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The Perils of Pauline (sorry, of Hillary).

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Back in late August and early September 2015, only 37 percent of Democrats supported Hillary Clinton for President.[1] By late August 2015, 45 percent of Democrats wanted Joe Biden to get into the Democratic primaries, while 47 percent of Democrats wanted him to stay out, and 8 percent weren’t sure.[2] By late September 2015, 42 percent supported Hillary Clinton. Then Biden decided not to run. She’s back!

Nagging at the Presidential Revenant was polling data showing that she is unpopular with white male voters. In Iowa, 66 percent of white male voters had an unfavorable view of her, while only 27 had a favorable view of her.[3] Yes, Iowa is a conservative state and the polling sampled all voters, not just Democrats. Yes, she will do much better in liberal states. Yes, she is building a coalition of women and minorities. Still, in a tight race, she could not easily just write-off the white male vote.

The numbers show a real division of opinion among mainstream Democrats about Hillary Clinton. She can be beaten in at least some of the primaries, just as she was before. Moreover, depending on which candidate the Republicans nominate, she can be beaten in the general election. To believe otherwise is to ignore the strength of underlying opinion and organization among likely voters. Republicans hold the majority in both the House and the Senate, in 70 percent of state legislatures, and the governor’s mansion in 30 states.[4] Even if successful in winning the White House, a President Clinton likely would face the same situation that Barack Obama has faced. It wouldn’t matter what platform she had run on, legislation would be blocked by Congress and executive actions challenged in court by many states.

However, other poll numbers challenge this view. A late October 2015 poll found that 57 percent of Democrats saw their party as more united than divided, while only22 percent saw it as more divided than united.[5] The same poll found that 57 percent of Republicans saw their own party more divided than united, while 28 percent saw it as more united than divided. The Republicans had good reason to see their party as divided. On the one hand, it had a mass of candidates vying for the presidential nomination through personal vituperation. On the other hand, a bitter fight over the leadership ripped through the Republican majority in the House of Representatives.

Perhaps Hillary Clinton’s best hope is to run to the center and hope that the Republicans wreck their chances by nominating a complete clown. It isn’t clear yet how far she may have to veer left in the primaries. At least in some cases, her stance on social issues (enhanced background check for gun purchases, gay-marriage, a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants) and economic issues (a mandatory increase in the minimum wage, rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline, opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership) can be spun as either progressive or mainstream.[6]

For their part, Republicans are doing what they can to stir up both the Republican and Democratic bases. They have been pushing restrictions on abortion and on access to the voting booth, along with more tax cuts, and a politicized inquiry into the Benghazi disaster.

[1] “Poll Watch,” The Week, 2 October 2015, p. 17.

[2] “Poll Watch,” The Week, 28 August 2015, p. 15.

[3] Josh Kraushaar, “Clinton’s white male problem,” The Week, 23 October 2015, p. 12.

[4] Matthew Yglesias, “Democrats sleepwalking to disaster,” The Week, 30 October 2015, p. 12.

[5] “Poll Watch,” The Week, 23 October 2015, p. 17.

[6] “Clinton: lurching too far to the left?” The Week, 30 October 2015, p.16.

The Iran deal after the shouting.

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Once upon a time, Iran signed up for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.[1] Under the treaty the development of nuclear power was acceptable, but the pursuit of nuclear weapons was not acceptable.[2] After n1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran pursued a secret program to develop nuclear weapons—not just nuclear power—until 2003. Then the hunt eased up, without entirely stopping. By 2006, Western nations had grown suspicious of Iranian actions, so they slapped on a series of increasingly painful economic sanctions. The vise kept tightening until the Iranians agreed to negotiate with a coalition of powers: the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, the European Community, Russia, and China.

The Iran deal that was recently technically-not-disapproved by Congress does certain things. It does not seek a permanent end to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It does try to extend Iran’s “break out” time to a nuclear weapon from the current estimated three months to one year.

What’s the up-side? The agreement imposes controls on Iran for ten to fifteen years. Some of this involves Iran backing away from its current level of development by surrendering 97 percent of the enriched uranium it already possesses, dismantling two-thirds of its existing enrichment centrifuges, and reconstructing its existing heavy water reactor. Some of this involves “intrusive”[3] inspections of Iranian sites all along the supply-chain from mines and centrifuge factories to enrichment facilities.

