Reflecting on "Spotlight": The Sins and the Merits of Roman Catholicism and the Free Press

This post seeks to advance a reaction to the film "Spotlight," an account based on The Boston Globe's revelation of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests in the Archdiocese of Boston.  Emphatically, it is not presented as a critique in any formal sense - I thought the cinematic aspects, acting, direction, and screenplay were fantastic, but I'm no film critic!  Moreover, insofar as I am certain that screenwriters and others involved in the production consistently sought to maintain a cinematic vision in general conformity to actual events, I cannot really contest the details of the film.  The nature of my comments precisely concern my reaction, as someone who has definitively abandoned Roman Catholicism but who otherwise remains in contact with the Church by virtue of devout practice of the faith by family members and friends, as well as the legacy of my own past practice of the faith.
        For the record, I practiced Roman Catholicism devoutly until I was thirty (that is, I went to mass every Sunday and holy day of obligation, attended confession/reconciliation at least two times a year, before Christmas and Easter, and attempted to become engaged in various liturgical practices, including a ministry to Catholics who had left the Church).  I left the Church for a variety of reasons.  However, I emphatically did not leave because of the clergy sexual abuse scandal!  When I am questioned on the subject, particularly by people like my Episcopalian theologian friend Scott, I can definitively argue that I left for succinctly theological/Christological reasons.  When I get around to it, I may start an entirely new blog to precisely elaborate my perspective on Christology and pursue resolution of numerous theological points pertinent to my life, but, briefly, as both a Marxist and a lifelong practitioner of Western monotheistic religion, I accept the existence of God but reject the Christian idea of the Trinity and question, in a somewhat dialectical sense, the divinity of Jesus the Nazareen.  Emphatically, in regard to a broad array of Western theological issues, I think that we need to reopen certain Christological arguments otherwise settled for evangelicals by the gospel of John and various Pauline epistles.  My present position on God resembles, at least in part, the positions of numerous Eighteenth century deists (represented in the American context notably by the religious beliefs of Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and other American forefathers), augmented with a heady quantity of post-modern critical reflections on rationality and the possibility for human apprehensions of objective truth.  Furthermore, as I may have stated previously on this blog, my family is almost entirely devout in its practice of Roman Catholicism, to the point that I have attempted, at least weakly, to downplay or otherwise conceal my rejection of Christianity, in general, and Catholicism, in particular.  As such, my perspective on "Spotlight" is significantly shaped by my lingering (familial and theological) relationships with Catholicism, my personal rejection of Catholicism (for reasons wholly unrelated to clergy abuse scandals), and my innate conviction of religious practice, spirituality, and other evident sources of faith as motivational sources for  the inherent possibilities for human civilization, however divorced from the larger development of a secular tradition of humanistic and existential philosophy.
      Having asserted these points on my relationship to Roman Catholicism, "Spotlight" played out in a manner that seemed to represent a broader struggle between good (the muckraking media, acting in the best interest of its readers and the general public in the name of unvarnished, democratized civil discourse) and evil (the entrenched power of the Church in the name of religious seclusion and unquestioned implicit/secretive influence over civil governance in Massachusetts).  And yet, the fine lines delineating good and evil are continuously blurred.  The Catholic Archdiocese of Boston not only utilizes its influence over legal authorities to circumvent criminal proceedings against pedophile priests and sweep evidence of abuse away from public scrutiny, but also manages vast charitable resources, without which thousands of needy dependents on the good will of Catholic parishioners would be thrust onto a cruel and uncaring world of impersonal state bureaucracies and budgets balanced on the backs of individuals least able to care for their own needs.  Significantly, at stake since the revelation of sexual abuse in the Church has been the fate of Catholic charities, reliant on the active monetary and volunteer support of parishioners but seriously impacted in a negative way by the reaction against settlements between the Church and victims of clergy sexual abuse - it's difficult for diocesan and parish level administrators to make demands of parishioners to give generously in support of liturgical missions and provision of care to marginalized populations when the same parishioners know that the diocese maintains legal liabilities from settlements in reparation from the actions of many pedophile priests.
           Moreover, on some level, the Catholic Church continues to constitute a community in faith, structured by a 2000 year old apostolic legacy, in which faithful Catholic parishioners both bind themselves to the dictates of the Church and articulate, by their faith and their participation in myriad liturgical functions/roles, the relationships that define Roman Catholicism as a global human community.  The body of the faithful (most notably, the laity) is at least as definitively Catholic as its head (the Vatican and its hierarchical structures, from Rome to every diocese and every parish community).  In the absence of either, there is no Church.  As such, responsibility for the evils apparent in the Church's clandestine response to localized incidents of clergy sexual abuse of minors resides in the hands of Church officials and, at least partially, in those of the laity from whom the former received a worldly blessing to administer to their spiritual needs and the material/charitable missions of the Church as they saw fit.  Before I left the Church, it seemed as though various corners of the lay community, in my own parish and elsewhere, were starting to come to terms with their own culpability for enabling priests to abuse children with impunity.  Groups like the "Voice of the Faithful" were actively demanding that diocesan level Church leaders account for their actions in the face of allegations against priests for sexual misconduct with children.  In certain ways, the hierarchical structure of Roman Catholicism, from the Chair of Peter to each individual lay communicant, simply does not afford the lay Catholic community the capacity to wield democratic oversight over Church leadership - the Church is not now, nor has it ever been, a democratic body of the faithful.
           On the other hand, if the Catholic lay community can gradually realize a deeper measure of responsibility, to the exclusion of the clergy, to minister to its own spiritual needs and, in more practical terms, separate the earthly liturgical/sacramental roles served by the clergy from the theological centrality of Christ as the transcendental head of the Church, then maybe lay Catholics will discover meaningful ways to "make do" on their spiritual lives without conferring on the clergy any excess capacity to serve as spiritual intermediaries beyond their sacramental duties.  In this respect, I am neither suggesting that parish communities need to take on the democratic trappings of various Protestant denominations nor that lay Catholics should demand extreme changes to sacramental and liturgical practices to more fully incorporate lay participation if not direction.  Rather, it seems conceivable that lay Catholics could organize themselves for collective spiritual and material/charitable practices in ways that might effectively marginalize clergy and Church hierarchy, remaining consistent with Catholic teachings and Church doctrine on spiritual/theological and social matters but enforcing a boundary between sanctified Church organizations and voluntary activism by the laity.  Such a characterization seems to describe, at least in my understanding, what the Voice of the Faithful had been about.  In my former parish, this group had been allowed by the pastor to meet in the parish hall.  In my view, such a collaborative rapport between the Church and a lay group, especially one with a critical orientation toward Church policies, might never have been warranted.  On some level, collaboration with the Church, even through the auspices of an open-minded parish pastor otherwise closely engaged with his community of believers, always portends the possibility of co-optation.  In this particular case, at least in my memory, the collaboration ended abruptly when the Springfield diocese relocated the pastor in question and replaced him with a priest who was less collaborative with lay groups critical of Church practices.  Alternatively, maybe the participants in Voice of the Faithful would have gained more from organizing collective prayer sessions, biblical and liturgical study practices, and/or spiritually-inspired charitable missions, out of their own homes and on other non-Church grounds.  That is to say, any pretense of democratic engagement between Church leadership and the laity, otherwise fostered by the odd friendly pastor, is of dubious value within an essentially undemocratic/anti-democratic, hierarchical organization that, in any case, the laity need not confront directly to voice their concerns!  In a certain sense, the sort of thing that I have in mind here might somehow approximate a "Reformation from within" by the laity that never actually threatens the Church hierarchy or its sacramental duties but permanently puts the same hierarchy in its place when it comes to the administration of extra-sacramental responsibilities.  If, on the one hand, this is something that, as a Marxist, deist, ex-Catholic, I really shouldn't overly concern myself, then, on the other hand, as someone with numerous Catholic friends and family members, I can only cast a strong degree of sympathy for the present state of Roman Catholicism, globally, in the U.S., and, most directly, in my own backyard of the Boston Archdiocese.  It is hard not to acknowledge that the wider world needs an active and engaged Catholic community of the faithful as much as Catholics need a Church that will acknowledge its responsibilities to change, repent its sins, and continuously resituate itself as an agency (however imperfectly democratized) in defense of a timeless moral and spiritual truth in action.
            Approaching the other side in "Spotlight," it is clear that the Globe's muckrakers cannot be ascribed an entirely unblemished record with regard to the paper's treatment of Catholicism in the Boston Archdiocese.  Here, of course, we are dealing quite substantially with the field of dramatization and, in this respect, we have to acknowledge that Hollywood screenwriters substantially produce the space within which they can tell a cinematically compelling story.  Given my own lack of knowledge on the lives of the actual Spotlight team at the Globe, I cannot draw a dividing line between what is real and what is fiction.  On the other hand, the real, whatever that might be, doesn't really matter when it comes to diagnosing the effects of a cinematic performance and, specifically, its capacity to reshape the way that we look at the given historical event that has been dramatized.  As I have noted previously on this blog (specifically in regard to docu-dramatizations on the cable network History), the gap between reality and fiction is pertinent to the particular way in which an audience grasps history and how such appropriations impact the way reality in the present is lived.
           With these warnings in mind, the (dramatized) Globe and its Spotlight team appear as active participants and facilitators in the Boston Archdiocese's prolonged history of clergy sexual abuse.  The particular case that opens the door for the Spotlight team to begin an investigation into clergy sexual abuse, the Commonwealth's prosecution of Father John Geoghan for numerous instances of child sexual abuse in 2001, is only pursued under pressure from a relative outsider, newly hired editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), who is continuously portrayed as a quintessential outsider ( a Jew from New York, coming to Boston from the Miami Herald, under the direction of the New York Times Company, owner of the Boston Globe, without any experience on the constellations of religious influence driving political power in extremely Catholic metropolitan Boston - as a welcoming present, Cardinal Law gives Baron a copy of an official Catholic Catechism, offered as a "guide map" to Boston).  Otherwise, the Globe's staff appears initially cool to the idea of probing clergy sexual abuse in any significant capacity.  Notably, Spotlight editor Walter "Robby" Robinson's (Michael Keaton) immediate supervisor, Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery), appears continuously dismissive of the entire project, at least until it seems likely that the team will be able to uncover verifiable evidence of involvement in the early 1990s by Cardinal Bernard Law's office in the Geoghan case.  Robinson, as a lifelong Bostonian and lapsed Catholic graduate of Boston College High School, apparently has his own record of dismissing widespread allegations of a cover up of sexual abuse claims in the Archdiocese.  In the end, upon publishing completed investigative findings on sexual abuse by dozens of priests in the Archdiocese, the Globe awaits significant protests by supporters of the Church in reaction to the tarnishing potential of its reporting.  Instead, the Spotlight team unleashes a torrent of testimonies from abuse victims, and, partly through its actions, instigates a broader reaction within the Catholic lay community, culminating in the formation of groups like Voice of the Faithful.
         The larger point here is that Baron's decision to pursue an investigation on clergy sexual abuse inheres to his conviction that, in an age of alternative media and declining newspaper readership, the Globe had to discover ways to remain an relevant institution in the eyes of its readers.  It raises a question, however, regarding the criteria for relevance of the print media, in particular, and media sources in general.  If editorial staff for the Globe made a consistent choice over the course of the 1990s to ignore or dismiss claims made by attorneys and victims' rights associations that a widespread institution of sexual abuse by clergy and extra-judicial rectifying procedures by diocesan officials existed under Cardinal Law's watch, then, in some way, it reflects a conscious preference within the paper for participation in the maintenance of an implicitly adjudged benign status quo within the Catholic community.  Furthermore, as screenwriters Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer forcibly imply, the lingering connections to Catholicism experienced by every staff member of the Spotlight team must have, necessarily, produced some underlying sense that the allegations they were tasked to investigate were too preposterously heinous to be true.  As such, at least some measure of relevance in the media must exist in the passive validation of a status quo in which the boundaries of the conceivable and the inconceivable get defined and professionally enforced.  If a capacity exists for the media to transform this relevance by challenging the status quo, then it remains to be asked how such a capacity it to be exercised.  The screenwriters provide a simple answer - just bring in a Jew from New York who isn't entrenched in the Boston Catholic establishment to challenge the invincible political influence of the Church and treat the newspaper as his own personal vehicle for a radical social crusade.  On the other hand, the story also seems to present small mutations in the mindsets of various staff members, most notably Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) and Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams).  It isn't entirely clear that such mutations could have taken place without Baron's decision to take on the diocese.  In this sense, we are continuously left with the problem that there is no necessary reason why the free press will be especially inclined, as an inherent condition of their role in promoting public discourse in a democracy, to engage in dangerous, radical projects against entrenched political agents that have abused the public trust (or, in this case, the trust of millions of Catholic faithful).      
               

