The Nomalization of Evil
The Nomalization of Evil

BY HERB DENENBERG

THE PHILDELPHIA BULLETIN
Perhaps the most serious and most dangerous problem we face is the normalization of evil. That’s the subject of an essay published on in the Wall Street Journal by Judea Pearl, father of Daniel Pearl, the 38-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded by Islamofascist terrorists in Pakistan .

The title of the article, “The Normalization of Terror,” and its theme carry a devastating message, showing how the mainstream media, many of our leading universities, and people like Jimmy Carter and Bill Moyers have succeeded in transforming the most despicable, immoral, genocidal degenerates into a respectable category freedom fighters, part of a resistance movement even though they are using the most illegitimate, immoral, and illegal ends to achieve their political goals.

These are the real moral degenerates of our time, with the likes of Jimmy Carter and Bill Moyers leading the parade of evil,

LEADING THE PARADE OF EVIL, BUT THEY ARE THE ONLY LEADERS, THE REST OF THE CROWD IS SECOND RATE PROFESSORS WITH NO PUBLIC FACE, AND A BUNCH OF BLOOD THIRSTY TEENS AND TWENTY KIDS LOOKING FOR ATTENTION.



followed by many in our elite universities and the mainstream media.


NO. THAT IS WHERRE THE LIE IS. MAINSTREAM MEDIA. NOT AT ALL. ONLY BILL MOYERS, AND I JUST SAMPLED FIFTEEN TRANSCRIPTS FROM HIS PBS SHOW, NOT A LEADER IN AUDIENCE POLLING BY A LONG SHOT, AND NOT ONE MENTION OF ANY OF HIS SO CALLED MISSION TO NORMALIZE TERROR.

April 11, 2008
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to THE JOURNAL. NOTHING ABOUT HAMAS.

Food is the big story this week. We're paying a lot more for it, a lot of people don't have enough of it, and Washington may be about to make a bad situation worse.

First, the price of food. Rice alone has shot up by more than half in just two weeks —double its price a year ago. But corn, wheat, and other grains are sky-high, too, creating a crisis for poor people around the world.

Here at home milk prices have soared over the past year by 26%, eggs by 24%, bread by 13%. Add rising grocery prices to the higher cost of gas and electricity, throw in disappearing jobs and home foreclosures, and you can understand why people are struggling to keep food on the table. Our government figures 28 million Americans will be using food stamps this year —the highest level since the program began in the 1960s.
April 4, 2008
Skip to Part II
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL.

The head of the United Nations' world food program says "a perfect storm" is hitting hungry people around the globe. The cost of food is soaring. Food riots have broken out in Indonesia, Pakistan, and Egypt, where the price of bread rose 10 times in a week. Afghanistan has asked for urgent help. Forty countries are judged to be at risk of serious hunger, or already suffering from it.

January 4, 2008
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL.

I know, I know — enough politics already. But no matter how sick and tired you may be of all Iowa all the time, something fresh is brewing here. This small mostly white, corn-growing state has put forward two men who are not more of the same. Michael Huckabee's a Baptist preacher...


July 20, 2007

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal. Here with me now are two partners of Triglyceride Investments, a private equity fund that recently announced its intention of combining the assets of all the hedge funds on Wall Street in order to bring under a single canopy of ownership every media outlet in America...


June 1, 2007 — Full Transcript (Watch the show) (print)
Congressional Ethics
Bob Kerrey

Listening to History

May 27, 2007 — D-Day Revisited )




May 18, 2007 —
"SOS Essay/Melissa Harris-Lacewell
Bruce Bawer
Trade Talks

May 11, 2007 —
"I'm Harry" Essay/Keeping the Faith
Nick Gillespie
Marilyn B. Young
The Cost of War

May 4, 2007 - t)
Carlo Bonini
Jerry Miller and the Innocence Project
Jonathan Miller

April 27, 2007 -
Jon Stewart
Blogging for Truth

WHERE'S ALL THE ORWELLIAN LANGUAGE. YOU WOULD THINK BUT THAT'S 20 ARTICLES, FULL TRANSCRIPTS.

NOTHING. HE ISN'T INVOLVED. IT'S A LIE, OR SO THE EVIDENCE SEEMS TO SUGGEST.



Bill Moyers talks with Imam Zaid Shakir
BILL MOYERS: It is not easy being a mainstream American Muslim these days. The specter of radicalism hangs in the public mind, and even the most assimilated of believers...those born here or immigrants who now claim America as their own face skepticism wherever they turn. Here's our account of how one increasingly prominent figure in the community copes with the skepticism - and the scrutiny. His name is Zaid Shakir.

BILL MOYERS: On a recent Saturday at a mosque in Brooklyn, New York, hundreds of Muslims gathered to hear one of the rising stars in their faith.

ZAID SHAKIR: Many people act like this is the worst that the Muslims have ever experienced - you know, in America it's like: "I can't take it anymore!" Can't take what? "People looking at me! You know, that look!" Man, people's homes are being blown up and you're worried about that look?! You want to de-fuse that look? Just wave. Seriously, just wave and blow a kiss. And then start running towards them in slow motion. Boom, that look will go away real fast!


BILL MOYERS: Imam Zaid Shakir is one of the most popular Muslim teachers in America today.



They speak in Orwellian language, turning evil into good, murder and genocide into resistance, and blowing the brains out of young children into acts of heroism. What is most disturbing about this terrible trend is that barbarism seems to be going mainstream even in America .

THIS IS VERY DISTURBING. MAINSTREAM. WHERE... NOWHERE. IT'S A LIE.



This is the story that Judea Pearl tells so well and so powerfully that it is a classic of the English language and a message that should be engraved on the mind and soul of every civilized person.

At the end of his powerful message to establish moral clarity in a world gone mad, Mr. Pearl writes, “Danny’s picture is hanging just in front of me, his warm smile as reassuring as ever. But I find it hard to look him straight in the eyes and say: You did not die in vain.”

Mr. Pearl says it is now seven years after the murder of his son, and then asks, “Would Danny have believed that today’s world emerged after his tragedy?

“The answer does not come easily. Danny was an optimist, a true believer in the goodness of mankind. Yet he was also a realist, and would not let idealism bend the harshness of facts.

“Neither he, nor the millions who were shocked by his murder, could have possibly predicted that seven years later his abductor, Omar Saeed Sheikh, according to several South American reports, would be planning terror acts from the safety of a Pakistani jail. Or that his murderer, Khalid Sheiky Mohammed, now in Guantanamo , would proudly boast of his murder in a military tribunal in March 2007 to the cheers of the sympathetic jihadi supporters. Or that this ideology of barbarism would be celebrated in European and American universities, fueling rally after rally for Hamas, Hezbollah and other heroes of ‘the resistance.’ Or that another kidnapped young man, Israeli Gilad Shalit, would spend his 950th day of captivity with no Red Cross visitation while world leaders seriously debate whether his kidnapers deserve international recognition.”

Judea Pearl would have thought that the murder of his son, Danny, would actually be a turning point in man’s inhumanity to man,


THERE THEY GO AGAIN WITH A TURNING POINT IN MAN'S INHUMANITY TO MAN. THAT IS THE KEY. TURNING POINT, SEA CHANGE, MORNING AFTER A GREAT DIVIDE IN AMERICA. I HEAR THIS, AND MY MENTOR. DR. JOSEF BLOCK WON'T LET ME ABSORB IT BECAUSE IT CANNOT BE TRUE. VLAD THE IMPALER, GENGIS KHAN,. POL POT, STALIN, JONESTOWN. THE SPANISH INQUISITION, SALEM WITCHES, TO HOPE FOR A SUDDEN TURNING POINT JUSTS DOESN'T MEASURE UP TO APPROPRIATE HISTORICAL REALISM.


