energy Commission, a kangaroo court designed to deny the renewal of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 1954. The Senate hearing, “a trial about a trial,” is the “present” and is shot in black and white. It is the point from which we flash back to the earlier hearing, and to the rest of the film, which is a biopic of the development of the atomic bomb and Robert Oppenheimer’s role in creating it, and the consequences for both Oppenheimer and the rest of us.

The film is a set of dichotomies: then and now, loyalty and disloyalty (and infidelity), suspicious government officials and free-thinking physicists, hot war and the Cold War, conventional war and nuclear war, Nazi enemies and communist allies who become enemies, Oppenheimer/fission/atomic bomb and Teller/fusion/hydrogen bomb, today’s man (Einstein 40 years earlier and Oppenheimer in 1945), and yesterday’s man (Einstein in 1945 and Oppenheimer in 1954), Einstein’s opposition to quantum mechanics and Oppenheimer’s opposition to the fusion bomb, and of course the theme of one purgatorial hearing as a payback for an earlier one—call it the dichotomy of revenge-driven ambition and subsequent karma.¹ What unjustly happens to Oppenheimer finds just parallel in what happens to Strauss at his own inquisition. The words used to characterize events in the earlier hearing echo in the latter.

But the issue of karma is not limited to Strauss and his final comeuppance. Oppenheimer himself fairly obnoxious at turns and disses Strauss multiple times. He is openly rude to his brother, Frank Oppenheimer’s, working class fiancé, Jackie, twice. He also disrespects David L. Hill (twice), a young scientist on Fermi’s team at the Metallurgical Lab in Chicago. Hill is possibly the only unblemished character of the story, having been treated with incivility, yet still doing the right thing when it mattered. He also signed Szilard’s petition opposing the use of the atomic bombs on Japan. The minor slights by Oppenheimer could have easily led Hill to oppose him, or remain silent, during the Strauss confirmation. And yet he does the right thing. Through him, the more important current of karma wins out.

The film is a pleasure to watch: epic scenery, world class acting, and tight editing (a necessity for a three hour, one minute film). Cillian Murphy and Downey are especially good (I always thought that Robert Downey Jr.’s best performances were portrayals of brilliant but flawed people, but here he shows himself to be a wonderful villain, whom he plays with depth, insight, and understanding. It is Murphy’s character who is brilliant and flawed). There is also a constellation of wonderful performances of the veritable Who’s Who of physicists that worked on the Manhattan Program. It is telling that big Hollywood names play secondary and even smallish roles in this picture. In terms of capturing the personalities of secondary characters, the movie is minutely accurate.

There is also cinematic artistry here. The expanding ripples of raindrops in a puddle as the film begins, are reprised for a fleeing moment as the shockwaves of “super” bombs radiating out from cities on a map, and finally again as raindrops in the pond at the Institute for Advanced Study at the film’s ending. The story in general is one of ripples and effects. They they are raindrops in a puddle, nuclear shockwaves, and the Butterfly Effect ripples of unintended effects set in motion by one’s earlier actions. On a sidenote, when I saw the film in the theater, at the point where suspenseful music suddenly stops with the detonation of the first atomic bomb, I found myself plugging my ears for the minute and 41 seconds it takes for the shockwave (the bomb’s “ripple”) to reach the observers at remote locations (and the audience). On another sidenote, it may be the best historical-political feature film since Reds.

The writing is tight and at times historically foreshadowing (Oppenheimer references a “wormhole” in an apple just as Neils Bohr is about to bite into it). We find parallels in the language of the of the two hearings, that neither is a trial or court, that those asking the questions are not judges, that their purpose is not to convict but to “deny,” that there is “no burden of proof,” the prosecutorial dunning, “I’m asking you,” the fact that the events in question in both hearings happened “so long ago,” and the observation: “who’d want to justify their whole life?” As regards the musical soundtrack, I am not sure if it is a work of genius I don’t understand, or just intermittently distracting.