What’s the down-side? Iran fended-off really intrusive inspections that would have allowed inspectors to look wherever they want. Only certain sites are open to free inspection. Other sites where Iran might seek to reconstitute its program out from under Western eyes can be visited only with Iranian permission. Refusal sets in train an appeals process; rejection of the Iranian position—in theory—triggers a “snap back” of the sanctions that brought Iran to the negotiating table in the first place. Then, the agreement suspends the sanctions regime. Iran stands to earn up to $150 billion a year.

So, this deal will delay the Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons for ten to fifteen years. What happens then? Both the Americans and the Iranians are wagering that people in the future will see their best interests clearly. The Obama administration appears to hope that Iranians in the future will see things differently than do members of the revolutionary generation that overthrew the Shah. Iranians appear to be thinking that the survival of the current regime depends on ending sanctions and that the future will take care of itself.

Will Iran try to cheat? Probably, but they are going to have spies all over them thicker than ticks on a hound.

What happens in 2025-2030? The Iranians may rush to “break out.” Or they may not care about nukes anymore. It’s hard to say.

How much confidence should people have in this agreement? Some. However, the opinion polls appear to show that Americans don’t want a big war right now. Give it ten years, and….   Then, neither Russia nor China has an interest in denying nukes to Iran.

So, take the deal, put the clutch down on war for ten to fifteen years, but don’t get confused about the possibility of hitting Iran if things don’t work out.

[1] “The Iran deal,” The Week, 9 October 2015, p. 11.

[2] Yes, there is gross hypocrisy in countries with nukes telling countries without nukes that they can’ t have nukes. Welcome to life.

[3] UN inspectors, video-cameras, and sensors.

Gun culture.

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My reader(s) is (are) probably fed up with recent posts on gun-related issues.  Perhaps i should explain.

My father was a Washington state country  boy who had hunted for much of his early life and who had been in the Army during the Second World War.  I grew up in a house full of guns, learned to shoot (badly) at a young age, received thorough training in  gun safety from a highly-regarded authority figure (I’d still be paying for the dental work if I had ever “played” with a gun), and got my first gun as a birthday present when I turned 12.  Guns hold no terrors for me.  (Gun-owners, well that’s a different issue.)

I had guns myself (shotgun, rifle, revolver) in my house for many years.  I taught my sons about gun safety along the same lines as my father taught me.  “Guns are always loaded until you know different; you can tell if a gun is loaded by checking in the breech; never point a gun at another person  except to save a life.”  (These rules caused much alarm among other parents during a gun safety lesson in Cub Scouts.)  I got rid of my guns when one of my children was diagnosed with depression.  Hard choice to make at the moment, but I haven’t regretted it for a moment.

Recently, I was asked to give the annual Constitution Day address at the school where I am employed.  With some trepidation, I told my boss that I would like to talk about the Second Amendment.  Recent events have made it a “hot topic.”  More than that, I wanted to try to sort out some of the confusions in my own mind about guns in America today.  The stuff I have posted on guns and killings is a part of the reading and thinking that I have been doing.  Hence, all the tedious posts.

The fundamental issues–as I understand them–are the following: The Supreme Court has held that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights; guns are a plague on at least a segment of the Americans population; a vast majority of gun-owners are going to be asked to sacrifice a “right” because a small share of Americans abuse that right; what are we to do?

Query.

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Why does my post called “White flight from Baltimore” draw so many hits/visitors?  Is it circulating on some kind of subterranean network?  No one comments.  No one “likes.”  But it keeps popping up on my list of views, right after “Archives.”  So, I’m puzzled.

JMO.

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Here’s what a former FBI profiler has to say about the Charleston shooter.  http://www.businessinsider.com/dylann-roof-was-a-paranoid-narcissist-says-fbi-profiler-joe-navarro-2015-6

Probably he’s correct.  However, I wonder if we’re going to learn–once somebody gets his hands on the shooter’s birth certificate–that he wasn’t born Dylann Storm Roof?  Perhaps he was born Dylan Something-Else-Entirely Roof.  The mutations of his name reflect the psychological turmoil going on inside him from when he was in his early teens.  Here’s my reasoning/puzzlement.