The American Civil War I: Armed forces may lose wars but they cannot win them

This post is advanced as a preliminary argument on the larger question of who won the American Civil War.  As such, it emanates from quite specific concerns about the relationship between the armed conflict that took place, largely in the U.S. South, between 1861 and 1865 and the underlying political issues that instigated the conflict.  On the other hand, it invariably advances arguments relevant to a generalized discussion of the relationship between politics and armed struggle.  Emphatically, it is an effort to posit that armed force, resulting in the total disarmament of one party to an armed conflict, need not necessarily result in achievement of the objectives of the victorious party.  If warfare is a struggle of wills between two parties to armed conflict, then armed violence against persons and property, as the means by which one party seeks to compel the other to submit to its will, is only imperfectly suited to achieving such ends. 
           What will follow in this post should not be construed as a general theory of warfare or even a component within a general theory of warfare insofar as such a general theory is itself impossible.  Nor will I attempt to rehash axioms on warfare by Clausewitz, Jomini, or Sun Tzu, all of which have their place as contributions to our knowledge of armed conflict but need to be situated in relation to their time and the particular problems to which each contribution was offered as an effort to address.  Rather, this post is an effort to argue that we need to disaggregate the military conflict that constituted, in part, the American Civil War from the political struggles from which it was likewise constituted.  The latter struggles continue to this day in diverse forms within the broader frameworks of race relations, Constitutional law/federalism, electoral politics/voting rights, and interpretations/recitations of American history.  Without such a disaggregation, we are apt to forge an arbitrary rupture in U.S. history and, in particular, the history of the U.S. South, between Antebellum and Postbellum times, a bifurcation that I would regard, at least in part, as erroneous.  A longer history of geopolitical divergence within the American polity needs to be analyzed as a totality, from the ratifications of the U.S. Constitution of 1787 to the present day, through which the Civil War appears as a brief if not inconsequential aberration.  Such a perspective would, in turn, inevitably reframe the terms through which we interpret the Civil War itself, marginalizing certain rationale for the conflict while accentuating others.  More pointedly, for the purposes of this post, disaggregating the military aspects of the Civil War from its underlying political instigations enables us to realize one particularly relevant conclusion: notwithstanding the overwhelming victory of U.S. federal military forces against the Confederate States, the victors were incapable of imposing their will in order to fundamentally transform social structures, race relations, and the balance of power between federal and state governments within the Southern states.
          Proceeding from the limited objectives of this account, I intend to argue, first, that the military victory of federal forces in the period from 1861 to 1865 was less than total, but, on the other hand, it was sufficient to fatally incapacitate the armed forces of the Confederate States to such a degree that further major organized conflict would have been futile.  Second, I will argue that, in certain respects, the conclusion of major organized armed conflict in 1865 constitutes an arbitrary boundary in defining the time span of the Civil War.  Rather, we need to include the span of federal military occupation of the Southern states through Reconstruction as a concluding stage of the military conflict, both to assess the effectiveness of federal military forces in compelling the submission of the Southern states to the will of the federal government and to place the Civil War in a comparative framework through which we can draw analogies to other, more recent American military conflicts.  Third, I will posit the existence of a vacuum between the military policies of Reconstruction and the diverse political agendas of Reconstruction-era Southern governments, Congressional and administrative policy makers, and Antebellum (aristocratic, ex-Confederate) Southern political elites.  I will argue that the existence of such a vacuum constituted a space for practical reinterpretation of the consequences of the federal victory, ultimately enabling un-Reconstructed Southern political elites to truncate the transformative capacity of the federal government on Southern social formations.  Concluding, I will argue that, on the one hand, the loss in major organized conflict by Confederate military forces demonstrates the capacity of militaries to lose wars, in the sense that the Confederate States could not retrieve the broader objectives that compelled their secession and formation of a political bloc (i.e. retention of slave class structures as a major organization of surplus labor production; supremacy of individual state political prerogatives against federal Constitutional authority including, in the last instance, the capacity to vacate participation in the U.S. Constitutional structure).  On the other hand, I will argue that the failure of certain federal constituencies to impose their will in transforming Southern social formations through military occupation demonstrates the incapacity of militaries to actually win wars - enduring political, economic, and cultural change cannot be foisted onto a social formation at the end of a bayonet. 
The Defeat of Confederate Military Forces in Major Organized Conflict (1861-1865)
The point in this section is not to provide an exhaustive account of the evolution of the larger military conflict between 1861 and 1865.  Rather, the account that I will advance seeks to convey a sense of the complexities involved in geographically dispersed military conflict over a space as large as the U.S. South.  It will emphasize unevenness in the measure federal military control and Confederate resistance across the space of the U.S. South.  The defeat of Confederate forces will reflect a methodical if uncertain piecing together of various components over time, rendering Confederate forces relatively incapacitated, rather than a punctuated, conclusive defeat of particular armies on particular battlefields.
        The generations that prosecuted major armed conflict in the American Civil War were infected by an intellectual bias favoring conclusive confrontations between large, organized military forces as the primary signature of victory in military conflict.  It was a bias constituted through the strategic, logistical, and organizational development of large conscripted armies, from the beginnings of the levée en masse in the French revolutionary period through the heights of Napoleonic warfare.  In certain respects, professional military specialists and at least some military historians remain infected by a similar bias today, notwithstanding a long history of low intensity conflict, guerrilla warfare, and lingering political insurgencies, waged by non-professional military contingents.  Even the Napoleonic period had its paradigmatic development of guerrilla warfare on the Iberian peninsula and partisan tactics waged by defiant Russian forces against French invasion, but, for noteworthy reasons, history remembers Austerlitz, Leipzig, and Waterloo, conclusive engagements that yielded conclusive subsequent political effects.
         The American Civil War had numerous significant military confrontations (e.g. Gettysburg, Antietam, Chancellorsville, etc.), but no single major confrontation was adequate to permanently incapacitate one or the other party.  If the series of confrontations resulting in the federal seizure of Petersburg, Virginia and subsequent seizure of the Confederate capital at Richmond in the spring of 1865 might be regarded as conclusive, then they further need to be definitively situated against the background of a nine-month siege, the progressive assemblage of diverse components in federal military efforts to break down or seize control over logistical infrastructure systems across the Confederate States including seaboard transportation avenues (i.e. the federal coastal blockade and seizure of control of navigation on the Mississippi River and its major Southern tributaries), and the reaching of critical thresholds in a war of attrition between the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and diverse components of federal forces besieging Petersburg, controlling the Shenandoah Valley, and traversing northward through the Carolinas against a steadily battered and dwindling Confederate Army of the West.  In other words, the larger story of armed conflict in the American Civil War, as in every war, is a story of networks/assemblages in which no individual confrontational piece in the broader process of military conflict can be arbitrarily abstracted from the totality of the conflict to achieve explanatory priority.
         Dispensing with the notion that we need to look for conclusive confrontations, we can characterize the evolving strategies of the federal military as efforts to articulate multifarious components in countervailing geographically and temporally dispersed networks.  Federal military forces initially conceive of their strategy as oriented toward the limited goal of seizing and holding key contested ground - Richmond (the Confederate capital), Norfolk, Charleston, New Orleans, etc.  Such a strategy operates, minimally, under the conception that by seizing and occupying key land spaces the federal government can disrupt the political will of the Confederate states and compel their re-entry into the union.  Such a calculus, in turn, relies on the idea that the Confederacy is constituted, organizationally, as a fragile and electorally shallow conspiracy among elites in the legislatures of the Confederate states, capable of being fatally undermined by a well-organized effort by federal military forces to disrupt the capacity of diverse state governments to hold key geographic locations.  That is to say, federal policy makers in the Lincoln administration, Congress, and the federal military establishment (e.g. Generals Scott and Hallock) misconstrue the democratization of anti-federal ideologies in the Confederate states beyond the ranks of Southern elites.  As the scale of popular support for the Confederacy across the broader electorate of the Southern states becomes apparent by virtue of the threshold of military mobilization within the White Southern population, the federal strategy of holding key landspaces gives way to a range of divergent ideas that might be crudely consolidated into two separate but integrally linked goals: the need to control or otherwise disrupt logistical infrastructures facilitating free flow of materiale and military forces across the space of the Southern states, and the need to inflict persistent losses against spatially dispersed and logistically isolated field armies of the Confederate states.
             By the end of major organized conflict, federal forces had largely realized both goals.  The defeat of Confederate military forces, in this respect, reveals a dichotomy.  The Confederate military proved incapable of defending dispersed networks of logistical infrastructures and strategically critical spaces.  Rail lines were cut, riverine navigation impeded, and, especially following the federal Army of the Tennessee's campaigns in Georgia and the Carolinas (1864-1865), entire swaths of land rendered barren of logistically usable resources.  As its control over logistical assets and networks dwindled, Confederate field armies became increasingly disconnected from each other and dis-articulated relative to governmental control and their domestic base of support.  That is to say, the Lincoln administration never loses operational control over federal military forces in a way that might have impeded logistical operations or undermined overall government supervision of strategic goals.  Lincoln may not have stood continuously over the shoulders of George McClellan on the York-James peninsula or that of Ulysses Grant at Vicksburg, but he absolutely maintained some degree of direction and discretion over the general formulation of operational planning at the level of designated armies/campaigns.  The same could not be said regarding the Confederate Davis administration, especially in the latter stages of major organized conflict.  Davis may have enjoyed some discretion regarding Robert E. Lee's decision to invade Pennsylvania in 1863, but he certainly lacked any meaningful control over the logistical details or the staffing levels for field units engaging in the operation, if only because the constitution of the Confederate states did not grant him adequate authority to exercise such close control of the military, which was, above all, a consolidation of separate state level militia forces consolidated under loose authority by a weak central administration.  Finally, to the extent that the Confederate military continued to enjoy a strong degree of popular support in local jurisdictions of the South, the Confederate government lacked any capacity to leverage such support across space to bolster the logistical status of the military.  By early 1865, the staffing and supply status of the Army of Northern Virginia was lost on populations in areas still under Confederate control in Alabama or Louisiana or Tennessee, and the Davis administration was incapable of procuring material assistance from such areas because it lacked any control over logistical networks capable of doing so.
            Conversely, federal successes at disrupting logistical networks and winning a war of attrition against Confederate field armies did not simultaneously manifest success at undermining popular support for the political project of the Confederacy, even in areas where the federal government quickly regained military control (e.g. New Orleans, seized in early 1862).  Rather, unevenly distributed patterns emerge in areas under direct federal military administration, areas loosely under Confederate control, and areas at the margins, where federal forces contended, in certain circumstances, with resistance from regular Confederate military units and civilian organized partisan or guerrilla units (see Samuel C. Hyde, Jr., "Bushwhacking and Barn Burning: Civil War Operations and the Florida Parishes' Tradition of Violence," in Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association (Spring 1995), 171-186, downloaded from JSTOR (21 Nov. 2015) at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4233176).  
      
           
      