THAT IS THE WHOLE THING. A TURNING POINT?? BECAUSE OF YET ANOTHER HIDEOUS ACT OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE. BOB LEES WAS BEHEADED. DANIEL PEARL WAS BEHEADED, MARIE ANTOINETTE WAS BEHEADED. HUMANS EAT BABIES, MAIM CHILDREN AND GENERALLY ACT LIKE THE CHIMPS THEY ARE DESCENDED, ONE OF WHOM ATE THE FACE OFF THEIR CARETAKER.





and that the slaughter of innocents to communicate political messages would once and for all be universally condemned....

THE SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS IS UNIVERSALLY CONDEMNED, EXCEPT WHEN AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARIES KILLED AT A THOUSAND YARDS, UNTIL WE KILLED TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND IN HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI. AND FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND IN IRAQ, AND NINE HUNDRED THOUSAND IN THE DRESDEN FIRESTORM. OR THE SIX MILLION KILLED IN A WAR TO PRESERVE AMERICA'S CONTROL OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER. UM ER, UH... YES VIRGINIA, THERE IS NO SANTA CLAUS.









by civilized people and sent to the ashcan of history, where such gross barbarism is no longer tolerated, the place reserved for such atrocities as slavery, human sacrifice, and other shocking and totally discredited practices of an era long gone.



But the moral degenerates mentioned above have given these icons of evil,

OVER THE EDGE. CARTER AND MOYER MAY BE THAT, BUT THEY ARE NEVER SEEN IN THE MEDIA EXCEPT PBS, AND THOSE SHOWS HAVEN'T MENTIONED HAMAS FOR A FULL YEAR, NOT BY MY SAMPLING OF MOYER'S JOURNAL. SORRY.


these most degenerate of moral degenerates, moral standing in our society and acceptance in elite circles of universities, of the media, and of political leadership. Mr. Pearl says we have reached the point where we are no longer disgusted by evil: “Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.”


WELL SPEAK FOR YOURSELF. WE ARE THE SAME AS WE ALWAYS WEREL. WE WATCH THE SLAUGHTER IN DARFUR AND GO TO THE MOVIES AND UPGRADE OUR KITCHENS, AND DON'T TITHE FOR THE POOR, AND WAIT FOR SOCIAL CHANGE TO DO IT FOR US.

WE LIVE IN LUXURY AND WRIGN OUR HANDS ABOUT KIDS WITH HAIRLIPS. PEOPLE ARRE JUST NOT WHAT WE WISH THEY WERE.




I am not so sure we have been numbed by violence into acceptance of evil. I don’t think people like those moral degenerates Jimmy Carter and Bill Moyers are numbed by anything. That would be an excuse. They are not numbed but have placed themselves in the hands of the devil by dark prejudices of various sorts that are lodged deep in their psyches.


SAME THING OVER AND OVER. CARTER AND MOYERS, IN THE HANDS OF THE DEVIL FINE. BUT NOBODY LISTENS TO THEM.


“But brute force can turn self-defense into state terrorism. It’s what the U.S. did in Vietnam, with B-52s and napalm, and again in Iraq, with shock and awe. THAT'S RIGHT. MOYERS STEPPED IN SHIT ON THAT ONE. CALLED US TERRORISTS, WHICH WE ARE, NAPALM AND SHOCK AND AWE, DEATH FROM ABOVE, VIETNAM, BABY KILLING.
YOU CAN'T SAY THAT. AND IF YOU HAPPEN TO STEP IN SHIT AND SAY NOT ONLY AMERICA BUT, AHEM, MAYBE, HERE WE GO, ISRAEL, BELIEVE ME, MOYERS IS OJN PBS AND NOBODY WATCHES AND IN FIFTEEN PROGRAMS SAMPLED NOT ANOTHER WORD ABOUT TERRORISM. HE'S BEEN DECLAWED.



The people I associate with have not been numbed and they can still recognize evil, be disgusted by it, and reject it. Mr. Carter and Mr. Moyers can no longer do that, but that is due to dark prejudice, not numbness.
\
ENOUGH OF CARTER AND MOYERS. SO THEY ARE CRAZY. HORRIBLE. DESPICABLE. DOES HE HAVE ANYONE ELSE??? NO BECAUSE THERE ISN'T ANYONE ELSE.


This is the way Mr. Pearl explains the described descent into evil. He reasons that well-meaning analysts in their zeal to find creative solutions to terror decided that terror is not a real enemy but only a tactic. Thus the mechanism that drives terrorism was made to disappear and in its place we now have the more “manageable ‘tactical’ considerations.”

OH, ANOTHER SHIT HOOK, THE FORMER MAYOR OF LONDON. THER BRITS HATE JEWS. OF COURSE YOU CAN FIND SOMEBODY TO STICK UP FOR HAMAS.

Armed with that kind of reasoning, the former mayor of London , Ken Livingstone, in July 2005 could tell Sky News that suicide bombing is almost man’s second nature: “In an unfair balance, that’s what people use.” So the slaughter of innocents, the blowing the brains out of babies, was suddenly transformed into human nature, an almost reflex-like inevitability with moral neutrality. It’s not a choice or a moral decision, but more like breathing out and breathing in. Terrorism is magically transformed into the morally acceptable.


COME ON. former mayor of London , Ken Livingstone, in July 2005 could tell Sky News that suicide bombing is almost man’s second nature.

SHAME ON YOU. SECOND NATURE??> THIS GUY IS A THUG, A CREEP AND A MORON. KEN LIVINGSTONE I PRESUME IS AN IDIOT.!





But our former president, Jimmy Carter, the most degenerate of the moral degenerates of our time,


LANGUAGE. THE MOST DEGERATE OF THE MORAL DEGENERATES OF OUR TIME. OUR TIME DOESN'T HAVE ANY FAMOUS SPOKESMEN FOR MORAL DEGENRACY.


makes the clearest argument for terrorism and the slaughter of innocents. In his book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, this is the way Mr. Carter slyly justifies terrorism with what is an appeal to suicide bombers: “It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Road-map for Peace are accepted by Israel.” Translation : Acts of terror are no longer taboo, but are just a legitimate means to a political end. Until you get what you want, terrorism is perfectly acceptable. Jimmy Carter, in effect says, “Keep killing women and children, and blowing up babies; as a former president of the U.S. I find your terrorism and even genocide perfectly acceptable.” And a subtext of that translation: The Palestinians should continue the slaughter of innocents until Israel yields to their demands, however reasonable or unreasonable, and without regard to whether the acceptance of those demands would spell the eventual destruction of Israel. Whenever I hear of Mr. Carter’s foreign policies misadventures, I wonder if there is a way to impeach an ex-president. If the answer is yes, I recommend starting with Mr. Carter.

Mr. Carter, whose ability to do evil knows no bounds, has put forth the dominant paradigm now widely used to justify, humanize and legitimize terrorism. When Syrian first lady, Asma Al-Assad, was asked what Israel should do to end rocket attacks aimed at innocent civilians, she replied, “They should end the occupation.” In other words, terrorists must have their demands met before they agree to stop murdering innocents and blowing the brains out of babies.

Mr. Pearl also notes that the media, in the U.S. and abroad, have played a major role in making terrorism acceptable. Qatari-based al-Jazeera television keeps providing Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi hours of free television time to spew the murderous interpretation of the Quran, authorize suicide bombings, and call for jihad against Americans and Jews.

Don’t think it can’t get worse, as it always does thanks to the international media and our own mainstream media. In August 2008 came the birthday of Samir Kuntar, an unrepentant killer, who is 1979 smashed the head of a 4-year-old Israeli with his rifle after first killing her father before her eyes. (But remember, Jimmy Carter, in effect, gave him the OK to do that.) al-Jazeera elevated Mr. Kuntar to heroic heights, writes Mr. Pearl, “with orchestras, fireworks and sword dancers, presenting him to 50 million viewers as Arab society’s role model. No mainstream Western media outlet dared to expose al-Jazeera efforts to warp its young viewers into the likes of Kuntar. Al Jazeera’s management continues to receive royal treatment in all major press clubs.”

