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The Novel That Explains the Moment We're In

Ron Rosenbaum — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 23:23:00 GMT

It can't be ignored any more. The fear. You've heard it in whispered asides, hesitant, nervous questions and observations like, "I've lived through bad recessions, sure, but things always started coming back" and "Do you get the feeling things are getting out of hand?" I keep wondering when they'll stop saying "double-dip recession," making it sound like a Baskin-Robbins promotion. I keep wondering when they'll start saying the dread D-word: Depression.

Oh, the word has been uttered (most saliently last week by Judge Richard Posner). And this week the White House has edged closer, calling it, "this great recession"—a step from the brink. But a fearfulness, almost a taboo, surrounds it. If we have nothing to fear but fear itself, as FDR said of the first Great Depression, we're beginning to fear the fear of a second. One can't help but notice people tip-toeing around the fear.

The best way I can explain the feeling is to compare it to those moments when a plane hits heavy weather. Even if you're a pretty good flier on smooth flights, there's that moment when your Airbus suddenly drops like a stone. No matter how many times it's happened before, and however much you tell yourself that stability will be recovered, it's hard not to avoid the sickening flash panic that this time the drop won't stop.

The intimations of the irrecoverable have grown more frequent this past month, with the post-downgrade market hitting heavy turbulence, flash crashes on Wall Street, burning and looting on the London streets. Man-made conflagrations hitting like the one-two earthquake/tsunami combination of natural disasters last March, when the world held its breath as the reactors seemed to accelerate toward meltdown. There's that same sense now of the precarious stability of civilization suddenly sliding out of control.

Are we about to plunge into a second Great Depression? Suddenly, it's not just a nightmarish fantasy. We may pull out like the Airbus. Or we might find ourselves on a more primitive means of transportation. Cue image of the Joad family on the road in The Grapes of Wrath over a soundtrack of "London Calling." Or maybe you think the "super committee" will save us.

There's a book that captures just this preliminary, premonitory, pre-monetary-collapse moment when we just don't know how bad things can or will get. The strange liminal time when everything's on edge, up in the air and falling fast.

The book I'm referring to, the one that captures that ominous strange interlude is BUtterfield 8. Many remember this John O'Hara novel as being mainly about sex. But it's really more about money. Or sex and money—or sex and money and liquor. (It's set during the last days of Prohibition, when Christian moralists—the Tea Party of their day—had imposed an anti-urban idiocy on us through the 18^th Amendment and the Volstead act.)

But more importantly, it's a book about timing.

Many people who have seen the 1960 film that won Liz Taylor an Oscar but haven't read the novel don't realize how radically different the book, published in 1935 and set in 1931, is from the film, set in what looks to be the postwar '50s.

The novel captures something that the film, which stars Ms. Taylor's sexy white slips, utterly discards: the menacing undertone of that end-of-Weimar period worldwide, those two crucial years poised between the Black Monday crash of October 1929 and the middle of 1931, when the novel is set. The months before flickering hopes of recovery were dashed as the worldwide Depression doubled back and sunk us deeper into the black hole of fear itself. We were teetering precariously over the edge of the abyss in 1931, but didn't know for sure. It's often forgotten that during that tense period, there were mixed signals, some signs that a recovery was possible.

And then the Smoot-Hawley tariff put the nail in the coffin of the U.S. economy and sent the rest of the world into a death spiral. The short-sighted, selfish, protectionist economics of the Smoot-Hawley Act irrevocably plunged us into the worst Depression in modern history.

Smoot-Hawley was the wrongheaded equivalent of the current Tea Party hysteria over deficits at a time when it makes more sense to put some steam into the economy rather than shrink and mummify it.

People forget that the '29 crash itself didn't ensure the worldwide Depression, didn't consolidate its death grip until 1932. It took the intervention of the brilliant minds in the U.S. Congress to ensure that. For those few years we lived in a limbo of anxiety and incipient panic, when recovery was possible.

For those readers to whom the specific economic infrastructure of O'Hara's fearful world in BUtterfield 8 might be unfamiliar, here's how the U.S. State department website puts it (who says literary criticism leaves out the economic and class considerations underlying great novels?):

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff was more a consequence of the onset of the Great Depression than an initial cause. But while the tariff might not have caused the Depression, it certainly did not make it any better. It provoked a storm of foreign retaliatory measures and came to stand as a symbol of the "beggar-thy-neighbor" policies (policies designed to improve one's own lot at the expense of that of others) of the 1930s. Such policies contributed to a drastic decline in international trade. For example, U.S. imports from Europe declined from a 1929 high of $1,334 million to just $390 million in 1932, while U.S. exports to Europe fell from $2,341 million in 1929 to $784 million in 1932. Overall, world trade declined by some 66% between 1929 and 1934.

Heckuva job, Hawley. You, too, Smoot. I suspect the debt ceiling "solution" will one day be remembered with similar contempt as Smoot-Hawley redux.

Someday, they will stand together in history's dock. Two groups of willful men who sold out their fellow citizens with their blind avarice and arrogant stupidity: the greedheads on Wall Street and the empty heads (and hearts) of the Tea Party know-nothings.

O'Hara's novel captures a world like ours, a world paralyzed and electrified by anxiety over the approach of the final plunge and ruled over by sleazy losers like those.

It was really an accident that I decided to reread BUtterfield 8. I got a Facebook message from a group I didn't belong to, the John O'Hara Society, inviting me to a walking tour of O'Hara's New York, starting out in the revered old saloon, Connolly's.

I resolved that before I took the tour I ought to reread one of O'Hara's New York books and got the Modern Library edition of BUtterfield 8, which has an introduction by Fran Lebowitz * (who displays her customary incisiveness).

And of course instead of going on the walking tour I ended up staying home, staying up late, and finishing the book.

The book starts off like a house on fire. O'Hara has perfected a technique (useful in evading censorship) that uses implication, imputation, indirection, euphemism, and innuendo to evoke sex and sexuality. We begin with our damaged flapper heroine, Gloria Wandrous, waking up in a strange bed in a luxe Park Avenue apartment with a dress torn down the middle and the owner (and tearer) off to meet his wife and family (back from Hyannisport) at their suburban county club.

Seeing as she has nothing decent to wear, Gloria appropriates the wife's mink coat and exits the building wearing that and nothing (much) beneath it.

It reminds you at the outset of an R- (or maybe X-) rated version of Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds (dare I say, "dirty Trollope"?), but evolves into something more like Trollope's The Way We Live Now, as we follow Gloria into a demimonde of bohemians, speakeasies, agitated gaiety shot through with denial—an evasive anxiety about living on the lip of the volcano and the impending collapse of any stable values (whether monetary, sexual, or legal). She's pursued around town (such is the plot) by the dress-ripper, Weston Liggett, a Yale oarsman and out-of-towner who's just outside the inner circle of blue-blood privilege, a proper member of society who finds himself unable to resist the temptation to undermine its professed propriety in the absence of any universally accepted moral authority—and the irresistible pull of Gloria's sexuality. In the aftermath of the crash, what's recently been called erotic capital trumps traditional capital, though neither comes to a good end.

It's a world where the distinctions between the proper and improper are still known but not necessarily respected and where the establishments with the strictest rules of behavior are the illegal speakeasies run by gangsters, O'Hara captures the bewilderment that the new transgressiveness causes for someone like Liggett—who wants, more than anything, some standards of authority to cling to, the better to validate his position in society.

"O'Hara understood better than any other American writer how class can both reveal and shape character," Lebowitz writes, "how profound the superficial can be, and how clothes can truly make the man. Fitzgerald usually gets the credit for this but Fitzgerald gives too much credit to cash."

And, indeed, as the novel staggers like a woozy bathtub-gin drunk from Park Avenue down to bohemian Village haunts and back up to the midtown speakeasy secret palaces, as Liggett seeks Gloria and Gloria seeks to evade the consequences of her sexual allure, we get a Hieronymus Bosch-like pageant of the disrupted strata of dissolute New York society dissolving boundaries of behavior. And beneath it all: the fear.

One of the manifestations of the crumbling of boundaries and standards is not just in sexual licentiousness but in the license in the language, the language of sexual description. In 1935, when O'Hara wrote the novel, "there were things better left unsaid," Lebowitz writes. (There still are, but today they get said anyway.) "There were unspoken passions and unwritten rules." She writes about the way the crucial, human element in sexuality is "perception—that which gives human sexuality its affect, that special little twist." What a great way of putting it, one I'm sure O'Hara would love: that special little twist.

One of the great things about O'Hara is that—in the days when the Hayes Office compelled Hollywood to suppress sexuality on film, leading to a wealth of witty innuendo, when Lady Chatterley's Lover was suppressed in print—O'Hara was a master of the subtle artfulness of sexual euphemisms. The indirection with which he conveyed those "special little twists" is delectable. You linger over them on the page and think, "is that what's he's saying? What, exactly, is he talking about when some gent in a speakeasy marvels, about Gloria, that "an American girl would do that!" What's that? The fact that one has to search one's imagination for the various acts that could be encompassed in his shock and awe gives whatever that is a "special little twist" it wouldn't have otherwise. It's always going to be something beyond one's imagination. It was an age in which everyone—including the novelist—was playing at getting around the rules.

I can't resist noting, because I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere, an amazing anticipation of a scene in Lolita that it's hard to believe Nabokov did not read. In a flashback we see 12-year-old Gloria molested by a "friend of the family." Perhaps an unnecessary "explanation"—O'Hara gives us the boundary-crossing that condemns her to a life of having her boundaries crossed.

Also, there's an extended riff—seemingly frivolous, but not really—on why a martini should be shaken and not stirred. One that anticipates Bond, although Bond would be unlikely to go on about the molecular reasons for the desirable, shaking-derived "foaminess" exalted here, a foaminess that stands as a metaphor for the intoxicating insubstantiality of this glittering world of ritzy speakeasy debauchery all built on froth. A world that in 1931's nervous interim was itself shaken if not stirred.

And then there's the sudden intrusion—as in Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death"—of a deadly seducer: gold.

Gloria's uncle, who has been a regular player on Wall Street, gets the vibe of the coming plunge and tells her, "I've been getting rid of everything I can and do you know what I've been doing? Buying gold."

"Bullion?" she asks.

Yes, he says. "The real article. Coins when I can get them and gold bars and a few gold certificates but I haven't much faith in them. You know I don't like to frighten you, but it's going to be a lot worse before it's any better."

No, he doesn't want to frighten her at all.

Then he tells a long story about a prophetic market trader, "A Jew, naturally." (I am of the opinion that the racism and anti-Semitism expressed by certain of O'Hara's characters do not reflect O'Hara's sentiments but, rather, his novelist's ear: They are reminders of how recently open expression of such sentiments was not shamed. In O'Hara they are denigrations of the characters who express them, not of their objects.)

In this case, Gloria's uncle almost seems to have a mystical, worshipful feel for that Jew's prophetic ability to foretell the collapse: He called the market turn and sold everything in August 1929; moved to France for the "whoopee" (translation: sex); and then set sail around the world with some Follies girls, landed on a South Sea Island, sent the girls home, and established himself as the owner of a copra plantation in order to watch from a distance the decline of the West. He became Conrad.

That was then, the flight into gold like the flock of seabirds trying to outrace a storm. It's interesting how gold still has the mystical power to ignite end-of-the-world emotions. Shortly after reading that passage in O'Hara, I came upon an eloquent jeremiad, attacking today's fixation on the supposedly pre-apocalyptic rise in the price of gold. Gold and the end-of-the-world fears it inspires. Art critic Adam Lindemann wrote recently in the New York Observer as he watched gold soar:

I've never bought an ounce of the stuff in my life and I hope I never do. The price of gold is a barometer for our collective anxiety and irrational neuroses. I'm referring to global financial meltdown, famine nuclear meltdowns, tsunami, anarchy in the middle east and eventually hyper inflation. But I was already scared and buying gold will only confirm my innermost "end of the world" fears which is the very thing I'm trying to suppress.

The key word here is "scared." He's scared of the seductiveness of gold not just to him but to the entire culture. Welcome to Thunderdome.

Frankly, I blame Oliver Stone. He gave a generation of frat-boy financiers an excuse for their moral depredations. "Greed is good" was not meant to be the moral of the story in Wall Street, but Stone and Michael Douglas made that speech such an appealing tour de force—like Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost with "evil, be thou my good"—but with better styling gel. And in the absence of any countervailing ethical values "greed is good" became an excuse, a mantra to bundle mortgages by, and burn down the houses they collateralized.

In O'Hara's novel, the end of the world for Gloria Wandrous comes when she falls or jumps off the top of a New York-to-Boston steamboat and gets slashed to pieces in the paddlewheel blades. A kind of rebuff to Twain's innocent sentimentalization of steamboats.

I still can't decide; I don't think O'Hara meant us to know whether it was accident or suicide, but she was fated—as a golden girl stand-in for the American dream—for a bad end, a nightmare end. Either way, the end of Gloria, the end of glory, horrid and grisly.

O'Hara is moralist. You think he's enjoying himself giving you a guided tour of speakeasy hell. While writing in 1935 in what has become Walker Evans' Dust Bowl hard-core long-haul Depression. But there's a rage in that bloody ending, a rage at those who made Gloria Wandrous a beautiful loser. (It's Wandrous as in wan, she makes a point of telling people, not "Wondrous" as in won.) It's all connected, all the collective financial and sexual bad behavior will come to a bloody end.

How connected are the events of the summer of 2011? How bad an end are we heading for? And who's to blame? I think this is developing into what will be a major cultural conflict. Consider what Dorothy Rabinowitz, a very sharp mind on the conservative side had to say in a Wall Street Journal column blasting the "looting-bankers defense" as she called it.

She singles out for reproof a remark made by a Labor MP in response to the Tottenham riots and their spread: "Britain was reaping what had been sown: the alienated young had been copying 'the ethos of looting bankers.' "

She quotes one more variation: Courtland Milloy in the Washington Post: "From London to Philadelphia, youths erupting over the theft of their future." He didn't stop there, calling the looting "the alley version of the Wall Street bum rush and rip off ... flash mobs of bankers and mortgage lenders picking pockets, looting businesses, taking over homes ..."

You get the picture. He's not encouraging or defending a culture of thuggery; he's just saying that it's emulating or echoing the financial thuggery of those in expensive suits and arguing that it's hypocritical not to treat the bankers with just as much contempt and condemnation as a street looter.

I have to say, despite Rabinowitz' eloquent response and my own aversion for blame-shifting, I find myself thinking that one doesn't have to approve of, or excuse, the rioters in order to condemn the bankers. With no value system except loot, the bankers and their quant enablers tore down more homes and stores and put more families in the street than the looters of London.

John O'Hara knew exactly how responsible the bankers and speculators of his time were for the crash and Depression that followed. He didn't need John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash, 1929 to instruct him (although I recommend this classic of economic history as a refresher course on the speculators' culpability—and perhaps a map of the future). O'Hara was writing in 1935, when we began to see the consequences of the crash; he was able to capture the fear of the abyss. Whether or not we escape it at this suspenseful moment in our history, I think we know who's more to blame.

It's still worth remembering Woody Guthrie's line:

"Some will rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen." And some with a collateralized debt obligation.

Correction, Sept. 2, 2011: This article originally misspelled Fran Lebowitz's name. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Seeing Catch-22 Twice

Ron Rosenbaum — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:57:00 GMT

I still fondly remember the day my father told me, "Hey, I just got a letter from Joseph Heller."

Now, my father wasn't a big reader and rarely wrote letters, much less to authors. But when I went through a phase in high school of constantly carrying Catch-22 around and quoting from it and writing things like, "There was only one catch and that was catch-22" in magic marker on phone booths in the supermarket parking lot where I worked as a shopping cart retriever (superdistinguished summer job!), my father asked to borrow my copy and, to my surprise, became an instant fan.

I guess it shouldn't have been so surprising. He had served as a wartime second lieutenant and was fond of quoting to me and my sister such profound military maxims as, "There's a right way, a wrong way and the army way." (Which meant: Do things my way, right or wrong.)

And I think he was impressed when I stumped him with what I would later come to think of as Joseph Heller's hilarious refutation of Kant's Categorical Imperative.

There's a scene in the World War II novel when some officer or other reproves the novel's anti-hero, Capt. Yossarian, for trying to escape another of the ever-escalating number of dangerous bombing missions he's ordered to fly.

"Suppose everybody on our side felt that way," the officer demands, echoing Kant's imperative—that one should decide how to act by envisioning the consequences if everyone else acted that way. It's a maxim much beloved by parents. Mine, anyway.

So, if everybody else acted that way? "Then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way," Yossarian says.