The CNBC Republican Primary Debate and Liberal Media Bias

A few comments are in order on the CNBC Republican Presidential debate last week in Boulder, Colorado.  To begin, from what I have heard about Boulder, I find it a little bit shocking that debate organizers could actually fill up an auditorium with an audience of prospective Republican primary voters!  On the other hand, it probably stands to reason that in a profoundly libertarian state, a Republican slate that has become so self-absorbed in its litany of government loathing might be apt to draw a following, even in the bluest of collegy, artsy, liberal towns.  On that note, I have neither watched this Republican debate nor any of the other debates, Republican or Democratic, so far in this primary season.  Rather, I had to go about obtaining a transcript of the debate online to see what was asked of each candidate and how each replied (see "Transcript: Read the full text of the CNBC Republican Debate in Boulder," in Time (Updated: Oct. 28, 2015, 11:40PM), at: http://time.com/4091301/republican-debate-transcript-cnbc-boulder/).  My only reason for doing so concerned the blustering over liberal media bias coming from certain candidates and, subsequently, the decision by the Republican National Committee to suspend its cooperation with NBC/Comcast in airing further debates.  Being employed by a family business where support for conservative Republican politics is the norm, I am entirely accustomed to hearing complaints, repeatedly, about the liberal bias of the mainstream media, favoring Democratic politicians and their liberal causes against the unwavering faith of everyday Americans in God, the Constitution (as the Founders wrote it), the free market, and the simple morality of frugality, sobriety, and self-reliance.  If the Republican Party since the 1960s has promulgated any unique, consistent, and pervasive mantra, then it would indisputably be “blame the liberal media for everything that has gone wrong with America.”
         In an electoral cycle where, despite a bewildering array of choices between moderately conservative, starkly conservative, harshly conservative, libertarian-conservative, Evangelical conservative, ostensibly business-savvy conservative, soft-spoken outsider conservative, and just plain “out in right field,” strangely bombastically conservative candidates, it seems likely that the broader American electorate in November 2016 will, short of Constitutionally funky rigging of electoral procedures in swing states, elect a Democrat to serve as President for the next four years, it probably should not be any surprise that it is now time to drag out the liberal media as whipping boy for a demographically shrinking Republican electorate, seemingly deprived of a good reason to feel excited (by which I, of course, really mean angry).
          Acknowledging, in this regard, that it’s never the wrong time to start blaming the media during Republican primary season, it seemed to me, perhaps mistakenly, as though the reaction to the Boulder CNBC debate was taking Republican anti-media politics to a new level.  After all, how much can a panel of personalities from a network that specializes in business reporting and casual investment advice really demonstrate a pervasive anti-conservative bias?  It was not as if CNBC executives had invited in someone like Rachel Maddow to lambaste the more spiritually minded Republican candidates for their unwillingness to accept the theory of evolution!  If Jim Cramer and Rick Santelli (a personality at least partly if erroneously associated with the beginnings of the Tea Party movement!) have to be counted among the worst perpetrators in the mainstream media’s efforts to tarnish traditional American values and undermine the capacity of political conservatism to restore American exceptionalism, then the cultural state of siege faced by Republican Party conservatives at the present time must be unimaginably grim indeed - even quarters where they could once rely on staunch supporters of the free market, limited government, and individual liberty now harbor treacherous enemies and closet defenders of the welfare state and the road to serfdom!  I had to see just how these “more liberal than I could ever have imagined” moderators ambushed the unsuspecting top tier Republican candidates.
             To be fair, John Harwood, a columnist with The New York Times, a quintessential liberal publication, was among the moderators for the debate.  It would be impossible to write off Harwood’s participation in the debate as something less than an effort by CNBC to appear balanced in organizing a debate with journalists from different corners of the political spectrum.  That said, Harwood’s first question, directed toward Donald Trump, showcased the very same condescending attitude that Republican Party conservatives have been quick to attribute to mainstream journalists.  Following a short summary of some of Trump’s more eccentric campaign positions, Harwood literally characterized Trump’s candidacy as a “comic book version of a presidential campaign,” a characterization for which Trump scolded him in his reply.  Trump was right to do so, and it was, in no way, shape, or form, an appropriate way to start off a debate of Presidential candidates, however outlandish certain of Trump’s positions have been to date.  In effect, Harwood opened the door to claims of media bias by phrasing his question in a way that most viewers of the debate, either in the live audience or at home, would never expect to see in the context of a Democratic debate relative to, say, Bernie Sanders’ plan to guarantee universal free access to public higher education.  Emphatically, I would have expected more professional journalistic behavior from Harwood and, at least, a greater degree of situational awareness in personally evaluating the appropriateness of his own questions relative to the possibility that he might be perceived as a manipulative liberal journalist, turning an opportunity to have serious policy debate into a three-ring circus in which the top tier Republican candidates could be painted as buffoons!
           I want to emphasize Harwood’s unprofessional characterization of Trump’s policy recommendations in order, among other things, to argue that, having evaluated the rest of the debate, I cannot fathom how CNBC’s moderation of the debate could be accused of fostering a bias in its treatment of the slate of candidates to such an extent that the RNC would be justified in suspending further primary debates with NBC/Comcast.  After Harwood’s mistreatment of Trump, CNBC’s Becky Quick undertook a stinging interrogation of Dr. Ben Carson’s 10-15 percent flat tax proposal, arguing that it would either cause the federal budget deficit to balloon or force a reduction of the entire federal budget by 40 percent.  I would fully expect and demand the same rigorous sort of treatment with regard to tax proposals, domestic projects, or entitlement reform measures in the Democratic primary debates - if the math does not add up for Hillary Clinton’s recommendations on domestic energy policies, then such proposals should be called out for scrutiny in this sort of debate context.
          The first mention by any of the candidates of liberal media bias came, interestingly, from Senator Marco Rubio, who, when questioned by Carl Quintanilla about his reported absence from multiple votes in the Senate and a call by one Florida paper for his resignation, countered that Senator Bob Graham, one of Rubio’s predecessors from Florida, never received calls for his resignation when his Presidential campaign resulted in a significant number of missed votes.  Later, Senator Rubio returned to the theme of liberal media bias independent of any question offered by the panel of moderators, labeling the mainstream media as Hillary Clinton’s super PAC for, among other things, converting the latter’s recent grilling before House Republicans on the special committee investigating the 2013 Benghazi attack on the U.S. Consulate into a victory for Clinton.
          Not wanting to ignore other efforts to blame the media, Senator Ted Cruz, in his first opportunity to answer a question from Carl Quintanilla on his opposition to the most recent federal budget compromise, chose to avoid discussing fiscal policy and instead blame the panel of moderators for converting the debate into a veritable “cage match” between the slate of candidates.  Again, in all fairness, following Harwood’s initial treatment of Trump, Cruz had a point.  On the other hand, in the context of debate that should have highlighted fiscal policy, regulation of businesses, and divergent approaches to entitlement reform, what does Cruz’s preference to avoid a fiscal policy discussion at the expense of missing an opportunity to attack the media tell us about the broader appeal of his position against fiscal policy compromises to avoid government shutdowns and/or debt default?  In categorically refusing to engage in this discussion, maybe Cruz gave the most honest reply to Quintanilla’s suggestion that he was not the sort of problem-solver that the American people were looking for in Washington.