First, Dyl-ann.  Really?  what Southern working-class father is going to name his son Dylann, rather than Dylan?

Second, look at what he’s wearing in a couple of the pictures.  Some of them show him wearing what appears to be a woman’s watch: narrow gold band noticeably smaller than the watch itself.  Then, although he February arrest report lists him as weighing 120 pounds and he doesn’t look even remotely like a lifter, he is shown wearing a Gold’s Gym wife-beater.  Picture of a big heavily-muscled guy on it.  Is this aspirational or something else entirely?

Third, to my mind, the kid looks to have been deeply depressed from his mid-teens onward.  His step-mother describes him as “bright,” but he did 9th grade twice and soon dropped out.  Been drifting ever since, a worry to his family.  Started abusing drugs.  Sometimes Depression manifests as “violence.”  Mostly verbal and directed at other people in an externalization of what the depressed person feels about themselves.  But it can turn into actual physical violence too.

Lots of times, parents aren’t trained to recognize the signs of this and don’t know anything about it.  Easy to confuse it was something else.  Like “he has his head up his backside.”

So, I’m wondering if the kid is gay.  Closeted gay youth in the rural South.  Can’t find a way to come out.  The watch and the Gold’s Gym shirt and possibly adopting the extra “n” on his name may have been little clues that he was trying to drop.  Hoping to provoke some kind of discussion/revelation.  Apparently that didn’t work.  We probably will not know anything definite about this unless they find some trace on his computer search history.  Feels like he doesn’t fit in.  Looks for something to grab onto.

Which brings us to Storm.  Somewhere on-line I read that it is a name commonly adopted by white supremacists.  May be the same with Roof.  He found something to which he could belong.  Make a name that would ring out.  By doing something terrible.

Anything else?  Yes, one thing.  He bought a gun (far as I can tell), rather than being given one.  Practiced with it.  Probably found out that he was a poor shot.  There’s a laser aiming light under the muzzle of the Glock.  Did it come with the pistol or is after-market?  Maybe it’s another sign of failure.

Last, what is the third patch on his jacket, across from the two flags and over his heart?

What would Bismarck drive? 3.

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ISIS looks like a coalition of old Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia survivors, Iraqi Ba’athists, and conservative Syrian Sunni rebels against the Assad government. If ISIS wins in western Iraq and eastern Syria and establishes a caliphate, what will happen to that coalition? Will the coalition hold together in happier times once external dangers are reduced? Or will “hunting season” open as the members pursue disparate goals?[1]

If you look at this over the long-run, working to strengthen good governance and economic development around the world is a good idea. The Islamist movements and the refugees seeking to break into Europe (and the US for that matter) are fleeing stagnant economies, misgovernment, and often violence.[2] “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Alas, I’m not sure that we know how to do this—aside from empires.

The Iraq War was a disaster.[3] As a result, Americans don’t want another real war at the moment. It would take a real war to slow down Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons by any significant amount of time. It would take conquest and occupation to stop it entirely.[4] So, the odds are that President Obama’s pursuit of an agreement with Iran to delay that country’s acquisition of nuclear weapons by some indefinite, but shorter, period is about the best that we can hope for.

However, confessing that we don’t want to do anything serious about Iran estranges us from Israel and Saudi Arabia. A nuclear Iran appears to both Israel and Saudi Arabia as a grave security threat. One of these days, the two countries may decide that Allah/Yahwey helps those who help themselves.[5] Perhaps the key decisions will be made in Jerusalem. Israel and Saudi Arabia have a community of interest in doing something about Iran’s nuclear program. The Saudis probably could not manage a pre-emptive attack on their own. The Saudis probably could not manage to fend-off an angry American reaction on their own. In both cases, a tacit alliance with Israel would be very valuable. On the other hand, Israel and Iran have a community of interest in doing something about ISIS, while Saudi Arabia has not made much of an effort against ISIS because it is beating up on Iranian clients in Iraq and Syria. It is difficult to imagine Israel working a deal with Iran over ISIS if it meant tolerating Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons. It is easier to imagine Saudi Arabia turning on ISIS as part of a deal with Israel. The thing all the decision-makers—in Riyadh, Jerusalem, Tehran, and Washington—are bearing in mind is that any attack on Iran’s nuclear program will start a bigger war in the Middle East, rather than end the current ones. So, perhaps cooler heads will prevail. Perhaps there will be a grand bargain instead of Armageddon. An American presidential campaign in which a host of Republican hopefuls appear to have been recruited from clown college and the anointed Democratic candidate once voted for the Iraq War just to appear tough enough to be president doesn’t inspire confidence.