Beautiful! It was one of the reasons I fell madly in love with the novel. Almost the way Yossarian says he fell for the chaplain in the first lines of the book. (Heller said he found a way to start writing Catch-22 when he heard in his head a version of the first lines: "It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.") It's one of the novel's amazing achievements that it may be the darkest, most profoundly negative vision of existence in modern fiction, yet it leaves you with a feeling of mad love for its crazy beauty.

Anyway my father was moved enough by his love of the novel to write a letter to Heller telling him how perfectly he had captured the absurdity of military life ("the army way") and how much it had moved him that someone understood. And it moved me that we could share this literary affection. So I was even more affected that Heller would take the time—a year after publication, just when Catch-22 was taking off and becoming the multimillion-copy best-seller it would be—to write a letter to my father thanking him for sharing his experience with the war and the military mind.

Every time I recall that, I think about the way reading Catch-22 changed my life. Maybe not for the better. Sometimes I think the book predisposed me to tangle with authority, and made me think that all authority was a joke founded upon pretense. (It's not?) But even though the book shaped me from a young age, the way I think about it changed, somewhat abruptly, about a dozen years ago.

If you remember the novel, you'll remember the chapter in the middle of the book about the soldier who "sees everything twice." (If you haven't read it, you really should get yourself a copy, and now is an optimal moment: The book is 50 years old; a biography of Heller and a memoir by his daughter are both just hitting bookstore shelves; and there's a 50^th anniversary edition already in stores with an affectionate and perceptive introduction by Christopher Buckley, who became a close friend of Heller's later in his life.)

Curiously enough it was something Christopher's father, William F. Buckley Jr., published in his magazine the National Review some years ago that caused me to rethink why I like Catch-22— led me, in effect, to see Catch-22 twice. And even more curious than that was the fact that what Buckley pere had published was an attack on the novel by Norman Podhoretz, who had something of a negative obsession with the book.

Before I seek to explain my second sight (my new vision) I should probably mention that Simon & Schuster, which is publishing the 50^th-anniversary edition, also published my most recent book—about what you might call the catch-22 of nuclear deterrence.

Most people see Catch-22 as an "anti-war novel." But I'm not sure that's exactly right, or that it goes far enough.

There's a brief passage in Chris Buckley's introduction to the new edition in which he quotes from a letter written to Heller by Stephen Ambrose the historian: "For sixteen years," Ambrose wrote, I have been waiting for the great anti-war book which I knew WWII must produce. I rather doubted, however, that it would come out of America; I would have guessed Germany. I am happy to have been wrong. Thank you."

This is a bit puzzling: Wasn't World War II supposed to have been "the good war," one of the few in history in which there was relative moral clarity? And didn't Ambrose write Band of Brothers for Spielberg, a script that was realistic about war but not anti-war. We were seeking to defeat Adolf Hitler after all.

This was the point that Podhoretz was making in his attack on the novel:

In due course even World War II fell victim to the onslaught of the antiheroic ethos that was resurrected in the Sixties and given even greater currency by Vietnam. Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 is the key document here. Though published in the early days of American involvement in Vietnam, Catch-22 was a product of the new climate, and so powerful was this climate already becoming that Heller not only got away with but was even applauded for what a few years earlier would have been thought virtually blasphemous—showing up World War II as in effect no different from or better than World War I. As Heller portrayed it, there were no heroes in that war; there were only victims of a racket run by idiots, hustlers and thieves.

I think I can speak for my father in saying that Podhoretz, who has written repeated attacks on the book, has missed the point, or lets a lack of a sense of humor obscure it. But sometimes an attack can have a clarifying effect on why one really values a book and this was the case here. I remember being indignant when I when I first read it. For Podhoretz, Yossarian was not the lovable, shambolic, subversive anti-war anti-hero I (and almost everyone else, particularly of the Vietnam generation) thought him to be. He was a shameless, shameful shirker.

In refusing to go on bombing missions after the requisite number kept being raised by self-serving commanders every time Yossarian came near fulfilling the quota, and by causing the scrubbing of planned missions, Yossarian was either condemning others to die or risk death in his place. He was undermining, Podhoretz argues, in an immoral, cowardly way, what was generally agreed to be a virtuous cause, however bungled its execution.

The people who defended Heller, Yossarian, and Catch-22 from critiques like Podhoretz's tended to say, Well, the war was just about all over! Already won! The missions were hardly even necessary; the commanders were foolishly and unnecessarily condemning the fliers to death by ordering extra missions.

I was satisfied with that for a while, and I kept on rereading Catch-22 with even more defiant pleasure. But after a while, probably after the time I spent writing Explaining Hitler, I began to rethink that defense, and to find it deficient. And re-examining the book opened the door to a new way of looking at Catch-22, one that saw it as even more profound.

First the factual background: If you examine the state of the war at the time when the novel is set more closely, you have to concede the war wasn't "over," in the sense of having been definitively won. (I've just done a new introduction to the 50^th-anniversary edition of William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which sensitized me to the chronology of the war.) There is no mention of Normandy in the novel, the Herman Goering Division is still a force to be reckoned with, even the Italian campaign was not a done deal. Mussolini is still in power in the novel, so its time frame must be 1943. Which means there was a lot of significant, potentially disastrous fighting yet to be done and that those bombing runs that Yossarian is shirking—even if they were ordered by preening idiots with no concern for the air crews or the war beyond the opportunity for self-promotion—had significance.

Which means that on strictly moral grounds, Podhoretz may have had a point. If you want to admire Catch-22 as an anti-war novel, you can only reasonably do so from a strictly pacifist position. What if everyone acted like Yossarian? Well, maybe he'd be a fool not to have done so, but Hitler might well have remained in control of Europe.

So where does that leave us? It left me thinking that to regard Catch-22 merely as an anti-war novel is a mistake. Even to regard it, as many critics do, as about "mortality" diminishes its scope. After all, Yossarian's much ballyhooed "discovery" of mortality at the end of the novel is not much of a discovery, however "hands on" it may be. (Spoiler alert: His fellow crewman Snowden suffers a horrendous flak wound and literally spills his guts into Yossarian's hands; the incident, recounted at the end of the book, takes place early on in the chronology and may well be what triggered the overt symptoms of rebellion we see in Yossarian throughout.) Even so, there's no shortage of novels that dwell on the tragedy of mortality.

I think Heller's argument was not with war or with death but with God. That the novel is less about the death of Snowden than "the death of God," as that theological tendency was known back then. That what the novel is really about is theodicy. Theodicy being of course the subcategory of theology which attempts (and studies the attempts) to reconcile human suffering, cruelty, and evil with the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, loving God. Heller doesn't think it can be done.

He makes this extremely daring, radically blasphemous argument—essentially that God is, if not evil, then hopelessly incompetent—most explicitly in the chapter about the soldier who "sees everything twice."

It's in Chapter 18. (Purely coincidence I'm sure, but by now everyone knows the story of how Heller had originally titled his novel Catch-18 but—because he learned at the last minute that popular novelist Leon Uris was coming out with a book entitled Mila 18—he and his editor and publisher decided to change the title to Catch-22. There has been much speculation about why they chose 22, as opposed to another number, and I have a theory I shall relate in a moment.)

But to set the stage: Chapter 18 takes place in the airbase hospital to which Yossarian has once again repaired, hoping to convince the doctors he's sick enough to avoid flying any more missions even though he's perfectly healthy.

This dodge has been wearing thin, which is all the more reason Yossarian is impressed by the scam invented by a fellow airman in his ward. The guy suddenly sits up and shouts, "I see everything twice!"

Chaos follows. "A nurse screamed and an orderly fainted," Heller writes, "Doctors came running up from every direction with needles, lights, tubes, rubber mallets and oscillating metal tines. They rolled up complicated instruments. ..."

It's in keeping with the novel's trademark absurdist genius that everyone seems to take terribly seriously the condition of "seeing everything twice" even though, if you stop and try to think what that means, it makes no logical sense at all. (It's not double vision.) And yet it seems incredibly suggestive, whatever it is. Perhaps a distant reference to Marx's version of Hegel in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon:Everything in history happens twice: First time as tragedy, second time as farce. Not a bad definition of Catch-22's literary genre: tragedy/farce.

The doctors struggle to decide which specialist should get to treat this unique but inexplicable syndrome and the airman gets to stay in the hospital. Before long Yossarian tries this gambit himself:

"The leader of this team of doctors was a dignified, solicitous gentleman who held up one finger directly in front of Yossarian and demanded, 'How many fingers do you see?' "

"Two," said Yossarian.

"How many fingers do you see now?" asked the doctor, holding up two.

"Two" said Yossarian.

"And how many now?" asked the doctor, holding up none.

"Two"" said Yossarian.

"The doctor's face wreathed with a smile. 'By Jove he's right,' he declared jubilantly. 'He does see everything twice.' "

"They rolled Yossarian away on a stretcher ... and quarantined everyone else in the ward for another fourteen days."

I always loved this scene for its Marx Bros. refusal of logic and the fact that everyone accepts it as logically possible. And I think the scene is a key analog to another instance of the genre of black humor/aburdism that was so influential in American culture of the latter half of the 20^th century. I have a strong feeling the awareness of the "seeing everything twice" line crept into Bob Dylan's absurdist "Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again)". In those lines Dylan sings: "An' here I sit so patiently/Waiting to find out what price/You have to pay to get out of/going though all these things twice." It's no fun going from tragedy to farce.

But for me, the high point of the "I see everything twice" chapter, perhaps the thematic high point of the book, is Yossarian's astonishingly scathing denunciation of God.

It comes between the first time he sees the soldier who sees everything twice and his decision to pretend that he does, too.

This is the key theodicy (or anti-theodicy) passage that makes Catch-22 in its own way a religious (or anti-religious) novel. It grows out of an argument Yossarian recounts having the following year (time schemes are not rigidly adhered to in Catch-22), an argument with the wife of his commanding officer Lt. Scheisskopf. (Occasionally, subtlety isn't either.)

It's Thanksgiving Day and she's reproving Yossarian for not being thankful, and he says, "I bet I can name two things to be miserable about for every one you can name to be thankful for."

Among her responses: "Be thankful you're healthy."

"Be bitter you're not going to stay that way," he says.

"Be glad you're even alive," she says.

"Be furious you're going to die," he counters.

They continue until Yossarian launches into a pagelong denunciation of God that I think is the blasphemous heart of the book:

"And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways," Yossarian continued, hurtling over her objections. "There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about—a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did he ever create pain? ... Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! [to warn us of danger] Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead. Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn't He? ... What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. ..."

Wow! It's a tour de force of anti-Deism. People speak too narrowly when they talk of Catch-22 as a satire of humanity. It's that, yes, and there are few better. But it's really a vicious satiric attack on God, as much as his poorly made creatures. This denunciation of God comes from the heart—Yossarian's, anyway—and transcends any denunciation of the evil of war. It's about the evil of existence itself and the creator of that existence and that evil.

I actually think that the importance of this passage dwarfs the obviousness of the passage about Snowden's death, which critics tirelessly tell us is the supreme moment of the novel. Yossarian's supposedly shocking discovery of mortality just does not live up to the metaphysical venom of this novel. OK, it's horrible to have someone's guts spill into your hands, but give me a break, he's been through war, he's seen death.

But the passage in the "I see everything twice" chapter is far more caustic, scathing, and deeply shocking and disturbing. Because it's not saying "death is bad." It's saying life is bad, existence is horrible. Why, in fact, get all upset about leaving the shambles of existence this deranged "country bumpkin" Creator has bequeathed us?

Once you get this you see Catch-22 twice or maybe for the first time.

I still love the book the way I used to, I still find it funnier than almost any other piece of literature. But there is a hidden "what's so funny here, anyway" aspect to the book as well, once you get beyond the war-is-hell and the officers-are-idiots. Life is hell. What kind of God created a world in which we'd have a Hitler to fight in the first place? Oh, it's a test, you say? Give me a spinal tap (in fact, give me Spinal Tap) instead.

Indeed, thinking about it in this way I wonder if both my father and I were touched by the same intuition that the novel is both tragedy and farce with a bleak vision of existence that encompasses far more than mere military madness.

And rereading the "everything twice" chapter for maybe the 10^th time I had another intuition, perhaps a bit far-fetched: I think this passage is so fundamental I'd speculate that the choice of Catch-22 to replace Catch-18 can perhaps be linked to the "I see everything twice" chapter. Maybe it was unconscious, but think of the number 22: It's seeing two, twice. I rest my case.

Yale's New Jewish Quota

Ron Rosenbaum — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 20:55:00 GMT

Who killed YIISA? It's a kind of academic murder mystery. YIISA—for those who have not caught the scant coverage of this deeply disturbing development—stands for the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism. Or should I say stood for that, till Yale, in a cowardly, clumsily-executed maneuver, abolished the program in the first week in June.

To many observers, both inside and outside Yale, killing the program seemed a shockingly ill-considered act. Even supporters of the move, such as Yale's Rabbi James Ponet, conceded (in an email to me) that it was "foolishly" executed. And considering Yale's well-known anti-Semitic past—the university long had a "Jewish quota," allowing in only a limited number of Jewish students per year, that it abandoned only in the 1960s—the decision is a shameful one.

Yale cited several reasons for killing YIISA, a program devoted to the cross-cultural examination of anti-Semitism that had been in operation since 2006. But many observers suspect the turning point was a YIISA conference last August called "Global Anti-Semitism: A Crisis of Modernity" which, while featuring 108 speakers from five continents, dared acknowledge the existence of anti-Semitism in some Islamic cultures. There has been talk—though no proof—of fear of offending potentially lucrative donors from the Middle East. Charles Small, the director of YIISA, "blamed radical Islamic and extreme left wing bloggers for the bad publicity," according to the Yale Daily News, which also reported that Small "pointed out that it was the largest conference on antisemitism ever, and it would have been absurd for the conference to ignore Muslim antisemitism."

It is worth noting that discussing the existence of anti-Semitism in some Islamic cultures does not imply there is anything essentially anti-Semitic about Islam. Small denied emphatically to me that any such Islamophobia was evident in the conference or in YIISA's seminars. But while the backlash against YIISA's conference included predictable protests from the official PLO representative and the group's supporters in America, the more subtle—and yet ludicrous—objection to YIISA's conference and YIISA's work came—as Ben Cohen pointed out in the Forward—in the charge of "advocacy," leveled by some YIISA opponents on campus. The charge that the program exhibited too much "advocacy" against anti-Semitism, as opposed to academic analysis of anti-Semitism. It seems unlikely that Yale tells its cancer researchers not to engage in advocacy against the malignancies they study, doesn't it?

I should note before I defend YIISA further that I have spoken both at YIISA, and at Yale's Hillel-like Slifka Center (which, shamefully, in my view, failed to defend YIISA), and I also edited a 700-page anthology on the question of contemporary anti-Semitism, Those Who Forget the Past. Finally, I should add that I had a highly positive experience as a student Yale, with no noticeable exposure to anti-Semitism.

As for the integrity of the work the center was supporting, consider, for example, this list of YIISA seminars examining anti-Semitism from a comparative perspective. It gives you a sense of the cosmopolitan range of its cross-cultural studies of the prejudice.

Apparently, I'm not alone in finding the center's work worthwhile. Closing YIISA generated a backlash. In the face of scathing articles in the New York Post by Abby Wisse Schachter (the daughter, incidentally, of Harvard's Ruth Wisse, one of the world's leading Jewish-literature scholars) and in the Washington Post by professor Walter Reich (he wrote, "Yale just killed the country's best institute for the study of anti-Semitism"), Yale had a PR problem.

One it solved by rushing into the breach with plans for a new acronym: YPSA! The Yale Program for the Study of Anti-Semitism. An institution whose scholarly neutrality—absence of advocacy against anti-Semitism—would presumably be less offensive to anti-Semites.

In one blow Yale had, in effect, given censorship powers over the limits of the study of anti-Semitism to anti-Semites and the like, the people who cried "advocacy." Not just at Yale but all across America. What timid college administrator anywhere is going to touch the subject in the wake of this incident? Why risk arousing a lynch mob of Israel delegitimizers? The decision could have a nationwide impact, discouraging scholarship in the field.

In addition, Yale was essentially inventing a new kind of Jewish quota: putting a quota on the anger that Jews could express against those who wish for their extermination. After all, such anger would be "advocacy." Apparently YIISA exceeded its quota.

Let us step back a moment and listen to professor Reich in the Washington Post, and particularly to the way he deals with the advocacy question. Reich, a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale Medical School, a professor at George Washington University, and a member of the YIISA board of advisers, is a calm, cheerful man, but you can tell from his tone the righteous anger he feels:

For the past five years, [YIISA] has flourished in New Haven, Conn. On a small budget it has sponsored research, visiting fellowships, papers and presentations on the most abiding and lethal hatred mankind has ever known—the one that brought us the Holocaust and that is once again racing around the world. A few institutes for the study of anti-Semitism have sprung up globally—a couple in Israel and some in Europe and North America. Yale's is the first in the States and the first to be closed down.