         The larger point that I want to make in regard to the debate is that, in my view, the questions given to each candidate were largely appropriate and, to a great extent, it appeared that the moderators made a palpable effort to give each of the ten candidates on stage a decent share of time to both answer questions and respond to attacks from other candidates.  If any of the candidates failed to command adequate attention in a way that could have boosted their campaign fortunes, then it was not for lack of an opportunity to convey their ideas on where the U.S. economy needed to go during the next Presidential administration and how the federal government could assist this process (if only by getting out of the way, a position supported by nearly every candidate on stage).  Emphatically, it seemed that the format did not give Senator Paul, Governor Christie, or Governor Huckabee many opportunities to express their views, but, to a great extent, the onus for any apparent disadvantage experienced by these candidates remains not with CNBC but with the exuberance of their opponents in utilizing every opportunity to intervene in discussions even when not explicitly being called on by moderators to do so - such exuberance might at least partially explain why Trump, Carson, Fiorina, and, increasingly, Rubio have been doing as well as they have to date in the polls.
         Fundamentally, if the debate formats have not been conducive to airing the views of the lower polling Republican candidates, to say nothing of Governors Pataki and Jindal and Senators Graham and Santorum (the “under card” candidates) who cannot even find their way back to the grown-ups table to debate the issues, then the fault rests with the larger primary process in the Republican Party and the plethora of candidates currently competing.  It is simply impossible to accommodate fourteen candidates for an in-depth discussion of policies without having certain organizations left feeling that they have been accorded inadequate attention and, thus, that the larger Republican electorate has not been given enough of a chance to evaluate their candidate’s merit.  It might be worth asking, in this respect, why, at this particular moment in its history, the GOP has presented so large and contentious a field of Presidential candidates.
         In my opinion, the size and combative nature of the present slate of candidates appears symptomatic a crisis within the Republican Party as it seeks to come to terms with the changing demographics of the broader American electorate and the likelihood that, if the party is to survive into the future as something more than a regional concern, it will have to undertake a deep reconsideration of its ideological principles.  As in previous electoral cycles, the GOP is undergoing a struggle between extreme partisans of moral/religious and/or economic (libertarian) conservatism and moderate/establishment Republicans, open to pragmatic compromise with Democrats in Congress and/or the executive branch.  As the more principled extreme conservatives see themselves increasingly marginalized across the broader American electorate, however, their politics have become steadily more extreme and their willingness to compromise with opponents has diminished.  From this standpoint, ultra-conservative Republicans, frustrated with the array of establishment moderates (e.g. Governors Bush and Kasich), have enabled the growth of an unwieldy slate of candidates in a frantic search for the sort of principled conservative candidate who might be capable of articulating a new direction for the country that can appeal to constituencies outside the GOP, emphasizing rigorous fidelity to traditional Judeo-Christian morality, limited governmental regulation, lower taxes, reduction of the size of federal bureaucracies, appointment of conservative jurists, and a more muscular American diplomatic and military presence internationally.  Effectively, the Republican libertarian and Evangelical ultra-conservative base (i.e. the folks who went out to form grassroots Tea Party groups in 2009) is scouring the party looking for a reincarnation of Ronald Reagan or, at least, what they believe Reagan stood for, embodied in a new candidate who will put their image of America first and put the liberals in their place.  Sadly for these true believers, the America of 2016 is not the America of 1980.  If Reagan ran today, he would have to veer well to the left of ideological imaginations of the Republican electorate to hold any hope of winning across the general electorate.  The size of the current GOP primary slate is accentuating tendencies to undermine support for more moderate candidates while simultaneously bolstering candidates who stand very little chance of winning in a general election against the likely Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.
            With these considerations in mind, playing the media bias card is as much a tactic to appeal to the ideological predispositions of the Republican electoral base, which has been warned by GOP leadership not to trust the mainstream media since at least the 1960s, as it is an effort by individual candidates to curtail serious media inquiry on legitimate questions on personal behavior and/or qualifications.  Thus, the questioning of personal spending habits and accumulation and default on personal debts by Senator Rubio becomes another issue of media bias in which matters of personal conduct that might demonstrate proclivities toward fiscal restraint and/or abandon would be admitted against a Republican candidate but never against a Democrat, because charges against the latter would tend to impugn his or her character in damaging ways.  It makes little difference, in this respect, if such counterfactuals hold no basis in reality - the point is that the media is out to undermine the political projects of conservatives and, as such, any personal black mark that can be leveled at a Republican candidate will be exploited.  

Is Trump's Candidacy a Conspiracy Against the Republican Party?

After racist generalizations against Mexican immigrants, cavalier dismissals of the idea that John McCain could be considered a hero in service to the U.S. for suffering years as a North Vietnamese prisoner of war, a litany of grotesque allusions to the enormity of his personal wealth, and his continuous articulation of vacuous, overly simplistic criticisms of existing governmental policies on a range of issues absent any clearly defined policy alternatives, Donald Trump has apparently decided to use this moment in the vetting out of Republican Presidential candidates to introduce a novel and refreshingly frank species of misogynistic prejudice, attacking, of all women, a Fox News personality popular among its conservative, Republican-leaning viewer base!?  Isn't there something amiss here?  Trump is hammering home a cavalcade of all the far right wing racist, sexist, and classist prejudices latent within the political unconscious of the Republican base, unvarnished by the slightest hint of political correctness, let alone decorum or a basic sense of interpersonal sensitivity or human decency, and, for all his efforts, he's apparently still number one in all of the major polls of announced Republican candidates!  There is something that just makes me want to ask who put him up to this.  This can't be for real!  It sounds more like a Stephen Colbert piece off of the Colbert Report, run amok for an audience that just doesn't get the joke, or, more to the point, it harkens back to Seventies television, when conservatives could enjoy big laughs from "All in the Family" while liberal intellectuals could laugh at the caricature the show made of conservatism.  Trump is playing Archie Bunker for millions of Republican conservatives who just don't get that they are the butt of the joke, and that, if the Republican Party does not get its act together and select a serious candidate who can appeal to a much broader, culturally heterogeneous electorate with a moderately conservative agenda and a willingness to engage in principled compromise with progressive constituencies, then the country is going to elect another Clinton into the White House and, probably, at the same time, bounce one if not both houses of Congress back to the Democrats! 