[1] See: Gordon Craig, Problems of coalition warfare: The military alliance against Napoleon, 1813-1814 (Colorado Springs: U.S. Air Force Academy, 1966); Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 6: Triumph and Tragedy. .

[2] It appears that the long drop in homicide rates in most American cities has been problematic for local television news stations. Perhaps they should just keep news crews in some place like South Sudan.

[3] In a few years, someone is going to add a chapter to one of those What If? books that explores “counter-factual history.”   My own version runs something like the following. Saddam Hussein was 66 when he was overthrown by the coalition of “the all-too-willing”; he had a bad back, but was afraid to have surgery because it would involve general anesthetic and something might happen; his sons were violent morons who were unlikely to be able to either share or hold power after the eventual death of their father; Iraq had attacked Iran in 1980 and the Iranians were—and are—eager for pay-back; the Shi’ite majority and the Kurds were eager to chart their own course, if only the Sunni minority would get their boot off the necks of the vast majority of Iraqis; and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia (the ancestor of ISIS) was operating in Syria from about 2002. So, even without the invasion, things might have shaken-out pretty much as they did. Only, we wouldn’t have our finger-prints all over the rubble. See: Richard K. Betts and Samuel P. Huntington, “Dead Dictators and Rioting Mobs: Does the Demise of Authoritarian Rulers Lead to Political Instability?”, International Security, Vol. 10, #3 (Winter 1985-1986), pp. 112-146.

[4] Perhaps we could partition the place with Russia? See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Soviet_invasion_of_Iran

[5] One of the ways to think about Saudi Arabian intervention in the Yemen civil war is as an opportunity to give their soldiers and flyers some combat experience before, you know…..

Casablanca.

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Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933. Germany took over Austria in 1938 and Czechoslovakia in 1939. Jews, Marxists, and liberals high-tailed it out of those countries (if they could). Soon, France was awash in refugees desperate to get to anywhere else. Murray Burnett (1910-1997), an American playwright with Jewish relatives in Europe, went over in 1938 to help them out. He picked up a lot of material that he turned into a couple of plays with his fellow writer and wife, Joan Allison (1901-1992).

Then war broke out in Europe. Germany conquered Poland (September 1939), then France and the Low Countries (May-July 1940), then the Balkans (May 1941), and then attacked Russia (June 1941). France set up an authoritarian, right-wing dictatorship and collaborated with Germany. That government was headquartered in the resort-town of Vichy, so people talked about “Vichy France” when referring to the country and its empire. The Japanese, already at war with China, started leaning hard on the British and the Dutch in the Far East. America didn’t want any part of these fights, but could it stay out?

One of the Burnett-Allison plays, “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” didn’t get produced, but Irene Diamond, a Warner Brothers story editor was visiting New York in 1941 and she read the script. She persuaded producer Hal Wallis (1898-1946) to buy the movie rights in January 1942.   Hollywood had been leery of making anti-Nazi films while America was neutral. Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war on the United States (both December 1941) solved that problem. Wallis drove a rapid writing of the screen-play by the Epstein twins, Julius and Philip; hired Michael Curtiz (1886-1962) to direct; signed-up Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) and Ingrid Bergman (1915-1982) to star; recruited a Who’s-Who of European refugee actors for the rest of the cast; and pushed through filming in June and July 1942, with an expected release day in May 1943. Then American troops invaded French North Africa and captured Casablanca. It was all over the news, so why waste the free advertising? The movie was rushed into theaters in November 1942. It turned into a slow-burning hit and won the Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay.