And here is how he described the conference that—merely by mentioning Islam—gave the anti-Semites a club with which to bully Yale:

Such eminent scholars as Bassam Tibi—a Syrian emigre, a distinguished professor at the University of Goettingen and a devout Muslim—spoke about anti-Semitism in that part of the world, as did other authorities. To be sure, some presenters expressed alarm and took an activist stance—as do some presenters at academic conferences on genocide, human rights, women's studies, African American studies, Hispanic studies, gay and lesbian studies, and nuclear proliferation.

So: It's okay for those who study racism, sexism, and genocide—or for other victims of oppression—to express advocacy, even activism, in conferences at Yale. But not Jews. Quota on that at Yale.

What's more disturbing, actually, after one digs into the matter a little, is the dismayingly docile role played by the Yale Jewish community, its Hillel-like Slifka Center and its most prominent rabbi, James Ponet (who was a contemporary of mine at Yale). I'm troubled by the community's compliant refusal to resist the hastiness of the decision to kill YIISA. And its inability to foster some discussion of what the hastily cobbled-together new acronym institution will be doing. The professor named to head it, Maurice Samuels, is well-liked (and in an email to me, he vouched that he would never disparage "advocacy" against anti-Semitism), but he has focused his academic work on the image of the Jew in 19^th-century French literature. Some wonder whether this background is sufficient for the task of examining contemporary anti-Semitism.

A brief chronology to put this in perspective. YIISA, founded six years ago on the initiative of respected sociologist Charles Asher Small, was up for routine review.

The review followed that August 2010 conference held by YIISA on global anti-Semitism. Abby Wisse Schachter, who I believe was the first to report on this scandal, quoted Yale Deputy Provost Frances Rosenbluth, who said at the time of the conference that YIISA was "guided by an outstanding group of scholars from all over the university representing many different disciplines."

But after criticism of the conference by the official PLO "ambassador" and various anti-Israel bloggers on the grounds that the study of Islamic anti-Semitism is prima facie "Islamophobia," the conference on worldwide anti-Semitism seemed to lead Yale to a curious turnaround on the issue of YIISA and Yale's faculty.

Suddenly—surprise!—the "faculty review" of YIISA discovered, contra Deputy Provost Rosenbluth, that YIISA hadn't involved the faculty sufficiently. Rabbi James Ponet actually told me that YIISA's key mistake was holding the conference in August, when the faculty would be away enjoying their time shares or whatever urgent vacation plans they had. It seems to me that any lack of faculty participation in YIISA events by the Yale faculty throughout the years should be laid at the door of the Yale faculty, which did not give the danger of worldwide anti-Semitism a high priority, before, during, or after their precious beach time.

But the truly dismaying aspect of the affair to me was the timid and compliant response of the Jewish community at Yale and its representatives. When an institution like Yale, which had engaged in anti-Semitic practices for at least a half-century, kicks out an institute for the study of anti-Semitism based on a secret faculty report, does the Jewish community, led by its Slifka Center—and its rabbi, Ponet—insist on transparency? Or, at the very least, request that Yale release its critical report, insist on some time to evaluate it, see what YIISA's response was, seek a solution that would preserve five years of valuable work and study? Why not consider ways of improving YIISA if necessary? No. Instead of resistance or at least investigative wariness, the Yale Jewish community rolled over and chose not to rock the boat. In fact, Ponet sent cheerleading emails to me and other concerned alumni asking us to send messages of support to the Yale administration in favor of the killing of YIISA and the substitution of YPSA.

The most stressful moment in the long, uncomfortable email exchange I had with my classmate Rabbi Ponet came when I asked him what he meant when he said Yale acted "foolishly" in the initial stages of the controversy.

I was stunned by his answer. He said that by "foolishly" he didn't mean it was foolish of Yale to throw YIISA under the bus for secretive reasons. No, it was foolish because Yale didn't have its substitute, the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, "fully in place". So it was not a "foolish" decision on the merits, he seemed to be saying; it was just the inept spinning when Yale killed YIISA that troubled him.

Better spinning, of course, would have meant a smooth upgrade in acronyms, not the stealth bureaucratic assassination that was exposed by Yale's foolishness. It would have made the killing of YIISA for "advocacy" against anti-Semitism less of a scandal. They didn't "have it in place." Ponet's line sounds like a description of inept maneuvering in the Bulgarian politburo before the collapse of the dictatorship. Thank you for your criticism, Comrade Ponet, these bureaucratic coups must run more smoothly.

When I replied with astonishment that this was what he felt was the "foolishness" at the heart of the matter, Ponet, perhaps realizing he'd let something slip that he probably shouldn't have, fired off a Sarah Palin-like rant against the media, denouncing me for caring more about a "scoop" than the truth and demanding that I concede that academics were more concerned with truthfulness than journalists.

I had to laugh at that one, since Ponet would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to have noticed that much of the postmodernist movement in the humanities at Yale is predisposed to deny the existence of truth and the "illusion of objectivity" and exalt the idea of competing "narratives" that might all be "true" in a certain way. Since objectivity was an illusion, Ahmadinejad's "narrative" of the Holocaust, by these standards, must be considered as valid as anyone else's. Ms. Schacter even reported in her piece on YIISA that one Yale grad seminar actually met with the great Iranian thinker and heard (with no "advocacy," one hopes) his views on the Holocaust and the lack of "scientific" proof of it.

In regard to academic truth and journalistic scoops, I asked Rabbi Ponet whether it was the Yale political-science department that uncovered the truth about Abu Ghraib or the lowly reporters he sneered at who risked their lives (not their time shares) to get the truth? Would he have preferred not to have had this "scoop" uncovered?

He has yet to answer the email. Henry Kissinger famously said academic disputes are bitter because the stakes are so low. But here, alas, the stakes are high. Rabbi Ponet and Yale will have a lot to answer for as the lasting consequences of their foolish and compliant behavior in the YIISA affair becomes more apparent and frank discussion of anti-Semitism becomes verboten on American campuses.

New York Women Have Evolved Into a Higher Species

Ron Rosenbaum — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 19:30:00 GMT

Can we return for a minute to Jill Abramson's ascension to the top of the Times? I don't think there's been nearly enough serious celebration—much less cerebration—devoted to this transfer of power, real and metaphorical. Especially on the part of men.

I'd say the occasion might even call for a kind of commemoration. Some action to remember the founders of the women's liberation movement in New York City—particularly those responsible for its stunning rebirth in the 1970s—and all the women who made landmarks like this possible. Abramson gave a gracious shout-out during her recent address to the Times newsroom to Nan Robertson, the Times reporter whose courageous 1972 public challenge to—and subsequent lawsuit against—her own paper, paved the way for this moment.

But her ascent marks more than the changing mores of the newspaper biz. The transformation launched back in the early '70s in New York, the transformation that made this moment possible, reached almost every aspect of modern life.

Come on people, I'm not suggesting literal dancing in the streets or ticker-tape parades. But Abramson's ascent deserves more than scattered plaudits in the media and a few privately popped bottles of champagne. It's something we should all celebrate, a genuine historical moment. For the women's movement in general, and for those pioneering New York City women in particular. And I actually have a suggestion on how to commemorate it that I will disclose at the close of this column.

Look, maybe it's a good thing, a sign of progress, that Abramson's appointment was not solely received as a gendered triumph, wasn't cast exclusively as an achievement of the women's movement. The decision to elevate Abramson has been discussed mainly as a meritocratic one, which, by all accounts, it certainly was. No one deserved the job more, on pure journalistic grounds, as my colleague Jack Shafer has made clear.

By now we've incorporated the goals and sensibility of the women's liberation movement so deeply into the very fabric of our culture, at least here in New York, that it's almost as if we don't notice it, like fish don't notice the water they swim in. We don't notice it until something like the DSK affair reminds us that things are very different elsewhere. Or, for me, when a development like Abramson's promotion reminds us how far we've come.

Perhaps I'm inclined to think about Abramson's new gig through this lens because I first came to New York in 1970, the year the women's movement was reborn. (No causal connection implied.) Yes, I know, there'd been feminist stirrings in the '50s and '60s, but the New York I arrived in was at a moment of metamorphosis. I began my first job, as a staff writer for the Village Voice, less than two months before the Voice published Vivian Gornick's groundbreaking manifesto for the new woman's movement: "The Next Great Moment in History Is Theirs."

In it she described the rise of then-radical feminism in various movements, on the streets, in demonstrations, and, equally important, in the mind, in relationships, in the newly evolving "consciousness raising groups" where women told their stories to each other and shared perspectives. The piece marked a moment of self-recognition for the movement.

The Voice was a key outlet for feminist writers, so I knew a lot of them. I also met a lot of activists while covering the antiwar movement, and while living for two years with a member of the radical feminist Redstockings collective. Feminist precepts seemed more the norm than anything else to me. I'm not claiming any special virtue; I was just lucky to get clued into the new rules early. In a way I took the ferment of the era for granted.

One thing that helped throw this period into sharp relief for me, helped remind me of the revolutionary change we've undergone, was recently reading the memoirs of women who came of age just a decade or so before then. I'm talking in particular about Joyce Johnson's classic Minor Characters, and Anne Roiphe's recent Art and Madness,which showhow shockingly different things were in the '50s and '60s, when smart, talented, creative women were relegated to roles as muses and enablers to purportedly genius male writers and artists. They had to keep the home fires burning while the men were out drinking and whoring—and worst of all ignoring that they too had artistic aspirations.

I never experienced that Mad Men culture firsthand. I'm not saying it had disappeared by the time I got to New York in 1970, but it was no longer the accepted norm. Instead I found brave, activist women changing the face of the city, the culture, and the country at large. The movement fought to put anti-discrimination laws in place, allowing women access to the workplace, eventually changing the entire culture of the town from the decade that preceded it.

And I feel privileged to have been even a passive witness to the whole process. Yes, there were struggles, clashes, and conflict. But there was also a sense of real change. Still, looking back on it, I failed to see how genuinely prophetic Gornick's "next great moment in history" proclamation was. It's only in retrospect I can see how the women's movement utterly transformed New York City, doubling (at least) its brainpower and pool of talent. A phenomenon that fed on itself: New York, which had always been a magnet for the happy-go-lucky Holly Golightlys of America, became even more a magnet for her brighter, brainier counterparts, a host of brilliant women whose confluence begat that critical mass of creativity that made New York City not only a thrilling and challenging place to be, but restored once again its status as undisputed capital of the world.

And so I want to use the occasion of the Jill Abramson appointment (she's a native New Yorker who brought New York attitude to the Times D.C. bureau) to advance a conjecture, a speculation, about New York women. It's a conjecture about the result of these struggles, with recalcitrant men, with the exigencies of New York City.

Here's my theory: Women in New York City have evolved into the equivalent of a higher species. Not quite the leap from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon (especially since Neanderthals have recently been getting props from anthropologists for having bigger brains than previously suspected and for not being quite as cave-mannish as they once were seen). Still a step up the ladder, not just from men, but from women elsewhere as well.

So when I say New York City women have evolved into a higher species I'm not speaking in a strictly biological, genomic way. (Although I call your attention to a recent Scientific American paper called "Urban Birds Boast Big Brains," which posited that the challenges of urban life to avian intelligence have resulted in an increase in the capacity of their brains to cope with the struggle for survival in the city.)

I don't think any similar study has been done on urban birds of the human persuasion. But I think an anecdotal case can be made that if our urban birds aren't smarter than nonurban birds, or other urban birds, New York women are smarter than New York men. Or at least that there are far fewer dumb New York women than dumb New York men. But this is what has always puzzled me: The evolution of women has made them not merely more fiercely intelligent and multitalented, but more sophisticated, witty, charming, and seductive. What's not to like? And yet few were the celebrations of the new realities by New York men, at least in the early years. In fiction, film, nonfiction, and memoirs by New York men, one sees so much crankiness and whiny complaint about the terrible inconvenience the women's movement has caused. Consider Roth, Updike, Mailer, Bellow. Consider, even, the enduring cruel image of the liberated woman in Kramer vs. Kramer. A major portion of the last century's literary history has been written by men unable to deal with the loss of subservience. And by women trying to deal with the inability of men to deal with it. (Even now in the new century, look at all the male literature devoted to whiny men flummoxed by female accomplishment. It's the new whininess. Neo crankiness.)

I will never forget being around the women at the Voice in the first half of the '70s. It was like a preview of the incredible diversity of talent among women, of their self-expression, their self-actualization, of the many paths women were free to take.

There was Sally Kempton, a graceful writer who later decided she wanted to became a guru. Ingrid Benglis wrote a brilliant essay foreshadowing the way sexual politics caused friction, good and bad, in a story titled "Combat in the Erogenous Zone" (super-genius title courtesy of Voice editor Ross Wetzsteon). Blair Sabol blazed an anti-fashionista path through the fashion world. Mary Breasted wrote a best-selling contrarian critique of sex education. Sarah Kernochan, triple threat novelist, songwriter, and filmmaker, won the first of two Oscars for Marjoe. Jill Johnston spun her dance critic column into a Joycean personal journal with a cult following to decipher it. There were too many to name. And then when I first began writing for Harold Hayes' Esquire I made the acquaintance of Nora Ephron, who was writing daring and candidly personal essays that explored the implications of feminism for male/female relationships. Everyone argued about Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, Kate Millet's attack on male writers, and Mailer's reply in The Prisoner of Sex. The contours of the most basic human relationships were being re-examined from the ground up and in some ways redefined. All of New York City was one big fat consciousness-raising group.

What do we owe to the women whose courage and sacrifice, when they were jeered by many of both sexes, won so much for all of us? What do we owe to the ones who didn't take the easy way out but became rebels in the '70s and paved the way for the way we live now?

This may sound incredibly quixotic. But what about the Equal Rights Amendment? Remember that? Since the amendment, first written in 1923 by Alice Paul, came soooo close to passage in 1982—but fell short—it has virtually dropped off the radar. Why was it so important then, but of negligible interest now?

Here's the text: "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

Radical stuff. Endorsed by the Republican Party platform as late as 1976, got passed by Congress and then by a two-thirds vote in 35 of the 38 state legislatures needed for final ratification when the initial clock—and a somewhat shaky extension—ran out in 1982, stopped short mainly by a one-woman crusade on the part of Phyllis Schlafly. Now it's become conservative and GOP dogma that the ERA is Satan's No. 1 favorite new amendment.

You might say it's forgotten but not gone. You could make a case that the advancements in women's rights legislation on the federal and state level and consequential changes in the culture have secured the equality the amendment insures, rendering it no longer necessary. But the women whose discrimination case against Wal-Mart got kicked to the curb by the Supreme Court this week might disagree. Legislation can be rolled back far more easily than an amendment. Backlash in subtle forms is more easily combated with an amendment in place.

Since 1982, the ERA hasn't entirely disappeared. Every new Congress, some never-say-die stalwarts introduce a bill to implement the so-called "three state strategy"—which would allow the 35 previous ratifications to stand and give Congress the right to extend the ratification period once more—giving advocates a chance to sway three more states and get the thing ratified.

This year, the bill was co-sponsored by Democratic House leader Debbie Wasserman-Shultz, among others. (As President Obama supposedly said, "Don't mess with Debbie.") Why not contact her office and show your support for continuing the struggle, doomed as it may be in the present House? (By the way, Wasserman's website also indicates support for gay marriage and as I write this, the New York State Legislature is on the brink of passing what would be another victory for the civil rights struggles of the '70s, a moment I wish could be seen by the late Arthur Bell, the Village Voice's pioneering reporter on that movement.)

Whether it succeeded or not, a renewed campaign for the ERA could spotlight the places in business and government that have failed to live up to the spirit of the amendment. The odds are against it; it may be a hopeless cause. But so was the suffragette movement, the anti-slavery and civil rights movements, the gay rights movement. The entire women's liberation movement when it began. It could mean a lot if people took the ERA up once more as a serious cause. It would be a fitting commemoration for the women who made Jill Abramson's rise and triumph possible.

I think it would be great to see a Times editorial advocating it.

Save the Condé Nast Maidens!

Ron Rosenbaum — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 21:29:00 GMT

The Devil wears Kevlar? Die Hard— With a Blusher? "Hazmat: This spring's must-have fabric!"

I'm sorry: It's not a joke. The hard-to-believe decision by magazine empire Condé Nast (publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Wired, and Glamour, among others) to move the city's hot center of creative talent from its current Times Square headquarters to the never-ending security nightmare known as "Freedom Tower" at Ground Zero, may be one of the single most questionable corporate decisions in New York City history.