On Failures to Coordinate: The PVTA and Zipcar on a Summer Sunday

I am writing this post as an effort to vent my recurring frustrations regarding my efforts to employ mass transit as a viable means to get from point A to point B in my day-to-day life.  The story conveyed here is a piece of a much longer story, beginning about six years ago when, in the course of a teaching gig that I had down at Holyoke Community College, I got into a fender bender in a commuter parking lot with the last car that I owned, prompting me, for a long list of reasons, to seek alternative means of transit to private car ownership.  I will have to elaborate on this story at some later date, but for now it suffices to say that I rely primarily on two distinct modes of automotive transportation to get from my home in the Baystate neighborhood of Northampton/Florence to work in West Springfield and to other locations that I might need to get to.  I hold a membership with Zipcar, which is very useful if I need to utilize a car either to travel moderately long distances (e.g. Boston on Sundays when I can park for free in Newton, Bennington when I feel like hiking my favorite section of the Long Trail, etc.) or I just need some means of transporting things close to home when loading things on my back won't do (e.g. getting the air conditioner out of my storage box in Hatfield).  However, I just don't have the means, income-wise, to use Zipcars everyday - my reservations tend to amount to a special treat for myself on a once a month basis.  On an everyday basis, I rely on the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority (PVTA), our local bus system for Hampden and Hampshire counties in the lower Connecticut/Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. 
             For the most part, the PVTA tends to serve my needs.  If it didn't, then I would not have been able to make not owning a car work out living over twenty miles away from my workplace.  On the other hand, there are recurring problems, many of which could be blamed on the performance of individual bus drivers.  I rely on one particular transfer at the downtown Holyoke Transportation Center, from the 6:30PM Purple 20 bus (Springfield bus terminal to Holyoke transportation center via West Springfield) to the 7:30PM Blue 48 bus (Holyoke transportation center to Northampton Academy of Music, the last scheduled run of the night) to get home to Northampton after work at least three nights a week.  Several Purple 20 drivers have succeeded in stranding me in downtown Holyoke for the night, forcing me to either walk 11 miles home (which, sadly, I did on one occasion!) or seek alternative means to get back to Northampton (e.g. call up my roomate, Joe, who has been extremely accomodating in giving me a lift back home when I most need one).  By and large, however, I have managed to combine rides from coworkers, shuffle schedules, and utilize alternate bus routes to ensure that I can get to and from work when I need to and still take care of numerous other needs, including, most recently, food preparation for my father, who has been a widower since my mom passed away last year and still hasn't mastered the fine art of preparing supper outside of throwing prepared dishes into the microwave oven!  Moreover, recent schedule changes for the PVTA have accomplished wonders in giving me new alternative means of getting from the Springfield area back up to Northampton, most notably the extension of the Red 41 bus schedule (Northampton to Holyoke Mall via Easthampton Center) to a location where it frequently though not always can connect with the Purple 20 from Springfield to get me back to downtown Northampton twenty minutes before the Blue 48.  Of course, there are occasions in which events beyond my control manage to throw a wrench into my commute for reasons that truly cannot be blamed on any individual bus driver.  Snow will fall during winter, traffic will get diverted by the Holyoke Saint Patrick's Day Parade, and motors on PVTA buses will unexpectedly overheat during August heat waves, but, for the most part, I've found ways to deal with or plan around all such excusable failures of the PVTA system. 
            Today represents one of those occasions when all my transit planning and calculations break down.  As I am writing this post, I should have been enjoying Italian food and, quite possibly, small quantities of Italian wine down in Waterbury, Connecticut, at the Pontelandolfo Community Club Festa di San Donato with my friend, Kirk, who lives and works as a librarian in Naugatuck, the next town over.  I had reserved a Zipcar for the purpose of getting myself down to Waterbury.  However, in the interest of reducing the total cost of the rental, I developed a rather complex plan.  Rather than simply reserving a car in downtown Northampton as I usually do, I decided to reserve an infrequently used Ford at Veterans' Park in downtown Holyoke, across the street from the Transportation Center.  Being relatively closer to Connecticut, the mileage that I would have expended driving from Holyoke would have been less than what I would have incurred had I reserved a car in Northampton.  Also, estimating that I would, at most, spend about two hours indulging on Calamari, Lasagna, and other regional delicacies at the festival, I limited my rental to 5 hours (Zipcars rent by the day or the hour and come with a limit of 180 free miles per rental).  This should have given me a generous 90 minutes for each trip and two hours to enjoy myself.  In hindsight, maybe I was cutting things a little close, but I can concede my frugal nature without embarrassment!  Also, there probably would not have been a problem extending the reservation by half an hour if I was due to run a little late.  The one possible wrench that could have disrupted the mechanics of my plan consisted of the fact that I would have to take the 12:00PM Blue 48 from Northampton down to Holyoke in order to get to my rental precisely at 12:30 when my five hours were due to start.  At the close of my rental, I would have to take either the 5:30PM or 6:30PM Blue 48 buses back to Northampton.  None of this seemed remotely problematic, however, when I initially made my Zipcar plans. 
          As it was, there was a major automobile accident on route 5, between Northampton and Holyoke.  The Blue 48 was diverted, I'm guessing, through Easthampton and around the Northampton Oxbow.  As a result, the 12:00 Blue 48 that I was waiting for to get down to Holyoke never arrived!  The Blue 48 was not back onto its schedule until 1:00PM, at which point, I had already texted Kirk to let him know that there were to be no Canolis in my future today and called Zipcar to cancel my reservation 20 minutes after I was supposed to have picked up my car.  It is difficult to attribute blame to anyone in this situation.  I made my plans under uncertain knowledge that the Blue 48 would be running on schedule as it does every Sunday.  The folks at Zipcar were nice enough not to charge me the full value of my five hour rental, although I did get socked with a fee for tying up a car for a couple of hours that probably wasn't going to be driven by anyone else for the remainder of the week.  The individuals involved in the accident on route 5 certainly didn't leave their houses this morning planning to get into a major accident, with injuries, that would divert traffic flows, playing havoc with bus schedules among other things.  Lastly, again, the PVTA tries its best to adjust to incidents that will obstruct bus services, but there are certain events that cannot be remedied.  The one complaint that I might have concerns the fact that I took a FULL HOUR for Blue 48 service to be restored after the traffic diversion. 
          As a summary point in this respect, in most circumstance, I try to plan my transit usage in the area on relatively tight schedules, taking advantage of every opportunity to limit the amount of time lost from taking particular buses and arranging Zipcar reservations in order to minimize my rental costs from hourly charges and mileage.  When I design a particular plan to combine PVTA travel with a car reservation, I need the plan to fall together like clockwork.  That is a little bit more than I can expect from the dedicated but otherwise somewhat unreliable members of the PVTA.  That is not to say that I think mass transit under the PVTA is a miserable failure or that bus drivers within the system are ambivalent toward the needs of individual passengers to get somewhere on schedule.  It is, on the other hand, simply a fact that the system runs with given limitations in both rolling stock and manpower that hinder its ability to adjust to situations like a major accident on a key thoroughfair.  As a result, attempting to coordinate my travel, especially in connection with my Zipcar use, against PVTA schedules requires a great deal more flexibility than I am willing to extend to the system or include within my travel planning.    