American pundits like Bill Moyers see the world just like al-Jazeera, so they should not be surprised to find the blood of innocents dripping from their hands. Mr. Moyers, after the war in Gaza , was quick to lend Hamas legitimacy as a “resistance movement.” And he resorted to the old cycle of violence, to make moral equivalence between Hamas’ deliberate slaughter of innocents and the Israeli attempts at self-defense.

He said, each side greases the “cycle of violence” and one man’s terrorism becomes another’s resistance to oppression. Thus, whether blowing up innocents or acting in self defense, it’s all the same. There is moral equivalence and neutrality; anything goes in this immoral world of Mr. Moyers, Mr. Carter and much of our mainstream media. Mr. Moyers uses this moral equivalence to indict the victims of terrorism as if they are merely actors in the endless cycle of violence.

Then Mr. Pearl turns to the universities, which he says are being manipulated into the support of terrorist and genocidal organizations like Hamas. He uses his own university, UCLA, where he is a professor of computer science, to illustrate the point. At UCLA there was a symposium on human rights, which was turned into a recruiting tool for Hamas. The director of the UCLA Center for Near East Studies selected only Israel bashers for the panel, and every member of the panel concluded Israel is the greatest criminal in human history.

Here is the way this human rights symposium turned out: “ The primary purpose of the event was evident the morning after, when unsuspecting uninvolved students read an article in the campus newspaper titled, ‘Scholars says: Israel is in violation of human rights in Gaza ,’ to which the good name of the University of California was attached. This is where Hamas scored its main triumph another inch of academic respectability, another inroad into Western mind.” For more on the sorry state of our colleges and universities read David Horowitz’s classic, The Professors, and his second book on the subject, Indoctrination U.

So, as Mr. Pearl’s article so artfully documents, we are losing our ability to distinguish between good and evil. We are being brainwashed into thinking that evil is good. Our media, our academics, and some of our political leaders are transforming terrorists and genocidal murdering maniacs into freedom fighters. If we lose our moral clarity, losing everything else we hold dear may not be far behind.

I have often written about the mainstream media, our academic institutions, and some of our political leaders seem to have become pro-terror and even anti-American. The Pearl essay is another classic statement of this theme. If I were editing one of those “Patriot’s Handbooks,” I would put Pearl ’s piece in it. I would recommend it for inclusion in the second edition of William Bennett’s fine book, The American Patriot’s Almanac.

I was struck by something else about the article. I missed it when it originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Feb. 3, 2009, the seventh anniversary of the death of Daniel Pearl. In retrospect, I thought it significant that it appeared in the Wall Street Journal, one of the few major American papers that has retained its moral clarity and that is able to distinguish between good and enable. You would not find this article in the New York Times or Philadelphia Inquirer, as they are part of the problem, the part that gives legitimacy to terror, murder and genocide.

And where did I come across the Pearl piece after missing it in the Journal? It is reprinted on Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism Web site ( www.investigativepr oject.com). It is significant, that one of the most powerful forces in identifying and fighting terrorists and terrorism has the moral clarity to see the importance of Mr. Pearl’s message, and consequently pay for the republication of the piece on its Web site. People like Steven Emerson have more moral clarity and common sense than the mainstream media put together. It is also significant that the mainstream media, which did not and probably would not publish the Pearl piece or one like it, are also that segment of America that has lost moral clarity and that has virtually become friends and advocates of terrorists and other enemies of America .

Can we fight and win the war on terror when such powerful opinion makers as the mainstream media and our elite academic institutions often seem to be on the side of terror? Can we fight and win the war on terror when political leaders such as the moral degenerate Jimmy Carter are dedicated to legitimizing terrorism, terrorists and their organizations?

Let me clarify one point, as in the course of this column I may have paid the likes of the Jimmy Carters and Bill Moyers of this land, the mainstream media, and our elite academic institutions an undue compliment. I’ve done that by implying they are on the same moral level as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the world’s other terrorist and genocidal organizations. The compliment is undue because I said they were on the same level as the terrorist and genocidal organizations. I should make it clear they are on a lower level. They have had the advantages of living in the greatest country in the history of the world, reaping all of its limitless advantages, and enjoying its right of citizenship. Yet they turn on their own country in favor of terrorists and the other enemies of America . This puts them on an even lower plain than the terrorist organizations. They, like Jimmy Carter, are indeed among the most morally degenerate of the morally degenerate.

Perhaps this all raises an even more fundamental question: Has America lost its moral bearings? We’ve seen Europe lose its moral bearings, where even religion is virtually disappearing from the scene. We’ve seen powerful observers of the scene, such as Mark Steyn in America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, and Bat Ye’or in Eurabia, show us how Europe has pretty much surrendered to Islam and Shariah. Is that one more sign it has lost its moral bearings and doesn’t even defend its values? Like Europe , are we too becoming victims of multiculturalism (all cultures are of equal value) and political correctness? When you observe the pathetic moral and verbal gyrations of the mainstream media, our academic elite, and leaders such as the moral degenerate Jimmy Carter, you tend to answer America may be far along on the road traveled by Europe .

Perhaps this suggests we better get back to fundamentals, and have less tolerance for who clearly can’t distinguish between good and evil. We better start treating the likes of the mainstream media, those academic elites, and the political leader exemplified by Jimmy Carter for what they are worse than the terrorists and genocidal maniacs we are at war with. That means no support for such political leaders, media outlets, and academic institutions where these types hold forth (such as Columbia and UCLA). If Americans don’t make a stand on this issue, no one else will. If Americans don’t make a stand now, America itself may be lost.

Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School . He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulleti n.us.

PINK FLOYD MEDDLE

The composition uses many progressive and unconventional musical effects.The ping sound heard at the beginning of the song was created as the result of an experiment at the very beginning of the Meddle sessions. It was produced through amplifying a grand piano and sending the signal through a Leslie rotating speaker. Gilmour used the slide for certain sound effects on the studio recording, and for the introduction in live performances from 1971 to 1975. A throbbing wind-like sound is created by Waters vibrating the strings of his bass guitar with a steel slide and feeding the signal through a Binson Echorec. The high pitched electronic 'screams', resembling a distorted whale song, were discovered by Gilmour when the cables were accidentally reversed to his wah pedal.[1] The "choral" sounding segment in the middle of the song was created by placing two tape recorders in opposite corners of a room; the main chord tapes of the song were then fed into one recorder and played back while at the same time recording. The other recorder was then also set to play what was being recorded; this created a delay between both recordings, heavily influencing the structure of the chords while at the same time giving it a very "wet" and "echoey" feel.[2] Harmonic "whistles" can be heard produced by Wright pulling certain drawbars in and out on the Hammond organ. Rooks were added to the music from a tape archive recording (as had been done for some of the band's earlier songs, including "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun"). The 2nd half of the song where Gilmour plays muted notes on the guitar over Wright's slowly-building organ solo was inspired by the Beach Boys song "Good Vibrations".[3] The song concludes with a rising Shepard-Risset glissando.

GORDON LIGHTFOOT

THE WRECK OF THE EDMUND FITZGERALD.


The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy.

With a load of iron ore - 26,000 tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early

The ship was the pride of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconson
As the big freighters go it was bigger than most
With a crew and the Captain well seasoned.

Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland
And later that night when the ships bell rang
Could it be the North Wind they'd been feeling.

The wind in the wires made a tattletale sound
And a wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the Captain did, too,
T'was the witch of November come stealing.

The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
When the gales of November came slashing
When afternoon came it was freezing rain
In the face of a hurricane West Wind

When supper time came the old cook came on deck
Saying fellows it's too rough to feed ya
At 7PM a main hatchway caved in
He said fellas it's been good to know ya.