Oh, forgive me, right, did I say "Freedom Tower"? Sorry, the 1776-foot tall (take that, al-Qaida! 1776 in yo' face!) replacement for the Twin Towers has been renamed! The false bravado of "Freedom Tower"—especially for a building whose security precautions will make it more like a supermax prison tower—has been replaced (in 2009) by the dignified, nonprovocative reticence of "One World Trade Center." (The new thinking, I guess: no use in unduly provoking al-Qaida—after all, they hate our freedoms!)

The name change has not diminished the folly of the whole building-as-symbolic-gesture, nor has it eliminated the fear factor in forcing thousands of middle-class and working-class employees to serve as live bait in World Terrorist Target No. 1. (Why not name it that?) Because the security concerns that were there from the beginning have not gone away, and the fixes for the flaws in the security have not been proven, and the site planners have been shown over and over again to be shockingly, scandalously inept.

What were they thinking at Condé Nast? Make a grand defiant gesture of their corporate boldness to the world? That seems to be the message of the blue-sky-filled full-page ads they've taken out in newspapers that proclaim the Terror Tower buy-in with the phrase "See You Downtown." Is the idea that no terrorist would dare risk Condé Nast's paralyzing death ray: an Anna Wintour frown?

Of course, such grand gestures by big shots (did they consult their employees about how they felt about being moved into World Terrorist Target No. 1?) often don't work out so well for the ordinary folk who must back them up. I'm thinking of the crews of the Titanic and the Hindenburg, for instance. Doesn't Condé Nast know the sketchy security history of this foolish project? Haven't they wondered why Mayor Bloomberg has not rushed to install his minions in World Terrorist Target No. 1?

I began writing about this six years ago when the NYPD counterterrorism squad, the best in the business, spoke about the dangers surrounding the emperor's new skyscraper. Things quieted down after some cosmetic fixes, but suddenly the confluence of the Condé Nast lease pledge (1 million square feet!) and a disturbing floor plan leak once again brought to the fore the folly and danger this unnecessary gift to terrorists represents.

The leak serves to spotlight, through the fog of sycophantic rah-rah media coverage, the comic-if-it-were-not-tragic nearsightedness demonstrated by the bureaucrats in charge.

These two events were accompanied by the fiasco of the "prism glass" (more anon) and the "Oops, we forgot the bathrooms" idiocy at the 9/11 museum. You may have missed, in the blizzard of screw-ups, the fact that the site's National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum—future destination point for thousands of busloads of schoolchildren—failed to provide a single restroom. Just another instance demonstrating the subprime intelligence of the site planners. If Ground Zero is not a national scandal by now, it should be, especially with all the 9/11 10^th Anniversary sentimentality coming up. Meanwhile, Freedom Tower 2.0's completion date has been pushed back for the umpteenth time, now to 2013. Don't hold your breath. These are not the whip-smart people you want to trust your loved ones' safety with when people all over the world are plotting to kill them in their workplace.

Did you (did Condé Nast?) miss reading about the "confidential" floor plan leak last month? Documents marked "confidential" and containing floor plans for One World Trade Center were posted and made available to terrorists on New York City's website by mistake in May. Something revealed, conveniently, after the Condé Nast deal had been announced.

Well, al-Qaida has no reason lately for renewed interest in the World Trade Center anyway. That's so 2001. Oh, right.

According to WCBS news radio, here are the truly scary details:

There are 17 documents stamped confidential showing every nook and cranny—including load-bearing walls, mechanical rooms, and ground floor entrances—of the still under construction tower in Lower Manhattan.

That concerns counterterrorism expert Makie Haberfeld of John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

"This absolutely gives the potential terrorist the blueprint of how to enter, how to defend themselves if there is a counterattack against them," she says. "I think it's in a way irresponsible on the part of the organizations that decided to that."

She says the documents provide a basis for a Mumbai-style attack.

Have the Condé Nast big shots talked to her? You know, just for a second opinion from an unbiased (non-real-estate-hustler) source?

Oh, but, hey, no worries, bro, the Port Authority (the New York/New Jersey entity that owns Ground Zero) said that the really super secret "confidential" details of the floor plan (forget the "load-bearing walls"; do the terrorists know where the snack kitchens will be located?) had been "scrubbed" from the 17 documents and that the docs should not have been labeled "confidential." That's reassuring. Everyone knows terrorists aren't interested in "load-bearing walls." And the attitude of the planners is What, me worry? It's OK if a document marked "confidential" gets posted on the Web.

Besides, the 9/11 attackers didn't try a "Mumbai style" attack—invading buildings and killing with automatic weapons firepower—on 9/11, so we don't have to worry about one now, right? They always use the same method on any given building, right? Of course, there was that 1993 basement bomb in the WTC, but, still ...

And, as for an aerial attack, like last time, well, maybe the original pre-"scrubbed," "confidential" documents showed the emplacements for the anti-aircraft guns built into the load bearing walls—the very walls the building will have to defend if the sleepy FAA and NORAD can't scramble jets quickly enough, as they failed to do last time.

So, rest easy, Condé Nasties, they got you covered from almost every angle except ground, air, and underground attack in this incredibly supersafe building.

In fact, it's the safest building in the world! Well, almost. Here's what usually savvy NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly (probably under pressure from real estate types) had to say about it last December. See if you find it reassuring:

Landlords, managing agents and tenants will change over time, but the threat to the World Trade Center will persist, as demonstrated by al-Qaida's 2006 plot to set off explosives in the PATH tubes and flood the World Trade Center and Lower Manhattan. Rather than give way to this threat, the NYPD and the Port Authority are working together to make the World Trade Center the safest work environment in the world.

And then he added (do I detect a note of desperation?):

Now is the time for anyone with alternate ideas for securing the site to present them for consideration.

They admit they don't know if there's a better plan than the one they're putting in place! They're still hoping someone can come up with something better, something more likely to work. Kevlar bubble wrap?

If that's the best the commish can give the real estate types to sell on, it ain't much. According to the city's Police Commissioner, Condé Nast is moving into a building under a threat that will "persist" indefinitely, as long as the building lasts. But they're working on it! Note that he didn't say it was "the safest work environment in the world." He said they're "working to" (as in toward) making it that. How far away they are from that goal he didn't say. What a brilliant gesture on Condé Nast's part to lease 1 million square feet in the No. 1 terror target in the world without an ironclad security plan in place. I hope they got a nice price.

And despite one commenter calling my WTC security stories "a lonely crusade," I was not entirely alone when I first raised these questions. Here's Frank Rich, writing in the New York Times several weeks after me: "The simple question that no one could answer the day after 9/11 remains unanswered today: What sane person would want to work in a skyscraper destined to be the most tempting target for aerial assault in the Western world?"

And then almost simultaneously Kurt Andersen, in his New York magazine column, called upon the Ground Zero bureaucrats to "Forget the idea that we are obliged to build a super tall high rise for symbolic purposes, to defy the terrorists, or 'repair' the skyline. The skyline was fabulous before the Twin Towers and Al Qaeda will not be diminished a jot" by offering "a provocation to ambitious terrorists around the world."

He added this question: "Will the inspirational jolt we enjoy in 2009 by having demonstrated our architectural gumption, outweigh the horror we will feel if that [edifice] is bombed in 2010?" (Failure to finish on time is the main factor that's kept the Freedom Tower safe so far.)

A look back at the first security scandal is instructive: One of the things the NYPD counterterrorism squad insisted on was that the base of the tower be moved further back from nearby West Street with its heavy truck traffic. (Can you say "truck bomb"?) Of course, I may have missed it, but what's the plan to prevent an explosion originating on one of the hundreds of trains that will be passing below the base of the tower? Is every train passenger and his or her backpack going to be searched? And what about a Stinger missile (widely available on the black market, I'm told) from across the river? Would you want to go to work in place people are scheming 24/7 to destroy?

Oh, but don't forget the bollards! The revised security plan after the scandal of 2005 included more bollards, a word I've come to admire for embodying itself somehow: Bollards are those fire-plug shaped heavy-metal stanchions placed at close intervals around security-conscious buildings to prevent a truck bomb from barreling through. Of course all those trucks making deliveries inside the building? The highly paid security guards who will check them out before letting them in the bowels of the tower only have to make one mistake ...

And then there was bold talk back then that the building security check-in would include as-yet-to-be-proven iris-scanning ID verification devices (when Condé Nast moves in will they offer eyeliner checks, too?). There will be dogs patrolling the perimeter and the pat-down is likely to exceed TSA-style obscenity.

And no worries about the air you breathe: Back then there was also talk of highly sensitive airborne biotoxin detectors so you'll know—after it's too late of course—if someone has infected the air you breathe with anthrax through the ventilating system. Very comforting.

But the pièce de résistance in this tale of folly was the reinforced base and the attempted prism-glass coverup. The NYPD counterterror people were adamant that the base of the building had to be encased in thick concrete for 185 feet up, or the first 20 stories, to protect against a bomb deposited at ground zero of Ground Zero.

But "Ugh," said the aesthetes designing the building. One hundred eighty-five feet of concrete. It would look like a "fortress," said one. "Forbidding," said another. Not exactly in tune with the delicate Condé Nast creative spirit. Actually, more like one of those supermax prisons that they keep psycho-killers in. Condé Nast on Shutter Island!

And so, back in 2006, they came up with this supergenius, highly artistic plan to cover up the supermax concrete and armor-plated fortress: They'd clad the concrete in "prism glass," a super-special reflecting glass, that would make everything look pretty in the sunlight. Designer sunglasses for the building!

Then, whoops, five years later, just last month, the site developers suddenly announced they were dropping the prism glass because the super special prism glass they'd already spent $6 million on "bowed and broke" on testing.

But better late than never, right? How's the testing on those air sensors going, guys? So Condé Nasties, you know your lives are in the hands of some very, very—what's the word?—slow thi nkers. Curious that the announcement about the glass came several days after the Condé Nast announcement—perhaps the slow, slow testing had not quite reached completion. We will test no glass before it's time. Goodbye, prism, hello again, supermax.

And, by the way, I don't think the matter is of more or special urgency just because it's Condé Nast. I'm speaking on behalf of everyone forced to work in this misbegotten building, because, in this economy, who has much of a choice if the boss says, "See you downtown"?

Why had I been on this "lonely crusade" against Freedom Tower folly for half a dozen years before Condé Nast entered the picture? I think it may be because my father was an office worker in the Empire State building when a fogbound plane—accidentally—crashed into it that I'm sensitized to the question.

It's true, though, I have a fondness for Condé Nast, having spent a decade or so riding the elevators to Vanity Fair, where I was a contributing editor, and Mademoiselle, where I was movie reviewer. I learned to treasure the complex and intoxicating mix of subtle fragrances that mingled in the elevator air. And to differentiate by subtle outfit cues, Vogue from Glamour and Glamour from Mademoiselle types. Condé Nast is a storied New York institution whose eccentric creative past is worth reading about—check out Mary Cantwell's memoir, Manhattan, When I Was Young.

I don't think anyone should be forced to work at the new Ground Zero on a daily basis but I would also add that Condé Nast in particular is a culture that would be more sensitive to daily apprehension of "Mumbai style attacks" than a worldwide shipping container corporation, say. (It's not that Condé Nast can't be tough minded, too. They could have unleashed a team of their best investigative reporters—The New Yorker, Wired—on the safety question before signing the deal. They still could. It's not too late. I'd trust these reporters over "security consultants.")

Still, Condé Nast people in general are sensitive enough already, it's their job to be sensitive. Sensitive to the tremors in the zeitgeist, to the length of a hem, the equipoise of a semicolon in Janet Malcolm's prose.

It's hard to be at your most antenna-of-the-species sensitive when dread of anthrax in the air-circulating system, or a bollard-evading bomb, is on your mind.

Nor am I saying that there's any place utterly safe from the threat of terrorism, in America, but you'd have to admit the Acme Widgets Company in Toledo (a name I made up) is less likely to be on the al-Qaida front burner.

True, even New York skyscrapers that are not making an in-your-face challenge to the most successful terrorist group in the world cannot be 100 percent safe. But why place your entire enterprise in most endangered skyscraper in the world? I have to believe there's more to this decision than we know. Could they be getting the space for next to nothing as a loss leader to attract companies who think: "Well, if Condé Nast is there it must be safe."

Maybe it's a kind of denialism at work. See—10 years later—we're all just Americans hard at work, the way we were the morning of 9/10/01. Like it never happened. But—I hate to be a downer—it did happen. To a building complex we were assured was oh-so-safe back then.

I've always felt that the most fitting response, one that would assure we never forget 9/11—the purpose of a memorial, right?—would be to have left the pit of destruction just as it was, a raw nightmare snapshot of what hatred does. Not business as usual.

Show the scar, the still-open wound. Don't try to cover it up with a pretty, prismy, 1776-foot-tall tower. That's not a victory for freedom. It's a victory for folly.

Dylan's Birthday Present

Ron Rosenbaum — Mon, 16 May 2011 14:31:00 GMT

Bob Dylan has a big birthday coming up (70), and it occurred to me that one of the best presents we could give him would be to extricate Bob from the treacly, reductive, crushing embrace of the Bobolators. (My name for those writers and cultists who still make Dylan into a plaster saint, incapable of imperfection, the way Shakespeare's indiscriminate "bardolators"—one of my targets in The Shakespeare Wars —refuse to believe it possible The Bard ever wrote a flawed line or a poorly chosen word.)

Similarly, the Bobolators diminish The Bob's genuine achievements by putting everything he's done on the same transcendentally elevated plane. With their embarrassing obeisance, their demand for reverence, their indiscriminate flattery, they obscure the electrifying musical—and cultural—impact he's actually had.

The book and blog Bobolators, with few exceptions, cumulatively give one the impression of a cult of scriveners all eager for a few favors from the Dylan Industrial Complex—a liner-notes commission here, a super-impressive title ("Historian in Residence" at the official Bob Dylan website) there. All you have to do is suspend your critical faculties and never express anything negative.

Of course it's not an easy job being a Bobolator. You have be prepared to praise the purportedly profound inner complexities of Masked and Anonymous—that botched Dylan movie by that Seinfeld writer—arguably the most turgid and clichéd production with the Dylan name attached to it ever. You have to chirp in wonder at "Little Drummer Boy" on the cringe-making Christmas album. You have to, in other words, make Dylan not only unsurpassable as a musician but guru-like in the ineffable brilliance of his life choices (give it up for Jesus, then give up Jesus), and a source of all wisdom whether he's mocking those who claimed to have "God on their side" or claiming to have God on his side (and Jesus in his pocket) himself.

To see him perfect in all aspects, as the Bobolators do, is to deny Dylan the respect he deserves as an artist who takes risks and fearlessly goes out on limbs that sometimes don't sustain his weight. The Bobolators abandon any pretense of aesthetic discrimination and in doing so reduce Dylan's often superb choices ("going electric," writing Chronicles) to the level of his occasional dismal ones (the Christmas album, serenading the torturers of Beijing). Let's just say their sycophancy does him no favors.

The odes that are produced by this mindset do more harm to Dylan's stature—make him seem merely the object of the worship of deluded fanboys, the idol of a not very discerning cult. Like the cultists who were upset at my Billy Joel put-down (still get hate mail; and fan mail, too.), the Bobolators put off many from his music altogether by making it seem some hermetic little boys club populated by Steve Buscemi Ghost World-types where you have to know which songs on Blood on the Tracks were recorded in New York and which in Minnesota to get into the clubhouse.

I say this as someone who has written about Dylan's work in both rhapsodic and occasionally scathing terms. Someone who, yes, is known among the Bobolators, for an interview with Dylan in which he uttered his resonant description of the sound he was seeking ("That thin, that wild mercury sound.") I guess for a time I was a Bobolator. (Jesus saved me.) But, in writing a book about him now (for Yale University Press), I'm seeking to peer through the haze of hagiography and discover what really makes Dylan Dylan—what makes him unique, and not just another great singer-songwriter. What accounts for his impact on our culture, on me. Why people continue to respond to his work. Why the cult.

In any case, if you needed any convincing it was a cult, you only had to read the outpourings of rage from his acolytes, who were on full, groveling display in the recent fracas over Dylan's tour of that secret-police torture state otherwise known as the People's Republic of China.

If you're coming late to this controversy, Dylan was invited to play Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong this year so long, Reuters reported, citing an official Chinese source, as he performed with "approved content." The widespread impression was that Dylan allowed the Chinese to vet his set list presumably for songs that might refer to, if not protest, the vicious crackdown on dissidents that was going on during the time Dylan played the People's Republic.