What is the movie about? One way to see it is as a parable for America’s involvement with the world. The previous love affair in Paris of Rick and Ilsa stands for America’s war “to make the world safe for democracy” in 1917-1918. Ilsa’s mysterious betrayal of Rick stands for the many failings of the Versailles Treaty that ended that war—and set the stage for a new one. Rick playing the odds in his nightclub in Casablanca stands for American neutrality in a world on fire. Victor and Ilsa Lazlo, Captain Renault (the “poor corrupt policeman”), and “Major Strasser of the Third Reich” stand for a nuanced view of Europe: brave, passionate, amused and disabused, and brutally aggressive. Rick’s choice stands for America’s choice: to re-engage or remain disengaged. No choice comes without a cost.

Rick himself stands for a particular way that Americans used to think of themselves. Rick is an idealist who fought against the Italians in Ethiopia and the Nationalists in Spain. He’s also a tough guy and a worldly one. He’s practical and gets things done. He’s on the run from something in his past. Along the way, life has taught him a lot about the darker forms of human behavior. They don’t scare him. He can live in the world the way it is. Not a bad way to be.

The final scene takes place at an airport. The studio didn’t have any airliners available, so it had the props department build a model out of cardboard, then hired a bunch of midgets to play the ground-crew to make the plane look bigger. (I’m not making this up.)

American Women Playing Basketball in Europe.

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In November 2014, Bria Hartley and Kayla McBride were newcomers at the start of their first season of European basketball. By March 2015, the season was winding-down for Diana Taurasi. Their experiences illustrate the spread of American sports abroad that matches the growth of soccer in the United States; the challenges and rewards of living in a different country; and the different approaches to civic life in Europe and America.

Most American sports teams are run on a business basis. Many European towns regard successful teams as a source of civic pride that more than offsets any monetary cost. European women’s teams generally benefit from sponsorship by local governments or subsidies from soccer clubs. As a result, there are teams all over the place.[1] In Russia the “oligarchs” who rose up after the collapse of Communism and were brought to heel by Vladimir Putin pour in money without regard to the market pay-off. Instead, it’s a form of public relations. Company teams give a sense of pride to the employees. The companies view the teams as “socially-oriented projects.” To raise the level of play and to provide models for the local girls striving to excel, the teams bring in American players. In Europe, the pay is about double what players can earn in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA). In Russia, it can be vastly higher. Over the last decade, hundreds of American women basketball players have gone to Europe during the American off-season.

After playing a season in the WNBA, in Fall 2014 Bria Hartley and Kayla McBride went to play for a team in Sopron, Hungary. Their early experiences surprised them, not always in a good way. Communications were a problem: the landlady at Hartley’s first apartment spoke little English (and Hartley’s Hungarian was—understandably—not all she might have wished it to be); there was a feeble Wi-Fi connection. European wiring systems aren’t always up to the standards of urban America: McBride feared she had blown up her Xbox on one occasion (sparks flying). European appliances, like refrigerators, are small and Europeans shop every day or every other day. There’s nowhere to go in Sopron between practices. By American standards, there are no tourist attractions; just a bunch of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque architecture. By American standards, there is no place to shop; no malls, just local markets.[2] Although Vienna is less than fifty mile away and the team gave the women cars, neither one knew how to drive a manual transmission and the street signs are in Hungarian and German. At nighttime, the city can seem a little like the set of a horror movie: no streetlights, an inconstant hallway light.[3]

Even the team itself is difficult to penetrate. American women players very often find apartments in the same complex, but the Europeans scatter around town. Many of the local players have some English. So, on the court in practice, English is the “lingua franca.” However, off the court, Hungarian is easier for the majority. So, they’re lonely.

They seize on the familiar: a WiFi café where they can e-mail home; a Tesco (the European version of Walmart); brands with American names like Heinz, even if it isn’t exactly ketchup that comes out of the bottle.[4] They call home a lot, they go home during the holiday break, and their families plan to visit.