The Captain wired in he had water coming in
And the good ship and crew was in peril
And later that night when his lights went out of sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Does anyone know where the love of God goes
When the words turn the minutes to hours
The searchers all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay
If they'd fifteen more miles behind her.

They might have split up or they might have capsized
They may have broke deep and took water
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters.

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the ruins of her ice water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams,
The islands and bays are for sportsmen.

And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered.

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed
In the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral
The church bell chimed, 'til it rang 29 times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
Superior, they say, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early.

PLUS IF YOU ACT NOW, AN ICE CRUSHER.


DAN'S POETRY CORNER

"The Future"
LEONARD COHEN

Give me back my broken night
my mirrored room, my secret life
it's lonely here,
there's no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby,
that's an order!

Give me back the Berlin wall
give me Stalin and St Paul
I've seen the future, brother:
it is murder.

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant

You don't know me from the wind
you never will, you never did
I'm the little jew
who wrote the Bible
I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all
but love's the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told
to say it clear, to say it cold:
It's over, it ain't going
any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
you feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future:
it is murder

Things are going to slide ...

There'll be the breaking of the ancient
western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There'll be phantoms
There'll be fires on the road
and the white man dancing
You'll see a woman
hanging upside down
her features covered by her fallen gown
and all the lousy little poets
coming round
tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson
and the white man dancin'

Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St Paul
Give me Christ
or give me Hiroshima
Destroy another fetus now
We don't like children anyhow
I've seen the future, baby:
it is murder


Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"


I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at
dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient
heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the
machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high
sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool
eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares


THE PIANO HAS BEEN DRINKING
TOM WAITS

The piano has been drinking
My necktie's asleep
The combo went back to New York, and left me all alone
The jukebox has to take a leak
Have you noticed that the carpet needs a haircut?
And the spotlight looks just like a prison break
And the telephone's out of cigarettes
As usual the balcony's on the make
And the piano has been drinking, heavily
The piano has been drinking
And he's on the hard stuff tonight

The piano has been drinking
And you can't find your waitress
Even with the Geiger counter
And I guarantee you that she will hate you
From the bottom of her glass
And all of your friends remind you
That you just can't get served without her
The piano has been drinking

The piano has been drinking
And the lightman's blind in one eye
And he can't see out of the other
And the piano-tuner's got a hearing aid
And he showed up with his mother
And the piano has been drinking
Without fear of contradiction I say
The piano has been drinking


Because the piano has been drinking
And he's your friend not mine
Because the piano has been drinking
And he's not my responsibility

The bouncer is this Sumo wrestler
Kinda cream puff casper milk toast
And the owner is just a mental midget
With the I.Q. of a fencepost
I'm going down, hang onto me, I'm going down
Watch me skate across an acre of linoleum
I know I can do it, I'm in total control
And the piano has been drinking
And he's embarassing me
The piano has been drinking, he raided his mini bar

The piano has been drinking
And the bar stools are all on fire
And all the newspapers were just fooling
And the ash-trays have retired
And I've got a feeling that the piano has been drinking
It's just a hunch
The piano has been drinking and he's going to lose his lunch
And the piano has been drinking
Not me, not me, The piano has been drinking not me


THE SECOND COMING



Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?




ALBATROSS
JUDY COLLINS

The lady comes to the gate dressed in lavender and leather
Looking North to the sea she finds the weather fine
She hears the steeple bells ringing through the orchard
All the way from town
She watches seagulls fly
Silver on the ocean stitching through the waves
The edges of the sky

Many people wander up the hills
From all around you
Making up your memories and thinking they have found you
They cover you with veils of wonder as if you were a bride
Young men holding violets are curious to know if you have cried
And tell you why
And ask you why
Any way you answer

Lace around the collars of the blouses of the ladies
Flowers from a Spanish friend of the family
The embroid'ry of your life holds you in
And keeps you out but you survive
Imprisoned in your bones
Behind the isinglass windows of your eyes

And in the night the iron wheels rolling through the rain
Down the hills through the long grass to the sea
And in the dark the hard bells ringing with pain
Come away alone

Even now by the gate with you long hair blowing
And the colors of the day that lie along your arms
You must barter your life to make sure you are living
And the crowd that has come
You give them the colors
And the bells and wind and the dream

Will there never be a prince who rides along the sea and the mountains
Scattering the sand and foam into amethyst fountains
Riding up the hills from the beach in the long summer grass
Holding the sun in his hands and shattering the isinglass?

Day and night and day again and people come and go away forever
While the shining summer sea dances in the glass of your mirror
While you search the waves for love and your visions for a sign
The knot of tears around your throat is crystallizing into your design

And in the night the iron wheels rolling through the rain
Down the hills through the long grass to the sea
And in the dark the hard bells ringing with pain
Come away alone
Come away alone...with me.

'Sniper'

'Sniper'
November 2, 2003

FIRST CHAPTER
'Sniper'

By SARI HORWITZ and MICHAEL RUANE
The bullet was the color of a new penny. It was less than an inch long and weighed about as much as a wedding ring. It left the muzzle of the rifle at a velocity of around three thousand feet per second, stabilized on its brief journey across the parking lot by six rifling grooves inside the barrel that gave it a clockwise spin.

A relatively lightweight bullet, .223 inches in diameter, it was undisturbed in its flight by wind, precipitation, or obstruction. In its wake, though, it left an unusually loud boom, in part the product of the weapon's short, sixteen-inch barrel. In hindsight, it was clearly the sound of a gunshot, though slightly muffled and missing the telltale whip snap of a rifle.

It was 6:02 p.m. on Wednesday, October 2, 2002, about an hour before sunset on another warm, dry day in Montgomery County, Maryland, the prosperous suburb just northwest of Washington, D.C. The temperature had peaked near ninety degrees at 2:00 p.m., and the area was still parched by a drought that stretched back a year.

At the Shoppers Food Warehouse in Wheaton, about ten miles from the D.C. line, a surveillance camera perched like a big gray bird over the store facade caught the bustle of evening rush hour. In silent, jerky, black-and-white video, the camera captured cars pulling into the supermarket parking lot and a steady stream of people walking to the entrance-commuters breaking from the outbound river of traffic to slip in a midweek market run or to grab a gallon of milk on the way home. But the camera was not the only thing scanning the parking lot that evening.

Somewhere, probably less than fifty yards away, someone peered through the tiny glass screen of a battery-powered Bushnell holographic gun sight. The sight, which looked like the screen of a tiny video game, was mounted atop a Bushmaster XM15 E2S rifle, which had been stolen from a gun shop in Tacoma, Washington, several months earlier. The shop did not yet know it had been taken.

The Bushmaster, called a "flat top" because it lacked the rifle's characteristic carrying handle, also had a bipod, a two-legged stand that could be folded under the barrel. It was the kind of setup the military's special ops people might use. Good for quick "target acquisition"-as the task of a sniper is euphemistically described. A commercial model of the military's M-16, the Bushmaster was a version of the classic American infantry rifle that has been carried from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf. But at this moment the rifle, with the logo of a coiled snake etched on the magazine well pointed from inside a beat-up Chevrolet Caprice that was stopped nearby. The car had tinted windows and a hole cut in the trunk just over its New Jersey license plate.

As the store video and the shooter focused on the lot from opposite directions, a gray 1990 Mazda pickup with a camper top and an American flag on its antenna pulled in. It waited for another vehicle to move, then turned into a parking place. A balding man in a business suit, dress shirt, and tie, with a grocery list in his pocket, got out and walked toward the supermarket. He was fifty-five, stood five feet eleven, and weighed 194 pounds. He wore glasses and carried a white handkerchief, a black pen, and a blue cell phone in a leather case. His lunch container was in the truck on the front seat. His name was James D. Martin. He worked for the federal government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent agency of the National Weather Service, and liked to stop at the market on the way home from work to get something for dinner.