Not true, Dylan protested (see he still is a protest singer) in a rare personal statement on the official Bob Dylan website issued on May 13, more than a month after his appearance had provoked controversy.

It was particularly notable since Dylan rarely responds to media attention. (One had the feeling this statement was meant to pre-empt birthday articles that made this an issue. Notable as well because that month had been marked by a profusion of defenses of Dylan from the Bobolators who indignantly denied there was anything wrong with anything Dylan did in "engaging" with China while it was jailing dissenters and had "disappeared" the artist Ai Weiwei, the iconic dissident.

Curiously, none of the Bobolators suggested Dylan follow the courageous example of Björk, who capped her 2008 Chinese concert by crying out "Tibet! Tibet!" (What happened to the spirit of "Ain't Gonna Play Sun City"?) Dylan's not a protest singer, the Bobolators maintained, and he was only faking it when he sung protest songs in the past.

Dylan's story is that the Chinese didn't vet his set list: "As far as censorship goes," he wrote on his site, "the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There's no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous 3 months."

"There's no logical answer to that"? I think what that means in Bobspeak is that he never knows what he's going to sing on any given night; it's all dictated by his unpredictable Muse.

I kind of like the way he sends up the Chinese authorities by sending them three months' of song lists, but it still evades the real issue; not what he sang but whether he should be singing at the sufferance of torturers at all.

Still, in all likelihood nobody would have paid much attention to Dylan's Chinese adventure, except for a scathing column by Maureen Dowd in the Sunday New York Times calling Dylan a "sell out" for kowtowing to the Chinese Stasi in the wake of Ai Weiwei's arrest.

Suddenly, as if answering a bugle call, the Bobolators rose and rallied as one to defend the besieged artist. No, I don't mean Ai Weiwei; he's just a disappeared Chinese guy to them, out of sight out of mind; he was no Bob Dylan. Must defend Bob. Whatever Bob does has a Higher Meaning.

And guess what the focus of the fierce attacks on Maureen Dowd was. Her unfamiliarity with Dylan's recent set list. She had jabbed at Dylan for not doing his most strident protest songs like "Masters of War" and "Hurricane" when—the Bobolators sneered—they rarely appeared on his set lists anymore. He hadn't sung "Hurricane" since 1976! Oh the humanity! (The humanity they had lost touch with in their Bobolatry.)

I'm not kidding: The Bobolators turned Dylan in China from an argument about repression, torture, and "disappearances" of dissidents, and how an artist, how any human should react to it, into an inside-baseball Dylanological contretemps designed to show off their superior knowledge of Dylan's set lists in his recent concerts. Talk about missing the point! Could they be this obtuse or just shamelessly eager to show Bob their undiminished fealty?

The "historian in residence" was the first to weigh in with a weak-tea defense of Dylan, a defense that raised a number of questions. Was there any line he'd draw? Would it be OK with him if, back in the day, Generalissimo Augusto Pinochet of Chile wanted to hear the soothing strains of "Lay Lady Lay" over the screams of his prisoners? Or how about today, Assad in Damascus must have some time off from piling up his dead citizens to enjoy a little live (non-protest) music. They just do these things out of sight in the People's Republic. The impression one got from the historian-in-residence was that human rights had to take a backseat to Dylan's whims.

One doesn't expect Dylan to be keeping close track of Chinese crackdowns but why wouldn't the historian-in-residence have not tipped him off that it was not a good moment to comfort the afflicters? Perhaps that was behind his hasty rush to justify the misguided deal—he hadn't spoken up before the deal went down and thereby hadn't protected Dylan from the scandal.

Have I made myself clear?: It should not have been an argument about what Dylan sang, but whether he should have sung anything at all. He could have cancelled the appearance without making a statement when he realized what was going on (people could have drawn their own conclusions as to whether the cancellation was political) or faked a motorcycle accident.

(By the way, re: motorcycle accidents. All good Bobolators know that Dylan's mysterious 1966 motorcycle accident changed the course of his life and his art, but the details, the seriousness, the after effects, have been obscured by mystery and unfounded theories. I now think I know the truth: the words of The Second Doctor, as I've come to call this shadowy now-dead figure. Something I learned about, curiously enough, while attending the J. Anthony Lukas Prize award ceremony at Columbia J-school earlier this month, something confided to me by one of the many ace investigative reporters there, so I tend to trust it.)

But, to return to the China contretemps, the Bobolators second line of defense was—seriously—that if his Chinese government hosts paid close attention and felt the true existentially subversive power of the songs Dylan actually sung, it would have rocked their world. Why the Great Wall of China would probably have crumbled into dust. Just from the force of his Truth, dudes. Gee, maybe it has! Has anyone checked the Wall lately? Is it still there?

And then they twisted themselves into pretzel-like contradictions: Dylan was never really a protest singer anyway; he only faked being one early in his career to get a leg up the ladder of fame from the folkies then fashionable when he arrived in New York at the beginning of the '60s. So he shouldn't have been expected to do anything confrontational in China; he was, like, above mundane political considerations.

Great defense! They're saying—his defenders!—that he was a scheming careerist liar. (Do they really believe the emotion in that beautiful ballad "Song to Woody" was all faked?) But he's Dylan so it's OK.

What's amusing is that they're willing to accept his explanation that he was never sincere in the first place politically so he shouldn't be bothered by it now. Don't they realize that this itself could be insincere. That he might be insincere in his protestations of insincerity about his protest songs? They're just such suckers for anything that issues from Bob's mouth they don't know when or whether they've been conned by one of the great put-on artists.

Still you have to love Dylan for creating all the mystery—and for that immortal line from the disclaimer-of-sincerity period when the folkies were on his case: "Folk music is a bunch of fat people."

But if Dylan was never really a protest singer, how can you claim at the same time that his songs, whatever he played, had the effect of a powerful protest on the Chinese torturers? Oh, and one of the most peculiar Bobolator defenses was that he really didn't, as Maureen Dowd implied, inspire anti-Vietnam War protesters with his music because, despite all the anti-war songs Maureen Dowd wanted him to play, like "Masters of War," he wasn't really against the Vietnam War! It may be true: The entire Vietnam protest movement was mistaken if they took any inspiration from him. They had the wrong exegesis!

I don't mean to be sarcastic—actually, to tell the truth, I do. As a matter of fact, as a more positive birthday contribution, I'd like to pay tribute to Dylan's sarcasm. A rhetorical mode that has been somewhat taken for granted, underrated aesthetically, confused with irony and cynicism. We take it for granted because it's become embedded in the consciousness of our culture, the sarcastic "Yeah, right" is our default attitude. For which Dylan can claim much credit and deserves much praise as far as I'm concerned, since I believe you can never be too skeptical of received wisdom.

And I think people get sarcasm most wrong when they confuse it with irony. Irony is most often the detached observation of the disjunction between word and world ("Like rain on a wedding day," etc.). But sarcasm is more earnest; sarcasm may be intended to hurt but almost always because he or she who utters it has been hurt, feels hurt. Cares. Irony pretends to detachment, cynicism knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, but sarcasm is earnest in its own mean-spirited way, and cares enough to hurt back. Most of all it doesn't like being lied to.

We weren't always, but America is now a nation (with many reasons why) that assumes it's always being lied to, whose default response now is that two-word compression of all sarcasm: "Yeah, right." And the case can be made that America wasn't a "Yeah, right" nation before Dylan came along. Parts of America still are not, but most of America has that precise attitude problem toward authority. I remember seeing a great T-shirt on the downtown subway at Union Square: "I ♥ my attitude problem." I ♥ America's wised-up wise-guy attitude problem. And I ♥ Dylan for expressing it so well that he altered the national attitude.

It's not his only attitude: He's written some of the best love songs ever, and some of the only ones that incorporate sarcasm. (What would you call the final line in "Boots of Spanish Leather" if not heartbroken sarcasm?) The sarcasm was there in the gritty rasp of Dylan's voice whatever he was singing. The voice itself was a polemic against prettiness, but not opposed to beauty.

Where did that come from? The fashionable thing to think these days is that the roots of what made Dylan Dylan are to be found in the distant past either in the old weird America of coal mines and Appalachian hollows and hollers or in the Popular Front politics of the prewar '30s. Aaron Copland—yeah, right.

The Bobolators think that it somehow enhances Dylan's stature to place him in the vast rural American backwoods landscape with these other rootsy "authentic" folk figures or in the "Popular Front" movement whose politics exalted "the people." Make him one with them. All of which makes him little more than a weirder Pete Seeger, a figure in a vast Thomas Hart Benton landscape rather than the idiosyncratic genius he is. It's not that he doesn't have influences, just that trying to reduce him to his influences, please. … These meta theories of Dylan have the effect of making him a less startling distinctive figure, more derivative.

They rob him of what made him such an intriguing and original force, not just a figure in the societal landscape that we're supposed to think more of because he's more like everyone else who came before but as a distinctive departure from what came before.

It's there, some of it, sure. But I think if you want to place Dylan in a cultural landscape, it is more accurately located in the urban "Black Humor" movement of the late '50s and early '60s: Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller and Catch-22, Terry Southern and the Dr. Strangelove script, Burroughs, Mailer.

And that the attitude of ridicule toward authority and propriety in all of them can be traced to their temporal location between two holocausts: the one Hitler perpetrated (but which people still didn't want to talk about) and the nuclear holocaust that seemed imminent, particularly after the Cuban Missile Crisis of '62. It was in '63 that Dylan wrote "Talkin' World War III Blues."

Just what is it that the twin specters of two holocausts, past and future, have to do with sarcasm? Well, an awareness of the human predilection for greater and greater mass slaughter, now push-button extermination, was at odds with the pretensions to piety, propriety, rectitude, and legitimacy that the official culture claimed for itself. Made one snicker and sneer at its claims to moral and ethical righteousness, their Pollyanna vision of human nature, founded as it was on tolerance, even enabling of extermination.

And it's too often forgotten that Dylan wrote a horrifically chilling Holocaust verse for one of his most brilliantly sarcastic songs, "With God on Our Side," which is in effect a sarcastic tour of official American history as intermittent slaughter, rationalized by religion, by "American exceptionalism," and climaxed by the aftermath of the Second World War, after which Dylan sneers about the way we forgave the Germans even though "They murdered six million/ In the ovens they fried/ The Germans now too/ Have God on their side." Killer.

He didn't forgive the Germans, or forgive the forgiving, and it's all there in that deliberately raw, ugly, in-your-face barbarism, "In the ovens they fried." No one wants that image, that metaphor made (burning) flesh conjured up before their inner eyes. We're usually content with speaking in hushed tones about "ovens." Dylan wasn't satisfied that we were satisfied.

I don't think I'm exaggerating his connection to the black humor movement or the origin of the black humor movement in a kind of displaced discourse about the absurd evil of the Holocaust(s). Dylan would, much later in his career (1981) on one of his "Christian" albums no less, write a tribute song to Lenny Bruce. Very sincere for the most part, as if he's looking back and seeing his younger sarcastic self in Bruce. And then—as if freaked out by his earnestness—he couldn't resist what sounded like a bit of sarcasm at Bruce's (and his own) expense. After praising him for having the insight to "rip off the lid before its time," he recounts his one meeting with Lenny, a taxi ride:

"Only for a mile and a half, seemed like it took a couple of months." You can picture it.

But not all sarcasm is necessarily harsh or Holocaust-related, thank God. Dylan is a master at evoking the subtle shades, gradations, and nuances of sarcasm. The potential tenderness of sarcasm.

I know the first Dylan song that really got to me was "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," a song with a sarcastic title and yet filed with regret, remorse, romantic longing, and a wish that things had turned out differently. His words are sarcastic, but he's almost sending up his self-portrait of detachment, portraying it as false bravado for a broken heart. He's thinking at least twice.

And I'd like to close on a personal note involving that song and its fusion of love and sarcasm.

There's something about this breakup song that, rather than indulging in bitterness and self-recrimination, lends itself to a romantic feeling. I can testify to this. I was at a party some years ago, feeling morose. A girl I didn't want to lose had left because I didn't do enough to keep her, and she had just taken off for the United Kingdom to marry a banker. The very next night at that party—it was in a sixth-floor garret in the Village—I was oversharing my sadness. I did it by quoting one of Dylan's most beautiful and overlooked songs of love and loss: "I Threw It All Away."

"I must have been mad/ I never knew what I had/ Until I threw it all away."

It just so happened that a poetically lovely young woman in a brown velveteen mini shift (hey, there are some details that linger in your memory) had been curled up on a couch taking note of this with a kind of knowing smile (she was onto my self-romanticizing game, yet in a forgiving way), and after I repeated "I threw it all away" one more time she spoke up and said,

"Yeah, but don't think twice, it's all right."

We ended up living together the next three years. I look back on it now as "Love at First Cite."

I have Dylan to thank for it.

Happy birthday, Bob.

If you're in Manhattan this Tuesday night, Ron will be speaking about his latest book, How the End Begins: The Road to Nuclear War, at the 92nd Street Y with The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg.

Why America Loves Serial Killers

Ron Rosenbaum — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:26:00 GMT

Long Island again. Serial killer(s) again. The media have—a little too overeagerly—been conjuring up the specter of "the Long Island serial killer," even though those five words compress at least two unproven assumptions: There's no proof that the remains of up to 10 victims (so far) found on the sandy barrier island that parallels Long Island's South Shore were killed by a Long Islander, or even by a single individual. Or that they were killed on Long Island. For all we know, they were killed by a Yale comp lit professor, who deconstructed them in Connecticut and carried them to Long Island where he "unpacked" them from the trunk of his Prius.

But even if the perp or perps came from elsewhere, at least one of the presumed murdered prostitutes, Amber Lynn Costello, operated out of a seedy home in Long Island's West Babylon. It was she who was the subject of murderous speculation in a chat room that made the front page of the New York Daily News: "HOOKER SLAY EXCLUSIVE, WEB OF L.I. SICKOS, Inside secret site where johns plotted revenge." It's indisputable that these "sickos" did come from Long Island and apparently patronized the murdered hooker from West Babylon. (There's a name to deconstruct!)

But it's evident that in tab world, Long Island and serial killer seem to go together. I feel a certain responsibility for that, having thrown a spotlight on the L.I./serial killer connection back in the '90s in a lengthy essay for the Times magazine, when my "Guyland" homeland—as I fondly called it in tribute to the way the L.I. accent rendered it: "Lawn Guyland"—had begun sprouting corpses (20 or so) from serial killers like Joel Rifkin. It was a time when Long Island also had to endure the embarrassingly seedy Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco scandal—and the three made-for-TV movies based on the case of Fisher, the "Long Island Lolita."

Why, I'd asked back then, had the peaceful, boring suburb I grew up in (though my long-form birth certificate proves I was born in Manhattan) turned into a tabloid hell? "Long Island Babylon," I called the piece, and, boy, were Long Islanders mad at me. You can't go home again.

Dudes, own it! I didn't kill them. It wasn't as if I was proposing a giant statue of a serial killer similar to the huge Long Island Duck that graces the tail end of the real Long Island (meaning the Un-Hamptons). I was just reporting—but the conjunction of Long Island and serial killers seems to have stuck.

Still, for a while things seemed to have simmered down out on the Guyland. Yes, we had tabloid outbursts like "the love judge," Solomon Wachtler, an eminent jurist who went cuckoo and dressed up like a cowboy, the better to blackmail his mistress. (A scandal whose best exegesis can be found in Laura Kipnis' recent book.) And, yes, the Guyland has continued to have a steady stream of bizarre spouse-slayings and would-be spouse-slayings: one inept but really, really angry spouse or another clumsily trying to hire a hit man to rub out the other, a hit man who often turned out to be an undercover cop. (What happened to the do-it-yourself spirit?)

But a recent Slate piece has offered evidence that serial killing in general has diminished, although it did proffer the caveat that the past decade's apparent declining crop of killings may not account for victims still buried unfound. And the Times quoted a self-proclaimed serial killer expert who said they were making a comeback (though, thankfully, he didn't blame Long Island):

Vernon J. Geberth, an author and former New York Police Department homicide commander who has analyzed more than 300 serial killings in the United States, said popular culture, not the locale, was to blame.

"I don't think it's strange at all," Mr. Geberth said. "I think that people fail to realize that we have more serial murders today than ever before. We've taken the most reprehensible members of society and given them star status. We've raised a generation of psychopaths. As a result, we have an increase in serial murder."

So what is it—more or fewer of them? Long Island or American culture in general? Fascinating that nobody can agree on whether the number is increasing or decreasing. Of course, "serial killer experts" have a stake in convincing us they are still on the rise, but it's hard to argue with Mr. Geberth's point about the culture and the "star status" we've given them.