Diana Taurasi’s situation is both very different and similar. She has been playing off-season basketball in Russia for seven years.[5] She now plays for the Ural Mining and Metallurgical Company’s Yekaterinburg team. The money is vastly better than what she can make in the WNBA, even playing for the championship Phoenix Mercury. The Mercury pays her a tad over $100,000 a year; Yekaterinburg pays almost $1.5 million.[6] Taurasi has a far more luxurious life and more supportive environment than do Hartley and McBride. She has her own translator, her own driver, and a free apartment in a very desirable district. Also, Taurasi’s team has been together longer and has older players, so it hangs together much better than does the team on which Hartley and McBride play. They go out for dinner and drinks, catch a drag show, go to the skeet range. Finally, by experience, Taurasi was more suited to adapt. She is the child of Argentine immigrants to the United States.

Still, playing in Russia presents all sorts of contradictions to Taurasi that don’t appear for McBride and Hartley. Yekaterinburg has a Hyatt with a luxury spa and rows of demoralizing Soviet-era workers’ tenements; it has oligarchs with private jets and pre-game tailgaters cooking chickens that they slaughtered that morning; championship games can draw 4,000 more-or-less sober miners. Shabtai von Kalmanovic, a KGB officer-turned-businessman who recruited Taurasi to play for his Moscow Spartak in 2006, got shot to bits in 2009. The killer has never been found. That murder taught Taurasi something about Russia. She remarked after the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, “They’re never going to find [the killer], and if they do, they’ll pin it on some guy from Chechnya.” The worsening of Russo-American relations has made many Russians (80 percent in one poll) anti-American. Even among the team’s fans, Taurasi can feel it building up.

In short, it’s a lot like study abroad or working abroad. Sue Bird, a WNBA player with a decade of experience in Russia, advises: “just relax because it’s really not that bad. Once you get comfortable and find your way, you’re good to go.”

[1] Seth Berkman, “Overseas, Lost in Transition,” NYT, 11 November 2014.

[2] There are, however, a great many low-cost dentists. This makes Sopron a Mecca for the chewing-impaired.

[3] Really, all that was needed was the goalie for a hockey team to be living in the same building.

[4] See: “Pulp Fiction” (1994, dir. Quentin Tarantino).

[5] Charly Wilder, “Where the Money Is,” NYT, 18 March 2015.

[6] So, when her Russian coach asked her to sit out one American season to ease the wear and tear on her 32 year-old body from playing year-around, she agreed.

The Special Forces Solution.

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Many of the international problems confronting the United States these days seem both intractable and incomprehensible.[1] This is deeply frustrating for people living in a country with what is still the leading economy and the most powerful military—by far–in the world. There may be a sense that there is a solution at hand, if our leaders would just employ it.

You can see where this attitude comes from. In truth, the “armies” of many developing countries aren’t made up of real “soldiers.” They’re just “men with guns”[2] hired to prop up the regime in power. The collapse of large parts of the army of Iraq in Summer 2014 illustrates this point. In contrast, the Special Forces of Western nations are highly skilled and motivated. In the American popular imagination, SEALS, Rangers, and Delta Force troops are almost mythic heroes. People often are quick to point out that the Battle of Mogadishu in October 1993 left 17 Americans dead, while the Somalis suffered 1,500 to 3,000 casualties.[3] If only we could lay the weight of our real advantage (elite troops, Precision-Guided Munitions (PGMs), drones) on the primitive enemy, they would be vanquished.

Recent war movies have epitomized this belief.[4] As one of the SEALS surrounded by Taliban says, “I think we’re in for one Hell of a gunfight.” However, all of these movies both built on and diverge from earlier, more cautious movies.

The movie “Clear and Present Danger” (1994, dir. Philip Noyce) asked what if the “war on drugs” was a real war? It answers that we wouldn’t fight it with cops and lawyers bound by legal forms and trials. An angry American president orders his National Security Adviser to launch a secret and illegal war on the cocaine cartels. An elite platoon recruited from Hispanic-American soldiers is inserted into Columbia. They begin to destroy drug labs and transport aircraft. They call in an airstrike against a meeting of cartel chiefs, leaving the building in ruins. The operation is aborted when a henchman of the surviving cartel chief discovers that it is Americans who are doing the killing—without a formal declaration of war. The National Security Adviser betrays the troops to save his own skin, but the remnants are rescued by men of honor. A series of clips begin at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4xO0k9LcIU