Martin was a churchgoing man, a member of the PTA, and a mentor to children at an inner-city school. He was on his way from his office at NOAA headquarters in Silver Spring, about five miles south, to his home in a development, about five miles north. There was a supermarket much closer to his home. But he also had to pick up some things for his church youth group, and this store, on the corner of Georgia Avenue and Randolph Road, had great prices.

Martin had grown up poor in southeastern Missouri. He had been in the service during the Vietnam War and had worked his way through college. He had come to Washington as a young man over thirty years ago. Now he had a split-level in the suburbs with a two-car garage, a remodeled rec room decorated with Civil War memorabilia, and a dog. His eleven-year-old son, Ben, was a Boy Scout. His wife's name was Billie. She was a Scout leader and a Sunday school teacher.

On the videocamera Martin moved stiffly, as if in an old-time movie. On the little screen of the Bushnell optical gun sight, a colored target designator fixed him from behind as he walked toward the entrance to the supermarket. He strode past one parking space, then another, an easy mark walking a straight line. From the old car, the black rifle jumped, and boomed, and sent its shiny bullet across the lot. Just a whiff of burned gunpowder may have lingered in the air.

The bullet struck Martin square in the back, slicing through his suit jacket and dress shirt and leaving a tiny hole in his skin one-eighth of an inch wide, smaller than the head of a plastic push pin. It cut through vertebra T7, below his shoulder blades, and severed his spinal cord, instantly paralyzing his lower body. Slowing down, it tore a slightly upward path, perforating his aorta, the main trunk of his cardiovascular system; the pulmonary artery to his lungs; and the pericardium, the membrane surrounding his heart. There was little deflection en route and almost no fragmentation as the bullet burst through his sternum, making a hole three-quarters of an inch by one-half inch shaped like a piece of broken glass. Later, at the autopsy, the medical examiners would find on his neck a tiny shard of gray metal that looked like lead.

Martin began to fall as soon as his spinal cord was cut. The catastrophic drop in blood pressure caused by his other wounds would have then led to swift unconsciousness. The brain carries only about a ten-second reserve of oxygen. A witness heard him moan and saw him crumple onto his left side, losing his glasses. He struck his face on the blacktop, gashing his nose and forehead. No one noticed the Caprice with the New Jersey license plate slip back into the evening rush and disappear.

A few parking places away, Kimberly Sadelson, a title clerk at a local car dealership, was loading groceries into her Honda when she heard the boom and saw Martin go down. She had her five-year-old son, Joseph, with her and hesitated to go near. She heard a woman scream and a man yell for someone to dial 911. From her cell phone Sadelson made the call.

"I'm at Shoppers Food Warehouse on Randolph Road," she said when a dispatcher answered. "And a man just fell in the parking lot. There was a loud noise. But we're not sure if he was shot."

"Okay, is he bleeding?" the dispatcher asked.

"Yes," she said.

"Where's he bleeding from?"

"I don't know," she said, her voice fearful and a little irritated. "I'm like half an aisle away from him."

"Is it inside?" the dispatcher asked.

"No," she said. "It's outside in a parking lot."

Across a busy road from the supermarket, Alan Felsen, a Montgomery County police officer, had also heard the boom. He had spent most of the day on bicycle patrol in a nearby business district but had been assigned to spend the last hour of his shift patrolling in one of the county's Impala cruisers.

Still dressed in his summer uniform-black shorts and light brown polo shirt with police on the back-Felsen had just pulled out of the parking lot of the Fourth District police headquarters, across the street from the supermarket. He had cut through an apartment complex and was waiting to pull into traffic when he heard the noise. He had his windows down, but the sound didn't register right away as a gunshot. It was missing the edge, the crack, of a firearm. It had clearly come from the supermarket parking lot.

For several seconds Felsen looked across the street toward the source of the sound, but he saw nothing. No commotion. No running. No screaming. He wondered if someone had dropped something large, a loaded pallet, maybe, at the gardening store beside the supermarket.

Then he pulled into the traffic, flicked on his emergency dome lights, and made a U-turn into the parking lot. He found people there frozen, standing, as if in a weird painting. He pulled up to the nearest bystander and called out the window: "What happened?" No response. "What's going on here?" Then, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a figure prone in the parking lot. He realized what he had heard. He grabbed his radio and yelled, "Break, break, break!" to get through the other transmissions. "Six-King-thirteen!" he said, using his call sign. "I'm at Shoppers Food Warehouse on Randolph. I've got the sound of a shot. One down."

After getting out of his cruiser, he paused for a split second to look around, then jogged to the victim. "Did anyone see anything?" he yelled over his shoulder. People were still frozen. "Anyone who heard the shot needs to stay here," he shouted. Felsen wondered for a moment if this might be a suicide. He needed witnesses.

About an hour earlier, a call had gone over the radio about a shooting in another shopping center a few miles away in Aspen Hill. A bullet had gone through the window of an arts and crafts store called Michaels. It had struck one of the store's illuminated checkout numbers, the number 5. But the holes were almost seven feet up, and no one had been hit. Felsen thought it probably wasn't related.

Felsen called to the man on the ground to see if he was conscious. There was no reply. He knelt beside him. Martin's chest, shirt, and suit coat were soaked with blood, and pressing Martin's neck for a pulse, he felt nothing. Martin wasn't breathing, either. Though he had never seen a gunshot wound this bad, Felsen was a former volunteer firefighter and had witnessed some bad accidents. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and began CPR chest compressions. It quickly became a bloody business.

From the crowd of bystanders, a woman asked: "Can I help?"

Felsen looked up. By chance, it was a friend, Marjorie Fiske, a local volunteer EMT Felsen had known when they were both county police dispatchers. Fiske had been a few yards away, loading her car outside the store, when she noticed the commotion.

"Margie," Felsen called, "go get my first-aid bag."

Fiske ran to Felsen's cruiser but couldn't find his kit. So she went to her car and got the first-aid bag she always carried with her. Together, they worked on Martin, trying to get a pulse back. As Felsen did the compressions, Fiske placed two pieces of gauze over Martin's mouth. She pinched his nose shut and began blowing air into his lungs. She could hear gurgling inside. A nurse stepped out of the crowd and joined the effort.

The nurse pulled Fiske's big trauma scissors from her bag and cut open Martin's shirt. Underneath was a huge clot of blood and a hole in his chest. The trio used more gauze on his chest to try to stem the blood. Already his shirt, tie, and coat were soaked, and blood was streaming across the parking lot.

More police arrived from the district headquarters across the street. Paramedics from the fire station next door to it also arrived and took over from Felsen. Felsen peeled off his gloves, washed his arms with gauze and disinfectant, and watched as they worked on Martin.

It was almost sunset. Minutes passed, and after a while, the paramedics gave up. They placed a sheet over Martin, who lay on his back in the soft light of the evening, his feet and hands sticking out.

Fiske, too, had stepped back. "Can I get out of here?" she said, shaken and worried about getting to a function at her son's high school down the road.

Felsen wondered what could have happened. Guy walking across a parking lot. A gunshot. Guy goes down with a through-and-through wound. No robbery. No carjacking. Nobody sees anything. Probably some kind of rifle involved. Felsen thought it was an accident. Somebody popped off in a neighborhood nearby, and the high-powered bullet found this poor man. What else could it have been?

Across the sprawling county, the usual calls were going out to the people who were notified when there was a homicide. One of the first was to Detective Patrick McNerney of the department's Major Crimes Division, Homicide/Sex Section. McNerney was working the 2:00-to-11:00 shift out of Montgomery County police headquarters, a nondescript redbrick office building set among scores of other nondescript office buildings in the bland office park landscape just west of the county seat of Rockville.

McNerney, a seventeen-year veteran of the department and the son of a retired federal judge, took the phone call from the department's communications center. There had been an "0100," a homicide, at a Wheaton supermarket. The victim had been shot. McNerney, an imposing blond-haired man who often wore a blue tie with shamrocks on it, was light on cases. This one was his: He would put it on like a jacket and wear it until it was over, for as long as it took. He alerted an evidence collection team, and they headed for the scene.