The only issue I had with the writing are a few present-day usages that crept into the script: Strauss talks about a need to “pivot” in his strategy at the hearings (Kitty Oppenheimer also uses this modernish term) to which a young Senate aide says “I don’t think we need to go there.” Oppenheimer gives a “heads-up” to a military security officer, and regarding the violent tendencies of another intelligence officer, is told that the FBI “talked him down.” In a similarly anachronistic vain, Strauss says that he and Oppenheimer “agreed to disagree,” and both Oppie and one of his tormentors quietly exclaim “ouch,” when they are respectively insulted and informed of who will be prosecutor for the AEC hearing. There is also a tendency for the dialog to explain events to the audience, but this I suppose is necessary in an exceptionally complex film about physicists and highly technical matters. Also the soundtrack varies from the interesting to the distracting. But these are minor considerations, and should be ignored.

One scene from real life that was omitted from the film, or softened, is when Einstein questioned Oppenheimer on the wisdom of fighting for his security clearance, and then called him a narr, or “fool,” in Yiddish. Just because you’re smart doesn’t necessarily mean you’re sensible. There is a scene that gives a watered-down version of the actual one, without the name-calling (and Oppenheimer’s statement to Einstein, “Damn it, I happen to love this country,” was actually spoken to his friend and Institute colleague, George Kennan, a character curiously missing in the film).²

Perhaps most compellingly, Oppenheimer, portrays its hero sympathetically but with his flaws in plain view, and its antagonists with both their flaws and understandable bases for sympathy. Likewise, Oppenheimer’s opponents are not cartoonish bad guys acting without motives. Strauss is depicted as an ambitious, insecure man whose malice grows from this sense of inferiority vis-a-vis the overt and implied scorn, and outright humiliation, by those he considers to be his betters. William L. Borden (David Dastmalchian), the man who blows the whistle on Oppenheimer, is shown as a righteous true believer convinced that he is doing the right thing for national security reasons. Edward Teller is portrayed as a brilliant, ambitious, and arrogant man with a vision and logic of his own who might have been right. It would have been all-too easy, and inaccurate, to have written him off as Dr. Strangelove. All the same, at the film’s ending, we fully understand why Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt) snubs his extended hand.

Oppenheimer is about a time when American thinking was both large and small. It was a time when a brigadier general in the right job could tell a subordinate to “Build him a town. Fast” (which is a little reminiscent of the laconic advice that the five-star George Marshall gave to George Kennan on designing the European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan, to “Avoid trivia”). It was a time when the U.S. fought won a world war only to embrace the Military Industrial Complex in a rapidly-escalating Cold War and the arms race that accompanied it. It is one of the largest and most important stories in all of human history (which Leslie Groves, played by Matt Damon, melodramatically observes in less delicate language), and this movie tells it without losing any of its scale or significance.

The movie’s ending comes together beautifully, drawing in all of its many threads and underscoring one last dichotomy, half of which has hung over humanity ever since the Manhattan Project. At Los Alamos, Edward Teller theorized that the nuclear chain reaction might not stop, that it might continue beyond the uranium or plutonium fuel and ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. Obviously this did not happen at Trinity, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or any of the other times atomic or hydrogen bombs were detonated. But in a sense, it did continue. There is a final flashback to a meeting of Oppenheimer and Einstein by the Institute Pond. Oppenheimer suggests to Einstein that perhaps he did initiate an ongoing chain reaction, not in a singular, never-ending atomic explosion, but by devising the weapon. The Trinity explosion initiated another causal sequence of events: the nuclear arms race and an ever-increasing club of nuclear-armed nations. He gave humans the capacity to destroy ourselves with nuclear fire, a capacity as real today as it has been at any time since 1945. Oppenheimer gave the world The Bomb, thus the title of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin upon which the film is based: American Prometheus (the movie attributes the Oppenheimer-Prometheus comparison to Bohr), although it could have just as easily been American Frankenstein.³ Epic tragedy may be dead in literature, but it lives on in history, in human events. The movie ends with a dark, cautionary prophecy.