I'm not saying I blame it on Jonathan Demme (although I once did) but I think the "star status" in the culture can be traced back to Silence of the Lambs and the way it made a star out of Anthony Hopkins' campy Hannibal Lecter by emphasizing his charming eccentricity rather than his cannibalism (or by making his cannibalism a charming eccentricity). Ever since then, serial-killer chic has achieved a stranglehold (so to speak) over American popular culture. Demme certainly didn't intend this, but his undeniable skill and reputation as a "classy" filmmaker mainstreamed his Lecter and opened the door to a torrent of less artful purveyors of serial-killer fare. And ever since, from Lecter to Dexter, through all the CSIs, the Michael Connelly novels (best in class but still), and, yes, the vampire craze (a thinly disguised serial killer cult for 'tweens), it's clear we love us our serial killers.

But why? Especially when you consider that almost every single one of them depends on the graphic depiction of the terrorizing, slicing, and dicing of attractive young women. (Maybe there's your answer: It's where sick misogyny goes to die.) But I have a theory that includes but subtends that. Because if it were only the appetite for terrifying and murderous violence against women, it could be focused on one woman at a time. It's the serial nature of it that is the attraction, the source of the "star status."

My theory is one I derived after my investigation of America's greatest fake serial killer, Henry Lee Lucas, for a 1990 Vanity Fair story that can be found in The Secret Parts of Fortune. (Unfortunately, Henry is probably best known through the credulous film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.) It was an investigation that took me into Death Row holding cells in Huntsville, Texas, and Starke, Fla. (That was where I interviewed Henry's "running buddy," Ottis Toole, one of the worst humans I've ever been in a room with. Toole claimed—falsely, I believe—that he killed and ate the son of "America's Most Wanted" TV host John Walsh.) And, for good measure (in a later story), I was led by an FBI man into a burnt-out crack house in Detroit, the burial ground of a real serial killer.

I should mention before laying out this theory that I hesitate to return to the subject, because almost anything you write, even about fake serial killers, contributes to the myth. But this Long Island story hits even closer to home than the previous ones. The Jones Beach island sand-pit burial ground that has been the locus of recent victims is just a few miles from the home I grew up in, in Bay Shore, Long Island. My high school friends surfed at Gilgo Beach, where four bodies have been exhumed from the dunes. (Yes, there was surfing on the Guyland, though not by me. Homie don't surf.)

And my family and friends had spent summer weekends on beach blankets getting sunburned and eating fried clams at Jones Beach, just down the road. I'd always thought that the blacktop that traversed the island, Ocean Parkway, had a lonely, bleak beauty. Now I feel a kind of resentment that the stupidity of serial-killer culture has stained the nostalgia-inducing primal scene of my past by making stars out of serial killers, making it seem like a kind of local profession.

More importantly, I think that all the literature, fictional and pseudo-scientific, has not articulated what I believe is the real reason why our culture seems to love serial killers.

So please allow me to introduce you briefly to the fake serial killer who opened my eyes to our longing for real ones. Yes, longing—that's what I've come to believe the Henry Lee Lucas case demonstrates.

Looking back on it, it's hard to believe that Henry, a homeless drifter, not too bright but with rat-like cunning, was able to take in so many, including the vaunted Texas Rangers, and the supposedly highly trained psychologists who quoted Henry's bogus self-analysis as gospel in textbooks, some of which are still in use even after his vast hoax had been exposed.

Henry was no angel; let's be clear about that. Convicted of murdering his mother in Michigan, he took to the road after his release from the state pen there. In the months before his star turn as super serial killer began, he had been living in a converted chicken coop in a weird religious cult called "The House of Prayer" in North Texas. (I'm not making this up.)

Picked up by the local sheriff on suspicion of murder of a young female travelling companion, Henry would later claim he started confessing to multiple murders in order to put an end to what we'd now call "enhanced interrogation" techniques in his holding cell (kept naked in an artificially freezing cell with just a metal bedframe, etc.).

So he started confessing and once he started he didn't stop for years. Not just the murder he was wanted for, but for random unsolved slayings, cases the cops had never been able to close. And once he started confessing he got himself transferred to better quarters, and the more he kept confessing to local unsolved murders the better his conditions got and the further down the line he put his eventual trial conviction and date with the Big Needle on Huntsville's death row. Eventually he got himself a comfortable cell with premium cable TV and unlimited takeout menu selection for grub, so he kept on confessing, and soon the sheriff had become a law-enforcement star because he had a star serial killer cracking cases for him.

The sheriff, one W.F. "Hound Dog" Conway, an ex-Texas Ranger, eventually brought in his fellow rangers and soon Henry blew up big, statewide, nationwide, confessing to multiple, dozens, scores of unsolved murders throughout America. It was amazing, the number of them—usually lone young women whose bodies were found in the culverts beneath interstate exits, identity undetermined, often because they'd been abandoned by their families once they became runaways or sex workers. Nobody wanted them but Henry and Hound Dog, the rangers, the so-called "serial killer psychologists," the superoverrated FBI "serial killer profilers" (another bogus legacy of Demme's Lambs—they almost always get everything wrong or offer the obvious "He's probably an unmarried male who lives alone." Duh!), and their enablers among the psychiatrists who could make a quick buck out of pop-psych serial-killer books.

The rangers were grateful for Henry because he substantially raised their "case closed" percentages, and soon they were going from bringing in lawmen from around the country to whom Henry would confess to unsolved murders to taking Henry around the country like a touring rock star, arriving in towns to "take cases." Meaning gullible or greedy lawmen would show him some corpse photos of some poor hapless murder victims whose bodies nobody wanted and Henry would say, "Yep, I remember doing her" and provide enough vague details to clear the case. Nobody looked too closely into it, as they just liked the way Henry expeditiously closed the books on nagging, unsolved deaths.

Eventually, he got up to claiming he'd killed 300, 400, 500, or 600, until …

The big recantation. Nobody's exactly sure why, although it had something to do with some born-again woman named Sister Clemmie who at first believed and tried to save Henry's soul and then became suspicious—and then a local DA began looking into some of Henry's confessions with a skeptical eye and in a dramatic standoff, Henry finally confessed his confessions were frauds.

What followed was a major blow-up that ended with a six-month-long judicial hearing in El Paso, a Texas State Attorney's investigation, and major embarrassment for the Texas Rangers, the serial killer "experts," and all others who profited from Henry's lies. Eventually, after years of litigation, then-Gov. George Bush was forced to commute the death sentence Henry had gotten for himself, and he eventually died in jail, though not after confessing to me, during my death row visits, his fake confession methodology. He'd developed a con man's skill at getting the cops, all too eager to close a case, to ask him more and more specific questions that Henry could accede to. ("Was she wearing socks, Henry, any memory of orange socks?" "Why, yes, come to think of it," etc.)

I'd spent weeks in El Paso reading the transcripts of the hearings and it was so clear that Henry pulling a scam from beginning to end that the question I've wondered about ever since was: Why? Why had he succeeded in fooling so many for so long?

Why is there an unhealthy air of excitement whenever a new serial murderer like the Long Island killer or L.A.'s "Grim Sleeper" turns up? Why is American culture so perversely in love with the idea that there are swarms of serial killers roaming our interstates (and now our interwebs—many of the L.I. victims were solicited by Craigslist, the serial killer of newspapers)? Ever since I saw The Silence of the Lambs, I felt that it and its successors played to, preyed on, some dark impulse in the culture to dramatize the terrorizing of women, but there is more, I think.

What I learned from Henry is that there are real constituencies for serial killers. Cops who get to use one guy to improve their closed-case stats—that's obvious. Then, more touchingly, heartbreakingly, there are the victims' families, some of whom I've talked to, some of whom clung to the belief that Henry wasn't faking it because his confessions gave them that "closure" they so desperately sought. Closure is a modern buzzword much overused, but it reflects an ancient human need when a child is killed, one that dates back to the closure at the end of the Homer's Iliad when the brokenhearted King Priam begs for the return of the body of his slain hero son, Hector—so that he can begin to put an end to his deeply lacerating mourning.

And then there are those pseudo-scientific charlatans, the "serial killer profilers" made heroes by The Silence of the Lambs and the bullshit best-sellers they write who claim to have fathomed the source of human evil in bromides like "low self-esteem" and "abusive family situations." The profilers get to be heroes because they convince Americans that however much evil is out there, however many serial killers, these specters are not unfathomable. Rather, they are explicable, capable of capture both physically and psychologically by these brilliant knights in scientific armor who can put the killers under the microscope and deliver us from evil.

And, finally, there is American culture itself. Serial killers are an alibi for our nation. Think about it. What would you rather believe? That there's a single lone sicko like Henry killing 500 hapless victims? Or that there are 500 murderers still at large (by virtue of Henry "taking" their cases) who have already gotten away with one murder and may be cruising into your town right now looking for another?

What paints a more disturbing picture of American culture? The one serial killer driven by inner demons or the 500 murderers driven by a sick and murderous culture that produces 500? And yet the latter, alas, seems closer to the truth. A sick and murderous culture that, I'd argue, comes full circle by creating actual serial killers, killers who have taken as their role models the fake ones on our screens. America has made serial killing a self-replicating phenomenon.

Don't turn away: Serial killers are America's alibi, and every time you pay your 12 bucks for another serial-killer movie or put one on your Netflix queue, you're feeding the beast.

You're an accomplice. In making serial killers giggly, kitschy chic, we're all accomplices.

Is Ulysses Overrated?

Ron Rosenbaum — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 18:50:00 GMT

Why did you decide to write this column in question-and-answer form?
Good question! As a tribute to a single chapter in Ulysses, the 70-page chapter known as the "Ithaca episode," the penultimate section of that otherwise overrevered modernist classic.

Does it have another name?
It's also informally known as the "catechism" chapter. It's the one that precedes the climactic Molly Bloom soliloquy and the one that many skip over to get to Molly's sexual meditations. More saliently, it's the one that is written entirely in question and answer form—in tribute, parody, and affectionately snarky celebration of the interrogatory rhetoric of the theological-indoctrination catechism form.

Why undertake this task now?
Two reasons. First there was the recent London Sunday Telegraph list of the 50 most overrated novels. Actually the way they put it was "Not the 50 books you have to read before you die," as a sort of swipe at literary bucket lists. And on top of the list, number one with a bullet, was Ulysses.

How did they characterize it?
They said: "Only a 'modern classic' could condense one man's day into an experimental epic that takes years to plough through. If the early description of the protagonist going to the lavatory doesn't make your eyes swim, the final 40 pages, untroubled by punctuation, will."

Was this fair?
Obviously it was deliberately mean-spirited, but on the whole Ulysses is due for more than a little irreverence. People still speak of it in hushed tones, perhaps hoping nobody will ask them about the parts they skipped over.

So you do think Ulysses is overrated?
In general, yes. Loved Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, but didn't need it blown up to Death-Star size and overinfused with deadly portentousness. Ulysses is an overwrought, overwritten epic of gratingly obvious, self-congratulatory, show-off erudition that, with its overstuffed symbolism and leaden attempts at humor, is bearable only by terminal graduate students who demand we validate the time they've wasted reading it.

Why so hostile?
For one thing, Ulysses gives a bad name and a misleading genealogy to "experimental literature." For another, it's the source of similar bloated mistakes by later novelists.

What do you mean, "misleading genealogy" of experimental literature?
The thing that's so galling is, of course, that all Joyce's tired and antiquated modernist tricks had long been anticipated by Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, that amazing 18^th-century novel that eclipses Ulysses in every way and shows how we've lowered the bar for anointing innovative literary "geniuses" ever since.

And what later artists' mistakes?
I'm thinking of Thomas Pynchon after V. and The Crying of Lot 49, his two masterpieces. I think it's clear that his followup, the bloated and nearly incoherent Gravity's Rainbow, was his deliberate attempt—out of a misguided reverence for Joyce—to create a Ulysses of his own. It's a mode of sloppy giganticism he's suffered from ever since.

So why are you rushing to the defense of just this one chapter in Ulysses?
Because I don't believe the baby should be thrown out with the bathwater. (Yes, I know, this is just the sort of cliché Joyce ridicules in the Eumaeus chapter.) Ulysses is best looked upon as a grab bag of great riffs and long stretches of tedious pretentiousness. All too many readers give up on Ulysses before Buck Mulligan finishes shaving—the silver shaving bowl is like an ecclesiastical salver, see! Isn't that profound?—and never reach that beautiful, tender and meditative semifinal "Ithaca" chapter with its Q&A format. The one chapter you should read before you die.

Why not the final Molly Bloom chapter, the one I always hear about from Ulysses defenders?
I find that men should refrain from commenting on the Molly Bloom soliloquy because they almost always make fools of themselves in doing so.

Why?
It's almost always a transparently sneaky attempt to promulgate the notion that they know what they're talking about when it comes to women and sexuality. Almost all male commentary presumes the commentators have privileged access to the secrets of feminine sensibility and thus are qualified to judge whether Joyce's rendition of Molly's soliloquy captures it fully. It's a surefire test for phonies in that department. Not to mention a sadly overused seduction ploy by sad-sack English majors. Pity the poor women who have to put up with multiple renditions of "I really related to Molly Bloom, you know."

OK, then. Aside from "Ithaca" are there any other aspects of Ulysses you find worthwhile?
I do love the "Oxen of the Sun" episode, in which Joyce writes chronologically successive rafts of prose that replicate the stylistic evolution of English writing from Chaucer to the present. It's skillful and funny and offers a tapestrylike illustration of the progress of language and rhetoric, style as content.

So what's the problem there?
I like the Oxen chapter for all the wrong reasons: It's a hermetic riff that invites you to join the secret society of English majors who take a selfish delight in its conceit (and in theirs). The chapter may be considered a minor tour de force, but it calls too much attention to its showy device for its own good. (Full disclosure: I was an English major, if you haven't already guessed.)

But you've also written fondly about the 30-page Hamlet discussion in the "Scylla and Charybdis" chapter.
All right, it's true, in The Shakespeare Wars I pay tribute to Joyce's quite tender and loving speculation about the emotional resonance of one putative episode in Shakespeare's life. It's based on the apocryphal story that when Shakespeare was an actor at the Globe, he played Old Hamlet, the ghost of young Hamlet's murdered father. And thus at that moment when the Ghost cries out to Hamlet on the stage, Shakespeare was—since he'd lost a son named Hamnet (or Hamlet) when the boy was only 11— in some poignant, resonant way crying out to his lost boy from the realm of the living to that of the dead. It's just about the only biographical speculation about Shakespeare I have any patience for, and that includes Stephen Greenblatt's elaborate but unfounded fantasy about the origin of Shylock, and James Shapiro's baseless sophistry about how Shakespeare supposedly wanted to cut Hamlet's last soliloquy.

Aren't you digressing from the subject here?
Yes! That's the reason I like the Ithaca episode. The second reason. The Q&A form allows the Questioner both to digress and to interrupt digression piling upon digression and get the Answerer back on topic.

What did Q interrupt here?
An incipient digression on my part about a long-running scholarly discussion over the relationship between the names "Hamlet" and "Hamnet" (always interchangeable back in the 16^th century?), which would have obscured my main point.

Which was?
Joyce was onto something if not historically then heartbreakingly, metaphorically true when he conjured up a ghostly Shakespeare calling out to a lost Hamlet.

Was there anything else you liked about Ulysses you're holding back on?
Well, the spelling of the sound the cat makes in the opening of the Leopold Bloom chapter.

Can you elaborate?
OK, everybody likes the opening of the Leopold Bloom section: "Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fouls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crust crumbs, fried hencod's roes."

I'm not hearing anything here about the cat sound.
OK, OK. The "cat-echism," you might say, comes just a couple paragraphs later. Joyce renders a hungry morning cat's imploration as "Mrkgnao!" an achievement of undeniably felicitous genius and accuracy that transcends by far the conventional "Meow."

You're digressing again. Let's get back to the Ithaca episode. Why do you like it so much?
Well, consider the four questions it opens with. (I've omitted the answers.)

"What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning [from Dublin's 'Nighttown']?"
"Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?"
"Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective like and unlike reactions to experience?"
"Were their views on some points divergent?"

What is it you like so much about a narrative proceeding this way?
Well, I think the signature of bad writing or writing that hasn't been polished is the false or the forced transition. Q&A narrative pretty much dispenses with any pretense at smooth transition, thus avoiding the problem. It's abrupt, playful, and it recognizes the two primal curiosities that enable narrative drive: the desire to know "what happened next?" and the desire to know "just who is this person or persons to whom whatever it is that happened happened?"