As they maneuvered through the traffic with lights and sirens, they crossed a county that epitomized the vast changes that had overtaken the once serene postagricultural life of the Washington suburbs. The rural enclave where Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart passed through on the way to Gettysburg began its transformation after World War II. More than a half century later, there were still farms, but much of Montgomery County was highly developed and affluent, with growing communities of Asian, Hispanic, and African immigrants. Its population had grown to over 870,000-substantially more, it boasted, than Baltimore's. Its citizens were generally safe and content. Traffic congestion was the chief worry. The county had seen only twenty murders so far in 2002, not counting Martin's. There had been forty-seven traffic fatalities.

Arriving at the supermarket parking lot, McNerney found the typical crime scene circus. Martin was on his back under a sheet. He had what to the medics looked like a nasty chest wound. Customers were going in and out of the Shoppers Warehouse, but a crowd of bystanders-"looky-loos," McNerney called them-had gathered, drawn by the TV trucks. McNerney's job was to slow the scene down, "stop time," if you will. Nobody in, nobody out. Then take it frame by frame. Nail down who was where, who saw what, who heard what. He had an investigator with a camera start taking pictures of everybody around. You never knew who might turn up.

'The Lesser Evil Politics in an age of terror

'The Lesser Evil Politics in an age of terror
July 25, 2004

FIRST CHAPTER
'The Lesser Evil'

By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
EMOCRACY AND THE LESSER EVIL
On the appointed day the unarmed crowd of the Gothic youth was carefully collected in the square or forum; the streets and avenues were occupied by the Roman troops, and the roofs of the houses were covered with archers and slingers. At the same hour, in all the cities of the East, the signal was given of indiscriminate slaughter; and the provinces of Asia were delivered, by the cruel prudence of Julius, from a domestic enemy, who in a few months might have carried fire and sword from the Hellespont to the Euphrates. The urgent consideration of the public safety may undoubtedly authorize the violation of every positive law. How far that or any other consideration may operate to dissolve the natural obligations of humanity and justice is a doctrine of which I still desire to remain ignorant. - Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), 2.36
I

What lesser evils may a society commit when it believes it faces the greater evil of its own destruction? This is one of the oldest questions in politics and one of the hardest to answer. The old Roman adage-the safety of the people is the first law-set few limits to the claims of security over liberty. In the name of the people's safety, the Roman republic was prepared to sacrifice all other laws. For what laws would survive if Rome itself perished? The suspension of civil liberties, the detention of aliens, the secret assassination of enemies: all this might be allowed, as a last resort, if the life of the state were in danger. But if law must sometimes compromise with necessity, must ethics surrender too? Is there no moral limit to what a republic can do when its existence is threatened? As Edward Gibbon retold the story of how the Romans slaughtered defenseless aliens in their eastern cities in 395 C.E. as a preemptive warning to the barbarians massing at the gates of their empire, he declined to consider whether actions that political necessity might require could still remain anathema to moral principle. But the question must not only be asked. It must be answered.

If the society attacked on September 11, 2001, had been a tyranny, these ancient questions might not be relevant. For a tyranny will allow itself anything. But the nation attacked on that bright morning was a liberal democracy, a constitutional order that sets limits to any government's use of force. Democratic constitutions do allow some suspension of rights in states of emergency. Thus rights are not always trumps. But neither is necessity. Even in times of real danger, political authorities have to prove the case that abridgments of rights are justified. Justifying them requires a government to submit them to the test of adversarial review by the legislature, the courts, and a free media. A government seeking to respond to an attack or an expected danger is required to present the case for extraordinary measures to a legislature, to argue for them with reasons that might convince a reasonable person, and to alter the measures in the face of criticism. Even after extraordinary measures receive legislative approval, they will still come under review by the courts.

The first challenge that a terrorist emergency poses to democracy is to this system of adversarial justification. The machinery of legislative deliberation and judicial review grinds slowly. Emergencies demand rapid action. Hence they require the exercise of prerogative. Presidents and prime ministers have to take action first and submit to questions later. But too much prerogative can be bad for democracy itself.

In emergencies, we have no alternative but to trust our leaders to act quickly, when our lives may be in danger, but it would be wrong to trust them to decide the larger question of how to balance liberty and security over the long term. For these larger questions, we ought to trust to democratic deliberation through our institutions. Adversarial justification is an institutional response, developed over centuries, to the inherent difficulty of making appropriate public judgments about just these types of conflicts of values. Citizens are bound to disagree about how far the government is entitled to go in any given emergency. Because we disagree deeply about these matters, democracy's institutions provide a resolution, through a system of checks and balances, to ensure that no government's answer has the power to lead us either straight to anarchy or to tyranny.

In a terrorist emergency, we disagree, first of all, about the facts: chiefly, what type and degree of risk the threat of terrorism actually presents. It would make life easy if these facts were clear, but they rarely are. Public safety requires extrapolations about future threats on the basis of disputable facts about present ones. Worse, the facts are never presented to the public simply as neutral propositions available for dispassionate review. They come to us packaged with evaluation. They are usually stretched to justify whatever case for action is being made. Those who want coercive measures construe the risk to be great; those who oppose them usually minimize the threat. The disagreements don't end there. Even when we agree about the facts, we may still disagree whether the risks justify abridgments of liberty.

These disagreements extend to the very meaning of democracy itself. For most Americans, democracy simply means what Abraham Lincoln said it was: government of the people, by the people, for the people. In this account, democracy is a synonym for majority rule. Popular sovereignty, through elected representatives, has to be the final arbiter of what the government can be allowed to get away with when it is trying to defend our freedoms and our lives. Democracies do have bills of rights but these exist to serve vital majority interests. When the executive branch of government suspends rights, for example, it does so in the interest of the majority of citizens. The public interests that these rights defend are defined by the elected representatives of the people, and courts must interpret what these rights mean in obedience to what legislatures and the people say the rights mean. Defending a right of an individual, for example, to freedom of association in times of safety protects the liberty of all. But protecting that same individual in a time of emergency may do harm to all. A terrorist emergency is precisely a case where allowing individual liberty-to plan, to plot, to evade detection-may threaten a vital majority interest. A democracy has no more important purpose than the protection of its members, and rights exist to safeguard that purpose. Civil liberty, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court has written, means the liberty of a citizen, not the abstract liberty of an individual in a state of nature. Such freedom, therefore, must depend on the survival of government and must be subordinate to its preservation.

What prevents such a system from falling prey to the tyranny of the majority is the system of checks and balances and, more broadly, the democratic process of adversarial justification itself. While injustice can always be justified if you have to justify it only to yourself, it is less easy when you have to justify it to other democratic institutions, like courts and legislatures or a free press. Thus presidents or prime ministers may not see anything wrong in a stringent measure, but if they know that this measure will have to get by the courts and the legislature, they may think twice.

Besides these constitutional checks and balances, there would also be the democratic check of competing social, religious, and political interests in the nation at large. One of the most lucid versions of this argument is to be found in Federalist No. 51, where in discussing the federal system's balance of federal and state power, the authors go on to say that while all authority in the United States will be derived from the power of the majority,

the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests and sects; and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of country and the number comprehended under the same government.
Against this pragmatic view there is a moral view of democracy which maintains that it is something more than majority rule disciplined by checks and balances. It is also an order of rights that puts limits to the power of the community over individuals. These limits are not there just for prudential reasons, to prevent governments from riding roughshod over individuals. The rights are also there to express the idea that individuals matter intrinsically. Democracies don't just serve majority interests, they accord individuals intrinsic respect. This respect is expressed in the form of rights that guarantee certain freedoms. Freedom matters, in turn, because it is a precondition for living in dignity. Dignity here means simply the right to shape your life as best you can, within the limits of the law, and to have a voice, however small, in the shaping of public affairs. Government for the people, in other words, is something more than government for the happiness and security of the greatest number. The essential constraint of democratic government is that it must serve majority interests without sacrificing the freedom and dignity of the individuals who comprise the political community to begin with and who on occasion may oppose how it is governed. Rights certainly owe their origin to the sovereignty of the people, but the people-and their representatives-must steer majority interests through the constraints of rights.