With things going badly in Ukraine, and with Russian officials warning about the possible use of tactical (“battlefield”) nuclear weapons there, it now takes little imagination to realize the enduring power of Oppenheimer’s adumbrate and his invention.

Notes:

1. Dichotomies and juxtapositions abound in this film. In addition to the ones mentioned above, there are plenty of others: insiders (physicists)/outsiders (non-physicists), scientists/soldiers, relativity/quantum mechanics, the powerful/less powerful, theoretical physics/experimental physics (and then applied, engineering), the Yiddish-speaking side of the Park/the other side of the Park, Trinity/Vishnu, physics/New Mexico, New Deal Democrat/Communist, Chicago/Los Alamos, the bomb/”gadget,” ambition/regret and denial, efficiency/security, arms talks/the super bomb, Los ALamos/the Institute for Advanced Studies, Oppenheimer’s paper on blackholes/the start of World War II, the two halves of a split atom/the two hydrogen atoms fused together, security/inefficiency, the just/the unjust, Germany/Japan, probability/certainty, a chemical reaction explosion/an atomic explosion, plutonium/uranium, the morality of developing and dropping the atomic bomb/the morality of developing the hydrogen bomb, a U.S. atomic monopoly/international control of atomic weapons, the U.S. bomb/the U.S.S.R.’s bomb, sunshine/shadow, the means/the end.
2. For the account of Einstein calling Oppenheimer a “narr,” see Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus, The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 495. Regarding Oppenheimer’s statement to Kennan, see pp. 4-5.
3. Of course the subtitle of the novel, Frankenstein, is The Modern Prometheus. Although American Prometheus provides far greater detail and information, it is striking how closely the movie follows the book.

By Michael F. Duggan

Why is it that the guy (or gal) trying to pay for coffee with an app always takes four times longer than the guy standing behind him with cash?

(Originally posted on May 3, 2024)

By Michael F. Duggan

I used to work on The Hill and still go back every five or six months to have lunch with a few former colleagues.  One of those lunches was yesterday, May 2.  With stories about clashes between police, protestors, counterprotestors, and outside agitators at Columbia, Dartmouth, and UCLA, I decided to take the long way home on the Washington Metro and stopped by The George Washington University.   In the words of Mick Jagger, I went down to the demonstration. 

I got off at the station one stop before my destination, at Farragut West, and walked a few blocks to the university.  May is a summer month in Washington, and the day was around 90 degrees.  It was the middle of the day, around 1:30 or a little after, and downtown, everything seemed so normal, a typical warm Thursday afternoon.  As I walked down 21st Street, I heard them from less than a block away, the protestors, and chants over a sound system to a drumbeat.  I had a two-page list of questions to ask participants, but when I got there, I decided to let the event speak for itself and allow the impressions to flow over me.  

Ah, GW, I thought.  Why wouldn’t they protest at a school named for a revolutionary leader who, more than anybody, won the War of Independence and who presided over the constitutional convention that gave us our First Amendment rights of free speech and peaceful assembly?  It was the eighth day of demonstrations on campus.

The protest and encampment are on the University Yard, a small square mall and possibly the closest thing to an actual campus on a university made up of city blocks.  I entered the square through its northwest corner.  There were well-identified GW faculty members and some law enforcement officers and people came and went as they pleased.  There were a few field crews from the broadcast media.  The first placard I saw read, “Anti-Zionism, not Antisemitism.”  The protest was smaller than I thought it would be, perhaps a couple hundred people.  Perhaps fewer (I assume that many students were in class).  But in the small commons, it was crowded and seemed like more. I walked down the west side of the square.  