The Triumphant Power of Multilateral Diplomacy: Hopes for Success of the Iran Nuclear Deal

As an initial reflection, I neither know nor understand all of the conditions and provisions of the agreement negotiated between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the six-party (U.S., Great Britain, France, Germany, Russian Federation, and People's Republic of China) contingent, seeking to dismantle certain developments within Iranian nuclear research for an eight-year period, restrain the possibility of military use of nuclear technology by reducing stockpiles of fissile materials for fifteen years, and incorporate a rigorous inspections regime through the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in return for selective relief on economic sanctions, enabling Iran to market larger quantities of petroleum products globally and to access certain financial sector resources previous closed by U.N. Security Council resolutions.  On the other hand, the fact that such an agreement could be successfully negotiated through a patient, ongoing process of diplomacy between major world stakeholders in the interest of meeting Iran half way in developing a sensible set of restrictions on Iranian nuclear development in the interest of peace, stability, and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons represents a very hopeful outcome and a possible model for the resolution of other issues in Southwest Asia, notably the Syrian Civil War and the current geographical/sectarian fracturing of Iraq.  To the extent that such issues might be introduced to a multilateral diplomatic methodology, it should also include a far more inclusive range of regional stakeholders (e.g. Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, etc.), the exclusion of which might have been the very critical oversight that actually facilitated the realization of an agreement with Iran, per se!   
             I am confident that numerous barriers exist to the ratification and successful implementation of the agreement, both within Western governments and in Iran.  In Washington, in particular, the Republican Senate majority will almost certainly oppose the terms of the agreement unanimously.  The ultimate capacity of the Senate to impose legislative conditions on the Obama administration's ability to faithfully apply U.S. obligations, particularly with respect to relief of U.N. Security Council mandated economic sanctions on Iran, will, however, rely on the ability of Republican Senate leaders to enlist a threshold quantity of Democratic Senators to overturn a presidential veto on Senate initiatives.  The major groundwork in this direction will likely be made by the Washington Zionist/Israeli lobby, determined to enforce the Israeli Likud government's categorical opposition to any deals with Iran over nuclear development that do not simultaneously include a recognition of Israel's right to exist.  It seems almost certain that a handful of pro-Israeli Democrats, most notably Charles Schumer of New York, will side with Republicans in opposing any deal with Iran.  While there is no guarantee that Obama will not encounter a veto-proof majority in opposition to a nuclear deal with Iran, it seems unlikely that the Zionist lobby will be able to yank ten to twelve Democrats out of Obama's camp.  For a lame-duck president, Obama continues to command an adequate degree of loyalty among Democrats, solidified perhaps by the promise of a resurgence in Obama's presidential-year electoral coalition as a potential force behind Democratic candidates in 2016, to make it difficult for most Senate Democrats to turn their noses up at a major diplomatic achievement by a president whose foreign policy successes have been sparse.  Similar struggles, however not as substantially impacted by the influence of Israeli political pressures, are sure to obtain in the British, French, and German parliaments.  In particular, given recent setbacks in electoral support for the Hollande government, acquiescence by French legislators to an Iran nuclear deal would not seem to be a guaranteed outcome.  On the other hand, given their proximity to Iran and the potential for European firms to profit from reintegration of Iran into various global markets, it would seem that Europe's stakeholders have much to gain from the successful ratification and implementation of an Iran nuclear deal. 
            Acknowledging my relative ignorance on the internal politics of Iran, it is my understanding that Iran's parliament will undertake debate on the agreement and that President Rouhani's moderate/centrist coalition currently enjoys a favorable balance in relation to hard-line Islamic revolutionary radicals.  On the other hand, the ultimate approval of the agreement will rest in the hands of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni and the net outcomes of parliamentary debate may fall on deaf ears.  While it seems possible that Khameni would reject the inspections regime as a subversion of Iran's sovereign right to unfettered nuclear development, it seems more likely that rigidities on Iran's end will emerge over the term of the agreement, as IAEA officials begin to inspect nuclear facilities and construct a timeline of Iranian nuclear development to determine where nuclear engineers and scientists currently stand with regard to the enrichment of weapons grade uraniam and/or plutonium.  In the near term, Khameni and the country as a whole stand to gain from ratification of the agreement and implementation of basic provisions to facilitate sanctions relief in accordance with preliminary timelines. 
            Concluding, I am not sure how good of an agreement might be under consideration here.  In certain respects, I agree with the general purposes of nuclear non-proliferation and can understand how and why the development of weapons grade fissile material by Iran would introduce destabilizing dynamics to the region.  Certainly, the potential for Iran to develop a nuclear arsenal would, on its face, represent an existential threat to Israel while simultaneously undermining Israel's current nuclear monopoly in the region.  Of at least equal importance, it would introduce a nuclear dynamic into the Arab-Persian/Sunni-Shi'a political rivalry, almost certainly inducing Saudi Arabia to undertake its own nuclear weapons program.  On the other hand, provisions within the current agreement apparently facilitating Iranian importation of a range of new conventional weapons systems after eight years of verified compliance with the nuclear inspections regime may induce a conventional arms race between Iran and the Sunni Gulf states.  Either way, it is worth asking whether the U.S. and other Western partners to the nuclear agreement will be made manifestly worse by the progressive reintegration of Iran into global trade in petroleum markets and, secondarily, in international weapons trade (again, after an introductory period of compliance).  For that matter, if we had walked away from the bargaining table, would an eventually nuclear-armed Iran truly represent a significant threat to the U.S., Great Britain, France, or Germany?  I think the answer to both questions is no. 
            Truthfully, I do not think that regional peace has been well served by the maintenance of an Israeli nuclear monopoly in Southwest Asia - if such a monopoly has aided in preventing the recurrence of conventional ground wars between Israel and its closest neighbors, then it has done little to achieve a lasting peace between Israel and its Palestinian cohabitants to the militarily occupied, colonized spaces of the West Bank and Gaza.  Moreover, it is questionable to what extent Iranian nuclear development has been driven by the presence of an Israeli nuclear monopoly as it has been induced by the existential threat of regime change against the Islamic Republic posed by U.S. Central Command!  In the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of 2003, the development of a tangible nuclear deterrent by Iran, capable of being employed against invading U.S. forces or against U.S. assets elsewhere in the world (to say nothing of developing a modest intercontinental nuclear capacity!), constitutes a completely rational response.  In certain ways, any relaxation of weapons embargoes against Iran, however strictly regulated, might aid the Islamic Republic in meeting its objectives to maintain a substantial military deterrent against unilateral U.S. military operations.  Beyond this, as a first step toward more cordial relations, an agreement between Iran and the U.S., however lodged in a multilateral context, might represent an open door toward other pragmatic diplomatic endeavors to realize other regional objectives.  With this thought in mind, it is certain that the U.S. and Iran remain far apart in coming to terms with the present situation in Iraq (i.e. not only the current struggle against the Islamic State but also the long term political status of Sunni populations in Ninawah and Anbar provinces if the government in Baghdad is to remain decisively controlled by the country's Shi'a majority) and the fate of the Assad regime in Syria.  On the other hand, if the present multilateral framework has facilitated a nuclear agreement, then maybe further negotiations in the same framework might at least begin to address these other problems.
            Fundamentally, this Iranian nuclear agreement represents a defeat, however transitory, for the sort of political unilateralism favored in Washington by various leaders of the Republican Party (and at least some Democrats) and in Israel by the Likud government, suggesting that the only meaningful way to come to a resolution of the problem of Iranian nuclear development would be at the end of a gun.  To the extent that actual diplomacy between negotiators at a bargaining table, under the principle of mutual respect for legitimate self-interests by all parties with a stake in the political isolation and/or reintegration of Iran into the global economy and the community of well-behaved sovereign nations, realized an agreement that seems likely to be implemented is good news for peace and the pursuit of more peaceful resolutions to intractable problems in Southwest Asia.      

Europe at all costs? Against the new Greek Bailout

Following from previous statements on this blog regarding the efforts by the European Commission and other actors to prevent a Greek exit from the Eurozone, the negotiated bailout extended to save the Greek banking system from insolvency is a bad deal for all parties involved, especially for Greece.  The fundamental problem here remains the same: the inclusion of Greece and other weak, peripheral national economies in a unified currency zone with Germany and other relatively strong national economies generates conditions in which the stronger economies enjoy excess, uncompensated export benefits from implicit currency devaluation at the expense of rendering weaker economies at a permanent disadvantage from implicitly overvalued nominal exchange rates.  The only thing that a new injection of borrowed funds from the ECB, IMF, and other Eurozone creditors, in exchange for a new round of austerity measures, will generate is the need for more injections in the future as a struggling Greek economy struggles more with no perceptible means of permanent relief.  The Greek economy will never actually begin to turn around until the country dispenses with the Euro, reintroducing a new national currency or undertaking the creation of a new interregional currency consolidating national economies more complementary to Greece.  If, in certain respects, the package of austerity measures that the Eurogroup is now imposing on Greece may be ultimately necessary and, perhaps, salutary to long term development of the Greek economy (something that is highly doubtful in regard to the imposed selloff of capital assets), then the resolution still leaves Greece with the biggest of all possible disadvantages, the inability to devalue its currency in order to realign the strength of Greek currency in relation to the country's export performance and the international marketability of its debt.  Only an exit from the Eurozone can achieve this end! 
          The capitulation of Greek Prime Minister Tsipras to an austerity package at least as bad as the one the Greek electorate cast its consensus against is nothing short of stunning!  Is it really possible that the international financial sector has this much power to threaten a national government with the incontrovertible demolition of its banking sector if it does not concede to measures guaranteed to inflict abject pain on the most vulnerable individuals in the country (i.e. pensioners who will be subject to significant cuts in benefits as one condition for the extension of new loans to Greece)?  Tsipras should voluntarily step down from power for having surrendered Greek political and economic sovereignty to financial blackmail!  More importantly, his government, from the point that it was initially elected, should have committed far more time, energy, and creativity to planning for the eventuality that Greece would be leaving the Eurozone and returning to an independent national currency.  Its apparent failure to do so is manifestly inexcusable.     
         Again, an overarching problem in the engagement of Greece with the European Union as a whole is that the partial and unsatisfactory institutions of monetary union without a complementary union of centralized fiscal redistributive mechanisms and a banking union have revealed just how superficial the impetus for political unity in the place of national chauvinism actually is in Europe.  To place the issue in an historical context more familiar in view of my American background, instead of creating a United States of Europe, the European Union has settled for something closer to an Articles of Confederation, in which the Germans remain free to abdicate their responsibilities for the failure of Greece to adequately adjust to a permanent appreciation in purchasing power and permanent inflation in the cost of Greek exports in the face of relatively competitive international commodity markets for Greek export sectors.  A more robust union, including international fiscal redistributions from the strong to the weak national economies, has not been and will not become politically feasible - not at a time in which the Euroskeptics have grown so strong across multiple EU member states.  Rather, it might be time for Europe to take a step back, scrap the single unified currency and, maybe (if policy makers continue to exercise some degree of creativity), restructure the Eurozone to incorporate multiple tiers with different consolidated currencies reflecting complementary macroeconomic performance among currency partners.  More fundamentally, the political motivations that prompted currency consolidation in the first place (alignment of all member states to peaceful, interdependent economic development in place of destructive economic competition promoting militaristic nationalism) need to survive the breakup of the currency, which, for the sake of Europe's future, should now be inevitable!  This, however, is a matter of ideological commitment between the various nations of Europe, militating against any resurgence of Twentieth century zero-sum political calculations. 