And what makes that different from ordinary narrative?
Well for one thing it introduces two new characters, Mr. Q and Mr. A, who hover namelessly over the two previously established protagonists' wanderings and converse about their personalities and past and present situations. After a while Mr. Q and Mr. A turn out to have divergent personalities of their own—and divergent situations, in the metaphysical scheme of things.

Whatever do you mean by that?
How does Mr. A know so much, is he the Creator of everything in the book? Does A stand for author? Has A authored Q, too? And Q's questions as well? But Mr. Q seems to be in some different space or place than Mr. A. It's dizzying in a pleasurable way, the thinking about fiction this chapter gives rise to.

Why pleasurable?
Well, ordinary narrative often takes these things for granted or makes you feel unsophisticated for wondering about who the narrator is and how much he or she knows. There's something touching about the way this narrative seems to care that you know certain things. Ordinary narrative acts as if it doesn't care what you care about, only what it cares about and acts all superior by making you guess why. The Q&A form makes you wonder why you wonder why. It's not about piling on literary tricks, so much as dismantling them to see how they're done.

What's the most revealing of the first four questions?
The answer to the fourth question on what points their view diverged: "Bloom assented covertly to Stephen's rectification of the anachronism involved in assigning the date of the conversion of the Irish nation to christianity from druidism by Patrick son of Calpornus, son of Potitus son of Odyssus sent by pope Celestine I in the year 432 in the reign of Leary to the year 260 or thereabouts in the reign of Cormac MacArt ..."

What has that got to do with the price of eggs?
Well, it suggests the comfortable interchange of two people who differ in many ways but are both erudite in a geeky way and the spiritual communion their geekdom affords them. (I also love that he slips that "Odyssus" reference in.)

Is there more to it, your interest in the catechism narrative method?
Well, to be honest I've only recently become fascinated by the catechism chapter and the way it uses Q&A as a narrative and meditative technique. But I love the way the form can both move things forward and also allow them to pause. To be endowed with unexpected and often surprising depth, detail, and dimensionality through the use of the interrogative (sometimes the interrogation) mode.

But that's not all, right?
Jeez, you're getting personal. If you must know, I've actually been experimenting with the catechismic method as a way of doing fiction, wondering whether an entire novel could be told that way.

What kind of novel?
A New York love story.

So what was the problem?
Well, the technical problem that besets me is my affinity for digression. I had resorted to using this catechismic technique to overcome my tendency to pile digression upon digression upon digression rather than moving the narrative forward.

Explain your epiphany in this regard.
In seeking to describe the Tribeca party where my protagonist met his new love, it took me so long to get past my many observations concerning the hors d'ouerves that I had finally out of frustration cap-locked: COME ON DAMMIT, AT LEAST DESCRIBE THE DRESS SHE WAS WEARING!! And I realized I heard an echo of the impatient catechismic Mr. Q, and suddenly realized why Joyce liked it. The way it cut through the endless possibility of digression and gets to the heart of the matter.

Are there any other reasons you want people to read the Ithaca episode?
Well, to name just one, I think it offers some of the most beautiful passages Joyce wrote in his entire oeuvre.

Like what?
The one that begins with Q asking, "What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?"

And A answers: "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit."

And?
And then the next three pages of transcendently beautiful prose consisting mainly of Bloom's meditations upon the constellations and the moon. Some of the most lyrical and spiritual writing in all Ulysses.

What is your advice to the reader of this column?
Don't die before you read these passages.

Describe her dress.
It was a short black sleeveless shift.

Anything else?
A Betsey Johnson.

Was there a special significance to that dress?
yes he said yes

Radioactivity

Ron Rosenbaum — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:30:00 GMT

I'm guessing the reference in the title makes sense to the non-Jewish world. You've all heard "Why is this night different from all other nights?" haven't you? One of the key Passover questions. The night is different because the story of Exodus is told on that night, and it's, you know, a big deal what with the plagues and the murrain (hate that murrain!) and the Red Sea and all that.

So what makes radiation different from all other blights? This is, by the way, not a column on nuclear power policy options post-Japan. It's a column about the primal dread radioactivity evokes in us.

I'll concede that the tragedy in Japan impelled me to bring together some thoughts I'd been having about radiation. Thoughts in part inspired by my own book on nuclear war and in part by another book, the remarkable booklike objet d'art, Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout, by Lauren Redniss. I'll get to that book and what it says about the astonishing regenerative power of human heart muscle cells—of the human heart itself—in a moment.

But I want to dwell further on the "why is this blight different" question. It's an "exceptionalist" question and, in case you haven't noticed, I am drawn to exceptionalist questions. Hitler, for instance, presents an exceptionalist question: Was Hitler on the continuum of other evildoers in history—a very, very, very bad man at the far end of the continuum of bad men, but still explicable by means of the same psychological, sociological terms that suffice to explain other evildoers? Or did he represent some unique sui generis category of radical evil? (Or so I asked in Explaining Hitler.)

And Shakespeare. Was Shakespeare just a very, very, very great writer, at the far end of the continuum of other great writers? Or did his work represent a sui generis creation, a quantum leap into a realm of words all his own? (Or so I asked in The Shakespeare Wars.)

And with another quantum conceptual leap we come to the radioactivity question: Is nuclear radiation whether contained within a civilian reactor or unleashed in a wartime explosive, different from other forms of energy in some mysterious way, quantitatively more powerful, but qualitatively more demonic—threatening to us in some manner that is metaphysical as well as physical? (Or so I asked in my new book, How the End Begins.)

Questions within questions: Here is one that I'd direct to the creationists out there, the ones who believe in a benevolent God. Couldn't your God (all powerful and loving after all) have created a universe in which there was no radioactive decay, thus no Hiroshima no Fukushima meltdowns. There would still be a lot of suffering and evil in such a world if that's important to you, but just not this particular kind. (Partic-ular indeed!)

Those who believe that suffering and evil can be explained, even justified, by the fact that man has free will and thus the ability to choose evil (the "blame-it-on-the victim" school of theodicy) and argue that courage and goodness would not mean anything if mankind did not have that free choice, still have to answer the question: Is this really the best of all possible worlds? Couldn't God have made it a little better? A little less suffering, fewer of those earthquakes, say, a slightly smaller number of childhood cancers, a little less heartlessness, a little more humanity in human nature? Whenever I hear people echo Voltaire's mocking (in Candide) of Leibniz's assertion this is "the best of all possible worlds," I hear Leibniz with a different, sardonic, anti-Candide questioning tone: "This, THIS is the best of all possible worlds?" This is the best you could do, God, Mr. Big Shot burning-bush guy?

Would it not be possible for you to devise a physics that allowed a world to exist and sustain hapless humans without adding to their burden by making nuclear extinction weapons and painful radiation deaths possible?

So there's that, although it must be accepted that in this world radioactive decay is a fact we have to deal with. But that still doesn't answer all the questions about radioactive decay.

Which is where the Hidden Variable controversy and the terror of irrationality comes in. And Radioactive and heart muscle cells.

I can't decide whether Radioactive is a work of art in the form of a book, or a book in the form of a work of art. It has elements of both, pictorial and scriptorial. Ostensibly, it's the story of the life of Marie Curie, two-time winner of the Nobel Prize for her theory and work on radioactivity. And a story of interactivity you might say. Hers with the two men she loved: her husband Pierre Curie, and—after he died in a freak accident—Paul Langevin, a fellow scientist. And interactivity between the human race and radioactivity once the Curies made it visible, usable.

Without heavy-handedness, Redniss counterpoises the love and tragedy that were the intersecting vectors of Marie Curie's life and work in an object—this book—which in its very inking radiates a striking luminescent glow amid menacing shadows.

Radioactive captures in a unique way the inseparability of love and death: the love of scientia, of knowledge for its own sake, and love for the deep, nuclear-level bonds between human beings in love. And the death that knowledge brought them, the Faustian bargain nuclear knowledge bought them. The myth of the Fall of Man set in early-20^th-century Paris.

And, overhanging it all, the later tragedies which Ms. Redniss never allows the reader to forget, the tragedies of Hiroshima and Chernobyl (I learned from Ms. Redniss that the dead zone around Chernobyl is known as "the zone of alienation"—worth the price of the book alone), to which can now be added the meltdowns of northern Japan.

Why is radioactivity different from ordinary energy, from ordinary disintegration—if it is?

Here's where the Hidden Variables mystery enters the picture, with Einstein himself making a star cameo. The radioactivity produced by the Curies' radium samples was the result of the instability of the radium atom. A certain percentage would disintegrate and send deadly fragments flying all over the place, and with certain radioactive substances lead to explosive chain reactions, bombs, and reactors.

Quantum physicists could figure out a way to predict, statistically, what percentage of a given isotope of radium atoms would disintegrate, but they could not find a way to discover which ones would and which ones wouldn't disintegrate and why.

The physicists claimed that precise prediction was impossible, and that the statistical probability was all that mattered. But not to Einstein who couldn't abide this "quantum unpredictability." To his death he insisted there had to be some kind of as yet undiscovered "hidden variables" within each identical-seeming atom that caused them to go off at a specific time.

Maybe you don't think it matters, Jeff Jarvis isn't going to tweet it, but it's important. It makes a difference whether our entire existence is built on solidity and causality or just a matrix of probability and statistics.

The conventional wisdom of contemporary physics is that Einstein lost the argument, that we have to accept quantum unpredictability. Although I'm of the school that says, "Don't bet against Al," because I can't accept that there is such a thing as the uncaused causation the quantum purists postulate. You might as well believe in Aquinas' God.

I e-mailed Ms. Redniss and asked her (this was a month or so before Japan) if she had any thoughts on Hidden Variables, from her study of radioactivity, or any hints from the Curies. I got the feeling she was one of those artists who dislike being asked what their work means. Do you remember the great scene in Tootsie where Bill Murray is playing a Very Serious Off-Off-Broadway playwright who is telling some people at a party, (I'm paraphrasing) "I don't like it when people see my play and come up to me afterward and say, 'I really dug your message, man.' I want you to show up three days later dazed and bleeding and just ask me, 'What happened?' "

No, I had no indication Ms. Redniss had that Bill Murray attitude, but I had that "What happened?" feeling after I read her book. In its own subtle way it will shake you up, maybe not 9.0, but close.

And I felt her reluctance to theorize came from humility not hubris: She e-mailed back she didn't have a theory but that "hidden variables are the story of my life." Enough said!

But it didn't help me with the problem at hand. Hidden variables and their relationship to the insidious intellectual threat posed by radioactivity. Why is this blight ... etc.

What finally gave me an intimation of why radiation is so intellectually as well as physically insidious—even repulsive—was reading my friend Errol Morris' five-part New York Times blog series on the philosophers Thomas Kuhn and Saul Kripke and why Kuhn threw an ashtray at Morris. In particular the delightfully digressive third part about the death of Hippasus of Metapontum, the fifth-century B.C. philosopher and mathematician who was alleged to have been murdered by members of the then-reigning school of Pythagorean mathematics because Hippasus had, if not invented, foregrounded the existence of "irrational numbers" that the Pythagoreans could not abide or fit into their mathematical schema. A number like the square root of two or pi whose decimal-point identity never comes to a precise endpoint but keeps unfolding into infinity. (Full disclosure: I read some early drafts of Morris' series.) Something about this incompletion, like the lack of hidden variables, is deeply disturbing.

They murdered the poor guy—Hippasus, not Morris—because of the threat of irrationality! The very same threat posed to science by the quantum unpredictability of radioactivity. Such irrationality is a scary abyss no rational intellect wishes to stare into.

So we're looking at a two-millennia-long resistance to the irrationality that seems to be built into the grain of our very existence and persists, even after we've come to accept irrational numbers, in the instinctive dread of irrationality that underlies our fear of radioactivity. I'm not saying the heroic Japanese reactor team, who, as I write, are probably on a suicidal mission to cool those fuel rods, have anything but the task at hand and the lives they're sacrificing on their minds.

I'm talking about the recognition that something doesn't compute about the world we live in, the post-decimal identity of the square root of two will never be completed even unto the end of time; the solid ground we step upon is but a sea of holes. Maybe it doesn't bother you when you're following Jeff's tweets, but I have a feeling that at some level it touches on the insecurity about our Being that we recognize from dreams and nightmares, from the classical philosophical problem of the inability to distinguish what is more "real"—our dreams or our waking lives. (I'm a Richard Linklater fan.)

But there is more to the story. Ms. Redniss concludes Radioactive with a surprising coda. One that is not directly connected to the Curie narrative in a biographical way but thematically ends the book on a stirring image of love and loss, the fission and fusion of the heart.

In the final pages, she has a glowing, fiery-orange-colored double-page spread evoking the furnace of the sun. On the right-hand page is a shadowy couple embracing and kissing flanked by a smaller childlike figure holding up a large egg shape. On the left-hand facing page there is an egg-shaped block of text that tells a resonant story about science and the human heart.

It was about the way radioactivity enabled scientists to prove that heart cells can regenerate.

It had long been an assumption of physiologists that human heart cells were different—in an exceptionalist way—from other cells: They could last a lifetime but could never be replaced if lost, or repaired if damaged, unlike cells from other organs.

Then a Swedish scientist named Jonas Frisén realized there was a way to test this theory. Aboveground atomic explosions from 1945 to 1963 (when the test ban treaty drove them underground) resulted in fallout, which was taken up in the food chain in the form of radioactive Carbon 14, which was absorbed by humans alive during that time.

"A radioactive tracer," Redniss writes, "had been introduced into humans after all: the atomic tests between 1945 and 1963 had time-stamped every human being on earth. The very experiments developed to vaporize human existence would now be employed to understand and sustain life. Dr. Friser's lab began by studying the muscle cells of the left ventricle. Heart cells, they found, do regenerate." In other words, as I understand it, he discovered cells that had not been in existence at the time the body was taking up Carbon 14 and thus must have come into being, been generated, after the tests' fallout ended, though the heart was still alive.

And then she has this remarkable quote from the doctor himself: "the heart muscle cells will be a mosaic: some that have been with that person from birth and there will be new cells that have replaced others that have been lost." Heart cells in a mosaic of the born and reborn. That means a lot to some of us. So much so that I refuse to end this with some lame Celine Dion joke. It's a genuinely, profoundly moving metaphor!

And, not to get too sentimental, but this is good to know—the capacity of the heart to expand—because we'll all need some new heart cells to express the way we feel about the Japanese reactor workers who gave up their cells for ours.

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An Unsung Hero of the Nuclear Age

Ron Rosenbaum — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 22:40:00 GMT

It was a risk. Dedicating a book to someone I'd had had a five-minute phone conversation with three decades ago. Someone who, last I'd heard, had become a long-haul trucker and whom I'd given up trying to track down.

But I went ahead and dedicated my new book, How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III, to Maj. Harold Hering because Maj. Hering sacrificed his military career to ask a Forbidden Question about launching nuclear missiles. A question that exposed the comforting illusions of the so called fail-safe system designed to prevent "unauthorized" nuclear missile launches.

It was a question that changed his life, and changed mine, and may have changed—even saved—all of ours by calling attention to flaws in our nuclear command and control system at the height of the Cold War. It was a question that makes Maj. Hering an unsung hero of the nuclear age. A question that came from inside the system, a question that has no good answer: How can any missile crewman know that an order to twist his launch key in its slot and send a thermonuclear missile rocketing out of its silo—a nuke capable of killing millions of civilians—is lawful, legitimate, and comes from a sane president?

I tried to track Hering down before my book went to press but failed to connect. And so I chanced it, dedicating the book to someone who, for all I knew, had gone from self-sacrificing hero to—who knows?—subprime mortgage broker? Not that it would have diminished his original sacrifice; heroes don't always fare well after they've left the stage, especially when they go unsung.

But I had an intuition when I first read about Maj. Harold Hering and his Forbidden Question that in addition to courage he had a rare kind of uncompromising integrity. And when I finally tracked him down ... well, let me first explain why I think he's an American hero.

Let's say you were a Minuteman missile crewman during the Richard Nixon presidency at the very height of the Cold War. You and your fellow crewmen are down in your underground launch control center, tending to your sector of the "silo farm"—the vast field under which nuclear missile silos (actually heavily reinforced concrete silo-shaped holes in the ground) shelter the instruments of mass death that lurk beneath the bleak badlands of the northern Great Plains. There you are, running through a drill, going down a routine checklist for launch readiness, when suddenly you get what seems like a real launch order. Not a drill. Get ready to twist your launch keys in their slots and send anywhere from one to 50 missiles rocketing toward Russia. World War III is under way.

Or is it? Your launch order codes are "authenticated," everything seems in order, the seconds tick away. But in what may be the last seconds of your life—for all you know Soviet missiles are about to rain down on the plains—a thought crosses your mind. About "authentication." It's supposed to ensure that the launch order comes from the president himself, or (if the president has been killed) from the surviving head of the nuclear chain of command.