The encampment of what I imagine were several dozen tents took up most of the Yard, with only the paved walkways and side areas being clear of them.  The atmosphere was festive, like an outdoor music festival minus the drugs and booze.  At least I didn’t see any. Yet even with a certain lightness, there was an undertone of seriousness and moral purpose.  I was clearly an outsider, and yet the feeling was raucous but unthreatening.  Outside of the square, university life seemed to go on undisturbed with students in shorts, tee shirts, and bare midriffs. In the Yard (and to some degree outside), young women and some men wore the keffiyeh, the Palestinian headscarf, whose simple pattern looks like a wire fence to me.  Some of the students, especially those I took to be organizers, wore facemarks, presumably to preclude recognition and retribution, should the university crack down (it seems unlikely that they were a lingering COVID-19 precaution). 

In front of Lisner Hall on the south side of the yard, there was a platform on which various students led loud, at times unintelligible, cheers and chants to a pronounced drumbeat.  The crowd cheered and chanted along.  The most threatening thing I heard was the now-famous “From the river to the sea” chant, which has inspired both benign and ominous interpretations.  At one point there was a vague call for “revolution,” and I saw a handbill reading “GW Revolutionaries Support Revolution” (this plea for revolution, presumably by kids paying 65K a year to attend classes there, struck me as redundant, absurd, and a bit juvenile). 

There was one defiant chant about taking down barricades and putting up a flag.* There were chants of “We’re not leaving…” and “The students united will never be defeated.”  There was one chant of the classic, “What do we want? [fill in the blank] When do we want it? Now!” (thank goodness there were no “Hey-hey, ho-hos”).  Although I do not put much stock in direct action protests, what I saw on placards, tee shirts, and scrawled in colorful chalk on the Yard’s brick walkways was humanitarian in tone (see list of chants and slogans below). 

What I did not see or hear were appeals to antisemitism.  To the contrary, GW has a sizable Jewish student population, and what I did see, were signs that said “Jews for a Free Palestine,” “Jews Say Cease Fire Now,” “Zionism: Misrepresenting Judaism for Over 100 Years,” and “This Jew is With You.”  There was a Moslem prayer invoked at around 2:05, but from where I was sitting, the crowd did not seem especially interested. 

Sure there was some of the humorless, theatrical, self-importance of youth.  But the protests are in response to what the demonstrators and much of the world see as the official violence of a state against civilians.  What could be less humorous?  The vibe was positive, chill, as they say, if noisy.  In my polo shirt, Tilley hat, and jeans, and with steno pad and pen in hand, I must have looked like a 1970s undercover narc agent, and no youthful eyes met mine.  But nor was there any hostility (frankly, I don’t think anyone noticed me at all).

I was only there for a half-hour or so—a brief and incomplete glimpse—and it is possible that GW’s protests are more focussed, peaceful, and disciplined than those at some other U.S. colleges and universities.  As far as I could see, there was no threat to life, limb, or property, and pleas by Republican lawmakers for more aggressive law enforcement seem unwarranted. If the protests of the 1960s taught us anything, it should be how to deescalate events rather than ratchet them up.    

If there are outside agitators, foreign agents, extremists, bigots, or bad apples whipping things up among the peaceful, good faith protestors, they should be held accountable if they break the law. But we should not blame Americans exercising their rights within the law.  If the students themselves violate university rules or indulge in bad behavior, like blocking access to buildings, or engage in intimidation, violence, or vandalism, they too should be held accountable.  Again, I did not see any bad behavior.

There is a distinction to be made between objections to the actions and policies of a nation, and bigotry against a people, and from what I saw, I believe that the protestors make this distinction and fall on the side of the former.  From the extremely thin slice of the protest I saw, the student protestors at GW seem to have gotten it right.   