Who won the American Civil War?

In the wake of a couple of months during which I seemed to lack the initiative to write about anything, I am hopeful that I am regaining the capacity to be needlessly long-winded in addressing numerous topics, most of which remain hopelessly abstract in their conception and connection to my everyday life, preparing marinated meat kabobs for July 4th celebrations in the lower Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.  This particular post seeks merely to advance a contemporary question in regard to the supposed objectivity of American history at one its most calamitous moments.  I intend to write at length on this topic when I have truly taken the time to approach it from all angles in order to produce a genuine piece of amateur historical analysis that could bore to sleep anyone unwilling to take for granted that the topic cannot be objectively answered at the present time.  I am asking it, moreover, with the larger supposition/suggestion that we New Englanders, in particular, as American citizens, should really engage ourselves in debate over just what our history actually means.  In doing so, it would be to our benefit if we took the liberty to throw out all of our preconceived notions of what has actually happened from the first moments of our revolution to the present day in order to truly open ourselves up to the possibility that everything we learned in history class was, sadly, erroneous. 

As Southern Republican politicians now stumble to get out of each others' ways in denouncing the legacy enshrouded in Confederate battle flags and reassuring the rest of the country that the South has decisively transformed itself since the days of Jim Crow segregation and the high tide of mainstream Ku Klux Klan White supremacy, the massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist-Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina (as well as other suspicious events since then involving Black churches) makes it at least somewhat apparent to me that it would be a mistake to regard the South as a monolithic entity and, as such, to make conclusive statements with regard to how the South has changed, both since the 1960s and, for that matter, since the 1860s.  Going further, to the extent that we recognize the demographic complexities implicated in any analysis of the South, we need to further recognize that, more than with any other region of the U.S., the history of the South and of Southerners, both White and Black, has been profoundly shaped by the Civil War and by the particular interpretations that Southern students of the conflict have brought to the table in an attempt to situate it in reference to the myriad processes leading to its initiation. 
With this in mind and the peculiar (but, possibly, mistaken) notion that "the victors write the history books," it appears to me that the question of who actually won the American Civil War remains subject to debate.  In a larger sense, notwithstanding the fact that the guns have lain silent since 1865, it might be conceivable to ask whether the Civil War actually ended, or whether it has simply continued in other forms, along diffuse, non-geographically-defined fronts with divergent, punctuated moments in which the same issues come back to the fore, engaging renewed and continuously evolving arrays of combattants over states' rights, the expansiveness of federal governmental power, race relations, and the broader meaning of the American experience as a collective historical legacy.  These are questions for which I, emphatically, lack a definitive objective response.  Rather, I hope soon to articulate a persuasive argument at length in order to say, most succinctly, that the particular ways in which we, as a nation (whatever that might imply!), have entered into debate on the meaning of this moment in our history have shaped the political, cultural, and economic development of the U.S. since the end of the Civil War and will continue to do so.       

Greek voters should vote "No" - It is time for Greece to leave the Eurozone

The Greek government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Syriza has scheduled a national referendum asking Greek voters to accept or reject a package of austerity measures, including tax increases and cuts in governmental expenditures, as a condition for continued financial assistance from the European Commission, European Central Bank (ECB), and International Monetary Fund (IMF).  Apparently, Tsipras is attempting to utilize the referendum as a bargaining chip in negotiations with European creditors in order to demonstrate the unanimity of the Greek electorate behind a more moderate, self-constructed set of institutional reforms and expansion of fiscal revenue sources (e.g. increases in corporate income tax rates and value-added taxes) less onerous to the broader Greek economy.  It is difficult to discern whether Tsipras is proceeding in a disingenuous manner - clearly, Syriza's electorate voted Tsipras into office with a mandate to take a hard line against the Troika and prevent the imposition of further austerity measures on the Greek economy.  To the extent that it is always preferable for political leaders to seek democratic approval for major national fiscal policy initiatives of this nature, I approve of the idea of holding a referendum to solicit the approval of the Greek electorate for a new austerity package.  On the other hand, I am sure that Tsipras is counting on a "no" vote next sunday, because approval would constitute an implicit no confidence vote by the Greek electorate against Syriza and Tsipras. 

With this in mind, I think it is time for the Greek electorate to conclude, resoundingly, that Greek membership in a single European currency zone was a bad idea and that long term Greek economic development stands to benefit from departure and reestablishment of its own national currency or (preferably) consolidation with other regional economies into a currency zone with more thoroughly harmonized interregional macroeconomic fundamentals.  Such a move would recognize that the dream of the Euro is, itself, the major stumbling block to economic growth and development in the European periphery and that the only European state that ever stood, unambiguously, to gain from a single currency was Germany*.  Moreover, while the notion that European political unity is cemented by the presence of the Euro enjoys some degree of validity, such a view neglects the role of continent-wide free trade and conscious national-level political commitment to the project of European unity, the sort of commitment that has been threatened thanks to the adverse effects of monetary consolidation.  It is time for the Greeks to stand up for their own economic sovereignty and for all Europeans to realize common ground on the idea that they have more to lose from the economic contortions demanded by continued monetary union. 

*Addendum: In the interest of being a little more fair to the Germans, the Euro is only an "unambiguous" benefit to the German economy from the standpoint of export industry, and exports maintain a privileged source of economic growth for Germany.  The transition from the old German Mark had to generate a relative devaluation, hurting businesses and consumers reliant on import commodities.  Likewise, since the onset of the sovereign debt crisis, Germany, as the principal beneficiary of the transition to a single European currency and the strongest national economy in the Eurozone, bore a disproportionate share of the burden in providing financial support to Greece and other ailing peripheral national economies.  Being number one has its costs.  That said, Germany will suffer the most from a breakup of the Eurozone when the smoke finally clears from the departure of the peripheral economies.  Assuming that a Euro without Greece will experience some degree of monetary appreciation relative to the U.S. dollar and other currencies, it's only a matter of time before Spain, Portugal, and perhaps even Italy start feeling the pain of having a currency poorly suited to their position within Europe and vis-à-vis non-European trading partners.  In an interdependent world, increasingly embracing the logic of free trade, maintenance of a structurally lop-sided currency zone, to the detriment of weaker member economies, as a suture for political unity across Europe, is non-sensical. 

Hopeful that Ireland will Pursue the Democratic Path to Marriage Equality

On Friday, Irish voters will go to the polls to decide (I presume among other things) whether to extend the liberty to enter in civil marriage to same-sex couples.  (See "Gay marriage vote marks a quiet revolution in Ireland," Reuters (19 May 2015), at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/19/ireland-gaymarriage-history-idUSL5N0Y93MD20150519).  If it succeeds in doing so, it will be the first country to enact same-sex marriage liberties by democratic referendum.  In this regard, I am hopeful that Irish voters will approve this referendum by a two-to-one margin, as currently predicted.  Likewise, I think there is a clear lesson here about how to pursue a humanistic, progressive agenda, with respect to the removal of sectarian moralistic prohibitions on sexuality and relationships, in full conformity with maintenance of the sovereign right of citizens to determine issues of such relevance in self-government as the definition of marriage.  That is to say, I continue to wish that we had gone about the extension of marriage by democratic means in the U.S. rather than pursuing these ends by means of adjudication and juridical fiat. 
           Having said this, this change in Ireland's direction with regard to officially sanctioned morality seems to portend important consequences for the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.  If two to three decades ago the Irish government operated in full conformity with a wide range of Catholic moral teaching, then today, as a result of certain internal matters and criminal abuses by Catholic ecclesiastical officials, the Church has largely alienated a broad spectrum of the Irish polity.  To some degree, such developments are a good thing, to the extent that a weakening of the Catholic Church catapults Irish social policies into the Twenty-first century.  On the other hand, I have to confess a degree of ignorance on the particular inbeddedness of the Church within the particular institutions of everyday life in Ireland.  My own impressions are shaped, on the one hand, by the lingering influence of the Catholic Church as a major administrator of charitable donations supporting numerous humanitarian social agendas in Massachusetts, and, on the other hand, by my understanding of the historical collapse of Roman Catholic dominance in the adminstration of social policy in Québec, a pattern starting with the election of the Liberal Lesage government in the 1950s.  At present, Catholicism remains significantly in a state of retreat in Québec.  In Western Massachusetts, the onset of the clergy sexual abuse scandals in the 1990s, coupled with a fiscal restructuring of the dioceses of Massachusetts, with the closure or merger of a vast array of old, ethnically-demarcated parish communities, seems to portend a major retraction of the influence of Roman Catholicism and, perhaps, a major decline in the number of Massachusetts residents who identify themselves as Catholics.  Insofar as I enjoy a jaded history with Roman Catholicism, I would express a certain degree of sadness that the Church is having such a difficult time accomodating itself to the changing attitudes of the faithful in so many areas where it had held out for so long against the forces of modernity/modernism.  In these terms, the sort of decline in the influence of Catholicism in Ireland indicated by the impending success of marriage equality may hold broader negative social implications for Ireland that the larger polity will have to address (i.e. assuming that the Church is still broadly invested in a range of social/charitable undertaking, serving diverse needs).  Conversely, it is suggestive of the necessity of larger, humanistic changes in moral teachings by the Roman Catholic Church as a whole, the sorts of changes that might be starting under the leadership of Francis I.  We can all be hopeful! 