The movie “Tears of the Sun” (2003, dir. Antoine Fuqua) asked what if we had wanted to stop the Rwanda genocide? A squad of Navy SEALS is sent into Nigeria in the midst of revolution[5] to rescue an American-by-marriage doctor working in a do-gooder camp. She refuses to leave without her ambulatory patients, so the SEAL team commander (played by Bruce Willis) is forced to take them along. They are hunted through the forests and mountains by the rebels. Along the way, the Americans change their attitudes. Willis’s character says “I broke my own rule: I’ve started to give a fuck.” One of his men says they need to fight “For all the times we stood down or stood aside.” A series of fire-fights display American prowess, but the SEALs and refugees are finally saved by a belated airstrike. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_MELX1MMoI

Both movies are cautionary tales in which elite forces are never all of the answer.

[1] The same probably can be said about the domestic social and economic problems.

[2] See: “Men with Guns” (1997, dir. John Sayles).

[3] The movie about the event, “Black Hawk Down” (2001, dir. Ridley Scott), was a huge hit and remains very popular.

[4] See: “Lone Survivor” (2013, dir. Peter Berg); “American Sniper” (2014, dir. Clint Eastwood).

[5] Curiously, the trouble arises from a reheating of the quarrel with the southern Ibos, rather than the current war with northern Muslims. See: “The Dogs of War” (1980, dir. John Irvin), another example of my argument. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyxBxmBjC0U

A couple of economic ideas from the past.

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As we lament economic inequality and get ready to keel-haul the Greeks, it is worth recalling  some commanding ideas of the past.

International payments and the domestic economy.

First, in the olden days, money had consisted of silver (good) and gold (better). Then, people had agreed to use paper money (which was worthless) on the understanding that it could be exchanged for gold whenever anyone wanted. To prevent scummy governments from printing all the paper money they wanted (“How can I be over-drawn when I still have some checks?”), fixed ratios of paper money to gold held by the government were established. The more gold that a government held, the more paper money that it could issue; the less gold that a government held, the less paper money it could issue. (See: accordion.)

Second, the money from one country can’t be used in another country. Countries settled their debts by transferring gold. Buy more stuff from a foreign country than you sell to that country and you had to settle the debt by shipping gold. Sell more stuff to a foreign country than you buy from it and they sent you some gold.

Third, if you put gold-backed paper currency together with the use of gold to settle international debts, you got a system in which the domestic economy of each country was linked to the international economy of all countries. If a country exported more than it imported, then gold flowed into the country. The increased gold supply inside the country compelled that country to increase the amount of paper currency in circulation. Prices and incomes would rise, making it less competitive. If a country imported more than it exported, then gold flowed out of the country. The decreased gold supply inside the country compelled that country to decrease the amount of paper currency in circulation. Prices and incomes would fall, making it more competitive.

Ideally, each country would strive for a rough equilibrium. However, the system was thought to be kinda-sorta automatically self-correcting. Countries with in-flows of gold and rising national incomes then could afford more stuff from abroad and ended up having to export gold. Countries with outflows of gold and falling incomes then could afford less stuff from abroad and ended up importing gold. This cut down on the role of any national government in managing the economy. Mostly, the heads of the various national banks (the Bank of England, the Bank of France, the US Federal Reserve Bank, etc.) were supposed to co-operate in smoothing out any bumpy patches.

 

Business cycle theory.

Commonly-accepted economic theory held that during a period of growth demand exceeded supply, so prices rose too high; any fool could make a profit and many did; wages tended to float up above a sensible level and many dead-beats got hired; and banks made unsound loans. In short, “plaque” built up in the “arteries” of the economy. This couldn’t go on. Eventually a “slump” would clean out all the plaque and re-establish the basis for sound growth. (See: angioplasty.) Demand would fall. Falling demand would force down prices to a reasonable level; unemployment would get rid of dead-beats and take wages down to a sensible level; silly businesses (see: nail salons) would go bankrupt; stupid loans would not be made; and the particular mix of products would return to what people actually needed. Then the economy could start growing again.

There is a seductive elegance to these all-encompassing theoretical systems. Same as there is with Marxism. The parallels don’t end there. Ideas have consequences.