Antisemitism must never be tolerated.  But there is a difference between criticizing the policies and actions of a government or political group on the one hand, and being prejudiced against an ethnicity, nationality, race, or religion on the other.  When the IRA planted bombs that killed civilians, I called it murder.  That doesn’t make me anti-Irish. Indeed, as a historian of ideas, I can only stand in awe of a tradition or traditions that gave the world the Old and New Testaments, Brandeis, Chomsky, Einstein, Feynman, Freud, Gershwin, Kafka, Marx, Mendelssohn, Oppenheimer, Popper, Simon and Garfunkel, Spinoza, and 214 Jewish Nobel Prize winners, among the multitudes of others.  But this impressive list has nothing to do with the current policies of Israel in Gaza.  

And of course, behind policy, politics abides, and all of this underscores that in an increasingly diverse nation, foreign affairs may resound in domestic politics.  A policy in which a nation provides bombs to Israel while air-dropping humanitarian relief to Palestinians in the war zone makes no sense outside of the context of the electoral count of swing states.  As it is, President Biden is caught between Israeli interests and a few hundred thousand Arab-American voters in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin in an election year. Either side (or both) could determine the outcome of the election.

Note

Some of the statements and slogans I heard or saw at the protest on May 2, were: 

“Stop funding genocide”
“End Genocide”
“Divest Now”
“Alumni: Stand for Divestment”
“Free, Free Palestine”
“GW Funds Genocide”
“From D.C. to Palestine”
“Occupation is a Crime”
“Stop the Invasion”
“Hands off Rafah”
“Our Tents are Home for Liberation”
“End all U.S. Aid to Israel”

The strongest statements I saw were:
“Dear Zionists, Nothing Blooms on Stolen Land”
“Support the Intifada”

*When I was at the University Yard, I saw a U.S. flag on one flagpole in front of Lisner Hall, and a Palestinian flag on another.  This morning (May 3) I heard a news story that there police took down the Palestinian flag and that the students put it back up, or attempted to.  This apparently happened after I was there.

By Michael F. Duggan

“Who is this crazy dame?”
-C.D. Jackson, Publisher

Long before it was Star Wars Day, May the 4th was Jane Jacobs’ (1916-2006) birthday. She was an intuitive genius and one of the great nonfiction writers of the late 20th century. Her groundbreaking book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961), changed the discussion about city planning and preservation over night. It is considered a classic (although I think her “Cities and the Wealth of Nations” is just as good).

With modest formal credentials, and not looking the part of a revolutionary, Jacobs took on Le Corbusier and the big boys in urban planning, and is generally considered to have won the debate. She challenged conventional ideas about how cities and neighborhoods really work and was pilloried for her views. The problem was that she was usually right (and wrote in remarkable prose–a stylistic quality of writing that can’t be taught). She wrote books–about 10 of them–up to the end of her life. Some of her later writings (e.g. “Dark Age Ahead”) are not as optimistic her earlier writings.

Jacobs believed that neighborhoods and cities are complex organic structures and that excessive planning created new problems and made existing problems worse (she wrote that “urban renewal” was based on “the myth of the salvation of bricks”–the fallacy that new buildings alone would somehow cure deeply-seated social ills of neighborhoods). Some critics have observed that she may have underestimated what would become urban gentrification.

In the 1960s, she warned against tearing down old neighborhoods and putting up the much vaunted Title 1 urban “projects” that she prophetically warned would become high-rise hellholes that would end up being worse than what they replaced. Neighborhoods should be saved and nurtured, not destroyed. Her writings on how economies work as naturalistic local and regional phenomena is equally impressive, and she offered a model of capitalism that is less predatory that what we have.

Banding with local groups in her neighborhood, she took on Robert Moses when he wanted to push a freeway through Greenwich Village (and Midtown, and Uptown) and won (not many people beat Moses on his own turf). Imagine if the Village and lower Manhattan had gone the same way as the Bronx.

She was one of those public intellectuals, who, when they are gone, makes you feel as if the world has lost some of its rationality, insight, and sanity. If you have not yet read her, you should add her to your list.