Why it was a mistake to sentence Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to Death

I just wanted to convey a few quick reflections on the sentencing of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the remaining convicted Boston Marathon bomber, to death.  Firstly, the Boston Marathon bombing remains a tragedy for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, one which we will remember for some time to come and which we still may be justified in continuing to ask why we should have been targeted for the retribution of crimes against Muslims by two Chechen brothers to whom we extended welcome arms as migrants looking for a place of peace from a homeland wrongly and savagely scarred by war.  In its generalities, the Boston Marathon bombing was a crime against all Americans and, by virtue of the federal criminal code regarding the use of particular forms of ordnance to inflict mass casualties, a federal jurisdictional question rightly subject to adjudication within federal courts by federal prosecutors.  In its particularities, however, it remains a crime against the people of Boston and, in this manner, under the General Laws of Massachusetts, a criminal offense against the citizens of this Commonwealth, a factor that continues to stand out in my mind. 
           In regard to both phases of the federal trial against Tsarnaev, I cannot fault either federal prosecutors or Tsarnaev's defense attorneys for execution of their duties.  In view of witness testimony, video-taped evidence, and the extended drama of the manhunt against Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlin, there was little hope that Tsarnaev was going to be acquitted of utilizing homemade bombs to kill and wound multiple individuals at the finish line of the Marathon in 2013 and murdering an MIT campus police officer while attempting to allude apprehension by Boston area and state police.  The defense conceded as much and waited for the penalty phase to make its case in favor of life imprisonment.  In the penalty phase, prosecutors effectively made the case that Tsarnaev both lacked remorse for his actions and that he had, in fact, been thoroughly radicalized as a militant Salafist fighting to avenge the bloodshed of tens of thousands of Muslims at the hands of the U.S. military, its surrogates, and U.S. allies.  As well conceived as the defense's planned case against the death penalty had been, anchored on the notion that Tsarnaev's brother Tamerlin had been both the mastermind of the bombing and the overarching influence over the actions of Dzhokhar for whom a thorough indoctrination in militant Salafism had not occurred, the image of Tsarnaev placing his bomb in close vicinity of Martin Richard, a nine-year old torn apart by the bomb in front of his parents, was probably adequate to convince members of the jury that Tsarnaev's inhumanity was a sufficient rationale to inflict the death penalty. 
          This post seeks to offer a short list of reasons why I think this decision was a mistake.  For the sake of brevity, I will not elaborate on these at the present time, although I may do so in the future.

1.  As a practical matter, given mandatory appellate review of Tsarnaev's sentence, the administration of justice against Tsarnaev will be delayed, perhaps by as many of fifteen years or more.  
2.  The appellate review process will both compel victims of the Marathon to relive the experiences of their personal tragedies and offer to Tsarnaev the opportunity to voice the radical Salafist views, that federal prosecutors have attributed to him, before a global audience.  (Oddly, one would have supposed that these views might have been voiced in the course of his trial if Tsarnaev had really been a true believer!) 
3.  In the many years until he is executed, Tsarnaev will enjoy all of the privileges of a prisoners in the federal system that prosecutors insisted he should be denied with a penalty of death - he will enjoy at least a few hours of television a week, he will enjoy periodic visiting privileges with family, he will be able to keep in contact with family and friends by other means, he will enjoy other entertainment or educational privileges open to federal prisoners under maximum security whether on or off of death row. 
4.  Fiscally, the costs of the appellate review process, including fees for attorneys and investigators and the temporal expense of undertaking hearings and review of evidence by jurists in lieu of other case work in federal dockets, will easily outweigh the expenses of keeping Tsarnaev alive in a solitary, individual cell at the federal super-maximum security facility at Florence, Colorado until his time of death from natural causes. 
5.  Even before his eventual execution by federal authorities, Tsarnaev may become a rallying-cry for Salafists around the world.  In particular, for Chechens and Dagestanis, both back home in the Russian Federation and within immigrant communities inside the U.S. and in other Western states, the impending execution of a countryman and brother in the faith may be adequate to radicalize many individuals unsatisfied by their evident conditions of life and seeking to discover an enemy (other than Putin, United Russia, and millions of Russian Orthodox nationalist-imperialists who have done everything in their power to declare Muslims in the North Caucasus their enemies) on whom to blame their circumstances.  When Tsarnaev finally dies in the hands of American executioners, we will give millions of Salafists in many countries yet another martyr.  Emphatically, we need to be more perceptive on the enemies we continue to make!
6.  Following a line from an entirely valid argument by Tsarnaev's defense attorneys in the penalty phase, the prospective conditions of a life sentence without parole within the federal super-maximum facility at Florence, Colorado, spent under conditions approximating permanent solitary confinement described by numerous critics of federal criminal justice policies as psychological torture, might have constituted a more harsh sentence for Tsarnaev than the one that he will eventually, after many years of appeals, receive at the hands of federal executioners.  Once Tsarnaev has exhausted his appeals, his suffering within the various boundaries of the federal criminal justice system will be over - had he been sentenced to life without parole, he could have been thrown into a small cell, in virtual solitary confinement, for the rest of his long, prospective natural life, utterly forgotten and foresaken by the world. 
7.  The crimes committed by Tsarnaev were, in their particularities, crimes committed against the Commonwealth of Massachusetts - he is alleged to have committed multiple acts of murder in Massachusetts, crimes against the laws of Massachusetts for which he has yet to be tried.  A preemptive determination of guilt for violation of federal laws by Tsarnaev should not exonerate Tsarnaev for facing justice before the Commonwealth within our system of criminal justice for the crimes he may have committed against the citizens of our Commonwealth.  However, by virtue of the federal criminal justice process and, in particular, Tsarnaev's death sentence within the federal system, the Commonwealth may be denied its ability, if not to determine Tsarnaev's guilt, then to subsequently exact justice from Tsarnaev.  
8.  Tsarnaev was sentenced to death in the federal criminal justice system at a courthouse in Massachusetts and with jurors who were citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a state in which capital punishment does not exist as a punishment within our criminal justice system.  An innate contradiction exists in the willingness of our citizens to sanction punishments in the federal criminal justice system, on our soil, that apparently controvert our values concerning the dignity of human life and the purposes of the criminal justice process - it may be impossible to rehabilitate Tsarnaev, but the conversion of the criminal justice process from a means to manage and/or isolate individuals liable to damage peace and good order to a means for enacting public revenge for the commission of particular acts is inconsistent with the philosophy embodied in the criminal justice process of Massachusetts.  
9.  The trial and sentencing to death of individuals at federal courts in Massachusetts raises Constitutional questions with regard to the jurisdiction of the federal criminal justice system, the authority of Congress to specifically prohibit and assign criminal penalties for certain acts damaging to the U.S. Constitution, the federal government, and the security of the U.S., and the authority of the state government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to prosecute offenses to our criminal statutes, consistent with our sovereign authority to maintain peace, good order, and justice within our boundaries.  In these terms, the sentencing of Tsarnaev to death in Massachusetts demands that citizens of this Commonwealth need to debate certain fundamental questions concerning criminal justice in Massachusetts.  Namely, what should the criminal justice process seek to accomplish, especially in cases involving physical violence?  Consistent with our theories regarding the ultimate purposes for criminal justice, should we re-authorize capital punishment in certain cases?  How should the Commonwealth and its citizens confront the federal criminal justice process in a manner consistent with the embodied federalism of the U.S. Constitution?  Is it reasonable, under the U.S. Constitution's Article I powers, for Congress to enact laws and authorize penalties contravening those permitted within individual states for particular circumstances like the use of "weapons of mass destruction?" (I do not presume to have the answer to any of these questions, but I think that we are not sufficiently exercising our capacities as U.S. citizens and citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to ask them.)