But what about that person at the top of the chain of command, the person who gives the order? Has he been "authenticated"? Who authenticates the authenticator? Can the president start a nuclear war on his own authority—his own whim or will—alone? The way Brigadier Gen. Jack D. Ripper did in Dr. Strangelove? What if a president went off his meds, as we'd say today, and decided to pull a Ripper himself? Or what if a Ripper-type madman succeeded in sending a falsely authenticated launch order? You're about to kill 10 million people, after all.

Such a scenario was not inconceivable at the time when Maj. Hering was going through missile training class at Vandenberg Air Force base. Bruce Blair (then a missile crewman himself, a wing commander in charge of 200 minuteman missiles, and now the head of the nuclear abolitionist Global Zero Initiative) discloses in my book that he had figured out a way to launch all 200 of his "birds" without authorization. Good thing he's a very stable guy.

But you've probably read about Richard Nixon acting erratically, drinking heavily as Watergate closed in on him. You may not have read about the time he told a dinner party at the White House, "I could leave this room, and in 25 minutes, 70 million people would be dead." (Try that line out at one of your dinner parties. I've always found it a good conversation starter.)

Anyway, back down there in your launch capsule you might allow yourself to wonder: "This launch order, is this for real or for Nixon's indigestion?"

If you were asking yourself that question, you wouldn't be the only one. James Schlesinger, secretary of defense at that time, No. 2 in the nuclear chain of command, was reported to be so concerned about Nixon's behavior that he sent word down the chain of command that if anyone received any "unusual orders" from the president they should double-check with him before carrying them out.

So there you are, having just received the order to launch nuclear genocide. Should you suppress any doubts, twist your launch key in the slot simultaneously with your fellow crewman and send death hurtling toward millions of civilians halfway around the world? Without asking questions? That's what you're trained to do, not ask questions. Trainees who asked questions were supposed to be weeded out by the Air Force's "psychiatric consideration of human reliability" requirement. I've read this absurd Strangelovian document, which defined sane and reliable as being willing to kill 10 or 20 million people with the twist of a wrist, no questions asked.

Maj. Hering decided to ask his question anyway, regardless of consequences: How could he know that an order to launch his missiles was "lawful"? That it came from a sane president, one who wasn't "imbalance[d]" or "berserk," as Maj. Hering's lawyer eventually, colorfully put it?

Hering needed a lawyer because as soon as he asked the question he was yanked out of missile training class, and after two years of appeals, eventually had to leave the Air Force, trade in a launch key for the ignition keys to an 18-wheeler.

But he forced the Air Force to face the question. We couldn't ignore the problem any longer. Although, as it turned out, we couldn't solve it, either.

If you think Hering's question is a relic of the Cold War, consider the situation now. Say you're a missile crewman today (remember, they're still down there, both the missiles and the "Missileers," no longer just missilemen), all briefed and ready to launch. Let's say you're at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, the place where some mysterious glitch caused 50 missiles to go offline last October. You know the missiles stopped talking to base. Stopped responding to all commands. And you've read about the way the Stuxnet computer worm demonstrated an ability to insinuate itself into the actual control systems of nuclear facilities in Iran and turn them to its own ends.

And you get a launch order. It looks like it's the real thing, it's all "authenticated." It directs you to retarget your "de-targeted" missiles and then tells you to get ready to launch. Should you entertain doubts? You know most of your fellow missileers (really, didn't someone in the Air Force realize how much this would sound like "Mouseketeers" in a Strangelovian way?) will follow orders and fire. If you don't fire it won't make much of a difference, a few million fewer dead among what will probably be tens of millions minimum. (The number of deaths that might result from a nuclear strike has been the subject of controversy. It might vary depending on conditions such as the height of the blast, but a minuteman missile carries a warhead at least 12 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb, which killed—again it's in dispute—around a 100,000 people in the first few days and many more over the years from radiation sickness and cancers. And a recent Scientific American study of the possible effects of a "small" nuclear war—say, between India and Pakistan—concluded that in addition to the immediate effects, the ash-shroud kicked up into the atmosphere by the blasts would chill and kill enough crops worldwide to starve 1 billion more people.)

Should you question the order to launch such an attack, not knowing for sure it doesn't come from a president off his meds? Or a cyberworm disguised as a president?

Do you have the right to question? Do you have the duty, under the Nuremberg precedent in international law, which denies a "just-following-orders" defense for genocide?

One would think so, since our policy of nuclear deterrence—a legacy of the Cold War—is based on threatening genocidal retaliation to prevent genocidal attack. Indeed, even if a retaliatory attack would be entirely pointless—indeed morally obscene—it's one that we're committed to carry out 24/7.

In the book I wrote, I focus on the astonishingly unexamined morality of retaliation that Maj. Hering-type questions open up. One of the most surprising discoveries I made was in my conversation with Moshe Halbertal, the Israeli military ethicist who said no—no nuclear retaliation is morally acceptable. I found myself in agreement. And you, dear reader, would you question such an order, like Hering or Halbertal, or just carry it out? Would you kill 20 million people to carry out a threat that failed?

There's no question the president now has just as much authority as he had then. You should read then-Vice President's Dick Cheney's declaration about the president's unchallengeable power to launch nuclear missiles whenever he sees fit.

Here's what Cheney told Fox News: "The president of the United State is now, for 50 years, is followed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a 'football' that contains the nuclear codes that he would use and be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. He could launch a kind of devastating attack the world's never seen. He doesn't have to check with anybody. He doesn't have to call the Congress. He doesn't have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in."

There was a fascinating debate among constitutional law specialists on the Volokh Conspiracy blog following the Cheney statement, and, alas, from my reading of the cases cited, there was no definitive judicial limit to his power as commander in chief to avow he had no time to consult Congress for a declaration of war. No one could come up with a definitive constitutional refutation of this. If a president said he had intelligence of an imminent nuclear attack there was no provision requiring him to prove it to anyone else. Congress couldn't defund a missile once in flight. (Well, it could, but lawmakers would have better things to do at that point—i.e., run for the hills.)

In other words, what Richard Nixon said still holds true: Any president could, on his own, leave a room, and in 25 minutes, 70 million (or more than that) would be dead. Not likely but in the new, more unstable, multi-polar nuclear age we've entered, Maj. Hering's question about the instability or sanity of the president himself remains valid, as does the larger sanity question: Can any order to kill 20 million with the twist of a wrist be sane?

Maj. Hering, I should emphasize, did not ask his question because he was some kind of peacenik or a pacifist. You wouldn't have seen him at a Jackson Browne no-nukes concert in the '80s. He had done multiple tours of duty in Vietnam, doing dangerous Air Rescue Service work, flying copters into live-fire zones to pick up the wounded and the dead. He hoped to make the Air Force his lifetime profession and was expecting a promotion to lieutenant colonel when he asked his Forbidden Question.

He asked his question, he later told the Air Force Board of Inquiry that heard his appeal, because his fidelity to his oath as an officer required him to carry out only "lawful orders." The Air Force maintained that the information he sought, about how he'd know a launch order was lawful, was beyond his "need to know."

To which Maj. Hering replied, in an interview, "I have to say, I feel I do have a need to know, because I am a human being." Yes!

"It is inherent in an officer's commission that he has to do what is right in terms of the needs of the nation despite any orders to the contrary," he went on. "You really don't know at the time of key turning, whether you are complying with your oath of office."

It was only by accident that I came upon Maj. Hering's story. I was flipping through the inside news pages of the New York Times back at the height of the Cold War and saw the following headline:

AIR FORCE PANEL
RECOMMENDS DISCHARGE
OF MAJOR WHO CHALLENGED
"FAILSAFE" SYSTEM

This seemed to me to be a more important story than its placement indicated, so I took the clipping up to Lewis Lapham at Harper's, and he commissioned a story that would explore not just the sanity question raised by the Major but the larger sanity of the system itself.
I spent three years investigating and writing a story about the mechanics and morals of the nuclear command and control system.

It was a story that took me into the underground war room of the Strategic Air Command (now STRATCOM) beneath Omaha's Offutt Air Force Base, and eventually out to a silo farm in the badlands where, at a missile launch control center, I got to hold a launch key in my hand and twist it in the slot in a test console, exactly as if I were executing a launch order that would kill 10 million people or more.

And believe me: Once you hold a launch key in your hand and twist it (hard to the right and hold for two seconds) it unlocks a door you never can close again. A door to the abyss.

So I came to understand the major's focus on "the time of the key turning." But I had trouble reaching the major. After his discharge, his job as long haul trucker made it difficult to reach him. But finally, as my story was going to press, I caught him at home in Indianapolis. He told me he'd just put his cartons of files on the Forbidden Question in storage, but that I was welcome to come out and go through them. I was already up to my eyeballs in Congressional hearings on the subject and he sounded as if he was weary of the matter and wanted to move on. And so did I.

So I moved on—like we all did after the Cold War ended, during the "holiday from history" that ensued. I moved on until 2007, when several events awakened me to the fact that we had entered a new age of nuclear peril with the same old flawed command and control system the Major had questioned.

And I wondered what had become of the major.

In the intervening years, Maj. Hering's question was not a tree that fell in the forest. Even if it didn't get the attention it deserved, it influenced some influential people.

Daniel Ellsberg, for instance, was very familiar with Maj. Hering's question. Ellsberg's post-Pentagon career has been devoted in great part to anti-nuclear activities. In fact, Ellsberg had saved clippings he had found in Detroit and San Francisco newspapers about the Major's case which he'd scanned and sent to me.

Another key figure, Bruce Blair, the missile-crewman-turned-anti-nuke-activist, had also been provoked to investigate the question of launch-order authentication. (He's the one who figured out that he could launch 150 missiles all by himself. He even told me how he'd do it.)

After Blair left the Air Force, he eventually became a consultant to the Congressional Office of Science and Technology, where he was given "above top secret" clearance to study the Pentagon's nuclear command and control systems. Blair told me that one of the reasons he went from being an advocate of nuclear arms control—in favor of a reducing the numbers of nuclear weapons, but not abolishing them—to being an advocate of "Global Zero" for nuclear weapons, is that even now, with all the digital modernizations of command and control, "no one has yet come up with an answer to Maj. Hering's question."

In other words we have risked the fate of the earth, the fate of the species, on the mental stability of a few ambitious politicians who rise to the top of the heap, not necessarily because of their rationality. There is no foolproof command and control system. The imposing phrase "command and control" belies its meretriciousness.

It was Blair who put me back in touch with the major, whom he'd checked in on periodically over the years, and it was through Blair I first got a working phone number for the major during my research for this new book. But some voice-mail glitch led to an unreturned message and a feeling that perhaps Hering had moved on or didn't want to talk. It was only after the book went to press, at the urging of my editor, that I tried one more time. After all, I dedicated the book to him. I didn't want it to come as a complete surprise.

This time he got my voice mail, or a version of it.

He responded by e-mail that he understood from my phone message that I wanted to send him a copy of a Harper's story I'd written and that he was glad that people were still interested in what he called "my Board of Inquiry," the hearing before the division of the Air Force judiciary which had rejected his appeal of his dismissal from the missile class because of The Question.

In other words he'd never seen the original 15,000-word story that had been inspired by him. I would blame the turbulent state of my life back then for my not sending him a copy. I guess I just assumed someone had brought it to his attention and that despite my admiration for his question, he'd read it and not responded because it was a chapter in his life he wanted closed.

I was wrong about that. I replied by e-mail to clarify that I was trying to reach him because I had dedicated my book to him (and wanted to send him a galley). I also sent along some questions about what course his life had taken after the Air Force ended his military career. How The Question had changed his life. I must admit the response was moving and surprising.

It was clear from his reply that he'd always been conflicted in a certain way about what he'd done. In his initial statements at the time of the Board of Inquiry he made clear that he was not seeking to disobey or ignore a "lawful" order, but he felt a responsibility imposed by his oath as an officer and by his "conscience" to be sure an order to launch his missiles was truly "lawful." He had wanted to be both loyal and unquestioning but had to question to be truly loyal. He'd found himself in an impossible catch-22 position.

It had taken him a long time, he told me, to absorb the "devastating" consequences of what he thought was strict adherence to duty. After cautioning me that he didn't want me to mention any family matters, he said, "I've been through some pretty rough times but have tried not to be bitter about it all."

The difficulty and the bitterness have been exacerbated by the kind of self division of which I speak. He told me: "I thought my actions were proper, but felt shame."

Proper. Shame. He was doing the right thing but had to suffer the ostracism of those who didn't understand the urgency of his question, who blindly sought to inculcate an unquestioning "follow orders" order of things.

He seemed to have a kind of love-hate relationship with the military. He said, "For a number of years I did not use many of the military facilities available to me as a retiree." He said that was because, "I didn't feel like I fit in any more, like damaged goods or general inadequacy."

The military that so undeservedly caused him to feel this way, that treated his urgently important question without the seriousness it deserved, caused him to reject the free medical care available at VA hospitals or other outreach services to assuage the suffering he'd gone through. The suffering they'd caused!

Instead, he sought alternate remedies, he told me. "During this time I became involved in several personal growth workshop/events, some very intense and also spent over a year in solitude in the mid '80s." He had a lot to think about.

A year in solitude. Like burying himself in an underground launch control center.

"Sixteen months," he told me later, where his only companion was a cat and the only contact he had with the outside world was listening every Saturday night to Prairie Home Companion.

I know, it sounds a bit bizarre, but we all have our own ways of healing our wounds.

"I left work as a road driver early on to work for the Salvation Army as a counselor into the mid-'90s. During that time I also volunteered for a year as a clinical associate for the Crisis Suicide Line."

Crisis suicide line. What could be more appropriate? It's impossible not to infer a kind of connection: Maj. Hering's question went directly to the issue of whether the human race would commit collective suicide in a crisis. He felt a responsibility then and later to intervene. We were, we are, a system in need of salvation from ourselves.

All the while he was counseling the suicidally inclined, he was in a "dark emotional hole" himself, he told me.

For one thing, despite all that had happened, he said, he "missed the Air Force, especially flying with the Air Rescue Service."

Indeed, one of his proudest claims to me was that at age 72, he'd become a marathon runner and competed in the U.S. Air Force marathon. "And today," he adds, "I proudly wear the Air Force insignia." In fact, he tells me, he was recently married for the second time "in [a] Navy Chapel … wearing the new Air Force dress uniform."

But he can't help feeling a loss and he can't help feeling his question still goes unanswered.

"I still miss/regret the loss of promotion to lieutenant colonel and believe I had the potential to advance further," he told me. "And I have certainly missed flying. But in the final analysis, I definitely would ask the question if I had it to do over. The Officer's Oath of Office demands it, I think. In looking back over my life, most of my working career has been saving lives and helping people. I have thought about the issue of Nuclear Warfare a lot and still do not have a definitive, fit-all, answer. But the concept seems generally insane to me and begs for very stringent checks and balances at all levels, especially pre-emptive strike considerations."

"Generally insane." It's interesting that he's moved from the special case of presidential sanity, to the question of the larger sanity of the system itself.

And, indeed, he told me that when he read the last page of my book, in which I urge anyone with a launch key or a launch code, not to send it, not to twist it, no matter what the circumstances—because any nuclear launch is genocidal—he said he agreed with me.

"I am left with a deep and growing hunger for peace among people at every level," he wrote me. "It seems urgent to me that we find ways to become a more tolerant and forgiving people. Perhaps," he says "I was not a good match for duty as a missile launch officer."

It depends on what you mean by a good match. If you want unthinking automatons imposing genocidal punishment on the innocent citizens of an attacker nation, he's not your man, he's not your major, not your "good match."

On the other hand, some might say we can't give the impression that everyone in missile launch control centers engages in Socratic debate about whether genocidal revenge is justified, or could be seen as "insane" in itself. Such debate, the official line goes, would end up "weakening the credibility of our deterrent" and perhaps inviting a genocidal attack. The major knows this. He's still a divided man.

In a way, we all are. We may feel the threat of an insane or unbalanced commander-in-chief doing something "irrational" is unlikely. But is the genocidal retaliation we've pledged ourselves to in the policy of nuclear deterrence, ever rational?

What I learned when I finally tracked Hering down didn't change anything I felt about him or his act. But I learned a lot more about what it cost him. I learned that he still doesn't really know he's a hero, though he comes as close to a definition of it as anyone I know. That on some level he's had to come to term with shame. And shame on us that he did and we didn't feel shame, that we didn't properly recognize his heroism.

So I'm writing this for Maj. Harold Hering, to convince him that in my mind he deserves more than a dedication, he deserves a medal of honor. The president who called for a world without nuclear weapons should give it to him. It's long overdue. And time is running out.

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