Aharon Barak, president of Israel's Supreme Court, describes these two conceptions of democracy as "formal" and "substantive." Other scholars have contrasted a "pragmatic" reading of the U.S. Constitution with a "moral" reading. In normal times, these two meanings of democracy-one stressing popular sovereignty, the other stressing rights; one privileging collective interests, the other privileging individual dignity-are interdependent. You can't have a democracy without rights, and rights cannot be secure unless you have democracy. But in terrorist emergencies, their relation breaks apart. What makes security appear to trump liberty in terrorist emergencies is the idea-certainly true-that the liberty of the majority is utterly dependent upon their security. A people living in fear are not free. Hence the safety of the majority makes an imperative claim. On this view, rights are political conveniences a majority institutes for its defense and is therefore at liberty to abridge when necessity demands it. Those who defend a rights-based definition of democracy will then argue that rights lose all effect, not just for the individuals at risk, but for the majority as well if they are revocable in situations of necessity.

Both sides then appeal to history and seek vindication of their claims. Those who think of democracy primarily in terms of majority interest point to the frequent abridgments of liberty in national emergencies past-from Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War to the detention of illegal aliens after 9/11-and argue that democracies survive in part because they do not let rights stand in the way of robust measures. Moreover, robust measures do not prevent rights' returning in times of safety. Temporary measures are just that and they need not do permanent damage to a democracy's constitutional fabric. Those who put rights first will reply that yes, democracy survives, but rights infringements needlessly compromise the democracy's commitment to dignity and freedom. The detention of Japanese Americans during World War II would qualify as an example of majoritarian tyranny and misuse of executive prerogative, driven by fear and racial bias. One side in the debate worries that caring overmuch about rights will tie the hands of a democracy, while the other insists that if rights are abridged, even for a few individuals, then democracy betrays its own identity.

Civil libertarians think civil liberties define what a democracy is. But the recurrently weak and shallow public support for civil liberties positions suggests that many Americans disagree. They believe that the majority interest should trump the civil liberties of terrorist suspects. For these democrats, rights are prudential limits on government action, revocable in times of danger; for civil libertarians, they are foundational commitments to individual dignity that ought to limit government action in times of safety and danger alike. For one side, what matters fundamentally is that democracies prevail. For the other, what matters more is that democracies prevail without betraying what they stand for.

A further disagreement arises over the question of whether a country facing a terrorist emergency should base its public policy exclusively on its own constitution and its own laws, or whether it has any duty to pay attention to what other states have to say and what international agreements and conventions require. Some maintain that a democracy's commitments to dignity are confined to its own citizens, not its enemies. Others point out that a democracy is not a moral island, sufficient unto itself. Thus, as many scholars have pointed out, the U.S. Constitution extends its protections to "persons" and not just to citizens. Hence aliens have rights under U.S. law-as well as, of course, under international conventions to which the United States is a signatory. Enemy combatants have rights under the Geneva Conventions, and even terrorists retain their human rights, since these are inherent in being human and hence irrevocable. Others think this approach values consistency more than justice. Justice-to the victims of terrorist outrages-requires that terrorists be treated as "enemies of the human race" and hunted down without any regard to their human rights.

When citizens of a democracy insist that what matters most in a terrorist emergency is the safety of the majority, they are usually saying that rights are at best a side constraint, at worst a pesky impediment to robust and decisive action. Those who think this are also likely to believe that international agreements, like the Geneva Conventions or the Torture Convention, should not limit what the United States can do in a war on terror. Since the threat is primarily directed at the United States, it must respond according to its own system of law, not according to anyone else's standards

September 30, 2001

War in a Time of Peace'
September 30, 2001

'War in a Time of Peace'

By DAVID HALBERSTAM

or a brief, glorious, almost Olympian moment it appeared that the presidency itself could serve as the campaign. Rarely had an American president seemed so sure of reelection. In the summer and fall of 1991, George Bush appeared to be politically invincible. His personal approval ratings in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War had reached 90 percent, unheard of for any sitting president, and even more remarkable for someone like Bush, a competent political insider whose charisma and capacity to inspire had in the past escaped most of his fellow citizens. Of his essential decency and competence there had been little doubt, and the skill with which he had presided over the end of the Cold War had impressed not merely the inner club that monitored foreign policy decision-making, but much of the country as well. With exceptional sensitivity, he had juggled and balanced his own political needs with the greater political needs of his newest partner in this joint endeavor, Mikhail Gorbachev. For Bush was quite aware that Gorbachev's political equation was much more fragile than his own, and he had been careful to be the more generous member of this unlikely two-man team that was negotiating the end of almost forty-five years of terrifying bipolar tensions.
One moment had seemed to symbolize the supreme confidence of the Bush people during this remarkable chain of events. It came in mid-August of 1991, when some Russian right-wingers mounted a coup against Gorbachev and Bush held firm, trying at first to support Gorbachev and, unable to reach him, then using his influence to help the embattled Boris Yeltsin. The coup had failed. A few days later, Gorbachev, restored to power in part because of the leverage of Washington, had resigned from the Communist Party. To the Bush people that attempted coup had been a reminder that with the Cold War officially ended or not, the Berlin Wall up or down, the world was still a dangerous place, which meant that the country would surely need and want an experienced leader, preferably a Republican, at the helm. Aboard Air Force One at that time, flying with his father from Washington back to the Bush family's vacation home in Maine, was George W. Bush, the president's son. He was just coming of age as a political operative in his own right, and he was euphoric about the meaning of these latest events. "Do you think the American people are going to turn to a Democrat now?" he asked.

Bush himself believed he was invulnerable. He had presided over the end of the Cold War with considerable distinction. He had handled the delicate job of dealing with the complicated international events that had led to the end of European communism, thereby freeing the satellite nations of Eastern Europe, and perhaps most remarkably of all, gaining, with Russian approval, a unified Germany that was a member of NATO. But typically he had held back on participating in any kind of celebration to mark those stunning events.

When the Berlin Wall had come down, many in the right wing, and a number of people around Bush himself, wanted some kind of ceremony, for this was a historic moment and they believed it deserved a commemoration not unlike those that had attended V-E and V-J Days in World War II, the victories in Europe over Germany, and in the Pacific over Japan. The destruction of the wall represented not merely the West's triumph in a long, difficult struggle against a formidable adversary, but equally important, a triumph in their minds of good over evil, proof that we had been right and they had been wrong, and that our system was politically, economically, ethically, and spiritually superior to theirs. At the very least there should be, they believed, one momentous speech to recount the history of the Cold War and celebrate the victory of the forces of light over darkness.

But Bush was uncomfortable with the idea of a celebration, aware that he had little flare for the dramatic. "I'm not going to dance on the wall," he told his aides. Even as the wall was coming down, Marlin Fitzwater, his press officer, had invited a small group of reporters into the Oval Office to talk with the president, but they found his answers cautious, curiously without emotion, almost joyless. Bush was sparring with them. Why wasn't he more excited? a reporter asked. I'm not an emotional kind of guy, he answered. "Maybe," he said later by way of explaining his self-restraint, "I should have given them one of these," and he leapt in the air in a parody of a then popular Toyota commercial portraying a happy car owner jumping and clicking his heels together. On Saturday Night Live, a comic named Dana Carvey, who often parodied Bush, showed him watching scenes of Berliners celebrating the destruction of the wall but refusing to join in. "Wouldn't be prudent," he said. Then Carvey-as-Bush pointed at himself: "Place in history? Se-cure!"

So, much to the disappointment of many on the right, Bush was anxious to minimize the event as a symbolic occasion. It was against his nature. Taking personal credit for any kind of larger success, not all of which was his, conflicted with the way he had been brought up. He believed -- an attitude that was surely old-fashioned and quite optimistic in an age of ever more carefully orchestrated political spin, when the sizzle was more important than the steak -- that if you did the right things in the right way, people would know about it. You should never call attention to yourself or, worse, advertise your accomplishments. Besides, Bush put a primacy on personal relationships, and by then he had begun to forge one with Mikhail Gorbachev and was obviously unwilling to do anything that would make things more difficult for his new ally. The more Bush celebrated, the more vulnerable Gorbachev and the other more democratically inclined figures in the Soviet Union were likely to be. Celebrating was like gloating and Bush would not gloat. (A few months later, getting close to an election campaign, Bush was more emboldened, and when he delivered his January 1992 State of the Union speech, with an election year just beginning, he did give the United States credit for winning the Cold War. Gorbachev, by then ousted from power, was not amused and said that the end of the Cold War was "our common victory. We should give credit to all politicians who participated in that victory.")

It was probably just as well that Bush did not try to grab too much credit for the collapse of communism, for what had transpired was a triumphal victory for an idea rather than for any one man or political faction. The Soviet Union had turned out to be, however involuntarily, the perfect advertisement for the free society, suggesting in the end that harsh, authoritarian controls and systems did not merely limit political, intellectual, and spiritual freedom, but economic freedom and military development as well. They limited not just the freedom of the individual, something that many rulers in many parts of the world would gladly accommodate to, but in the end limited the sum strength and might of the state, which was a very different thing. Therefore, what the proponents of an open society had long argued, that freedom was indivisible, and that the freedom to speak openly and candidly about political matters was in the long run inseparable from the freedom to invent some new high-technology device, or to run a brilliant new company, was true. The rights of man included not merely the right to compose and send an angry letter to a newspaper complaining about the government, they included as well as the right to choose where he went to work, and his right to garner, if he so chose and worked hard enough and with enough originality, far greater material rewards than his neighbors. The Soviet system was a devastating argument for what the lack of choice did, and what happened when a society was run top to bottom, instead of bottom to top. When George Bush had taken office, the Soviet system had begun to collapse of its own weight. Clearly by the eighties, Communist rule, as critics had long suggested, had undermined the nation itself, weakening it, particularly in a high-tech age when there was such an immediate and direct connection between the vitality of the domestic economy and a nation's military capacity, and when the gap between American weaponry and that of the Soviets had begun to widen at an ever greater rate.

Symbols had never been Bush's strength, and those who were dissatisfied with his innate caution liked to imagine what Ronald Reagan -- who was always so brilliant with symbols and had a God-given sense of when and how to use them -- might have done had he still been president when the wall fell. Possibly he would have ventured to Berlin for some wonderful kind of ceremony that the entire nation, perhaps the entire free world, could have shared. But Reagan was then and Bush was now, and unlike his predecessor (and his successor), Bush tended to downplay ceremonial moments. Many in the right wing who had often found him to be of too little ideological faith were again let down. Once more he had proven himself unworthy, placing success in a delicate and as yet unfinished geopolitical process above the temptation to savor what might have been a glorious historic moment.

Bush's belief that process always took precedence over image confirmed his reputation, essentially well-deserved, as a cautious insider rather than a public figure who knew how to rise to historic occasions and use symbols to bring the nation together. In a way it was Bush at both his best and worst. At his worst, he failed to take a memorable event and outline what it meant in larger terms of the long, hard struggle of a free society against a totalitarian state, and perhaps at the very least to showcase those remarkable people in Eastern Europe whose faith in a better, more democratic way during the long, dark hours of communist suppression was finally being rewarded. But it was also Bush at his best, because he was unwilling to exploit a vulnerable colleague -- Gorbachev -- and his distress and humiliation for political profit. Bush, after all, was first and foremost a team player, and unlikely though it might have seemed just a few years earlier, Gorbachev was now his teammate.

Whether or not he celebrated the end of the Cold War, it appeared to be just one more significant boost to his presidency. And it came at virtually the same time that American military forces, as the dominating part of the United Nations coalition, had defeated the Iraqi army in a devastating four-day land war, a rout preceded by five weeks of lethal, high-precision, high-technology air dominance. The stunning success of the American units in the Persian Gulf War, the cool efficiency of their weapons and the almost immediate collapse of the Iraqi forces, had been savored by most Americans as more than a victory over an Arab nation about which they knew little and which had invaded a small, autocratic, oil-producing duchy about which they knew even less. Rather, it had ended a period of frustration and self-doubt that had tormented many Americans for some twenty years as a result of any number of factors: the deep embarrassment of the Vietnam War, the humiliation suffered during the Iranian hostage crisis, and the uneasiness about a core economy that was in disrepair and was falling behind the new muscle of a confident, powerful Japan, known now in American business circles as Japan Inc.

The Gulf War showed that the American military had recovered from the malaise of the Vietnam debacle and was once again the envy of the rest of the world, with the morale and skill level of the fighting men themselves matching the wonders of the weapons they now had at their disposal. The lessons of the Gulf War were obvious, transcending simple military capacity and extending in some larger psychological sense to a broader national view of our abilities. We were back, and American forces could not be pushed around again. Perhaps we had slipped a bit in the production of cars, but American goods, in this case its modern weapons, were still the best in the world. The nation became, once again, strong, resilient, and optimistic.

The troops who fought in the Gulf War were honored as the troops who had fought in Vietnam were not. Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf, the presiding generals of the war, were celebrated as William Westmoreland had never been. Shades of World War II: Powell was the new Eisenhower, the thoughtful, careful, tough but benign overall planner; and Schwarzkopf was the new Patton, the crusty, cigar-chomping, hell-for-leather combat commander. There was a joyous victory parade in Washington, and then they were honored again at a tumultuous ticker-tape parade in New York. Powell's security people had suggested that he wear a flak vest, but he felt he was heavy enough without one, and he was driven along the parade route in an open 1959 Buick convertible without protection. Both Schwarzkopf and Powell were from the New York area, Schwarzkopf the son of the head of the New Jersey State Police, and Powell the son of parents who had both worked in the garment district. Powell's memory of occasions like this was of newsreel clips of parades for Lindbergh, Eisenhower, and MacArthur. Now riding through a blizzard of ticker tape raining down on himself and Schwarzkopf, he had been delighted; all this fuss, he thought, for two local boys who had made good.

Nineteen ninety-one had been an excellent year for George Bush. It had ended with the ultimate Christmas present for an American president when Gorbachev had called to wish him well personally, and to inform him that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Gorbachev, the last leader of the USSR, was resigning and turning over power to Boris Yeltsin, the new leader of Russia. Earlier in the day, Gorbachev had told Ted Koppel of Nightline that he was a something of a modern-day Russian pioneer because he was participating in the peaceful transfer of power, acting in accordance with a formula that was democratic, something relatively new in Moscow. Then, in a warm, rather affectionate conversation with Bush he said was turning over what he called the little suitcase, the bag that contained the authorization codes to activate the Soviet nuclear arsenal, to the president of the Russian Republic. Even so, he could not bear to mention Yeltsin, his sworn enemy, by name. The deed was done and Gorbachev was gone. (As Raisa Gorbachev had shrewdly observed after returning from an immensely successful trip to the United States in June 1990, "The thing about innovations is that sooner or later they turn around and destroy the innovators.")

Some of that special call announcing the end of the Soviet Union was even watched on television. Gorbachev, the product of the most secretive society in the world, was now a media-savvy man who had learned to play to international as well as domestic opinion. Bush would later discover that Gorbachev had allowed Koppel and Nightline to televise his end of their two-person phone call. It was the climax of a year that most American presidents only dream of. It seemed like the rarest of times when almost all the news was good and Bush was the primary beneficiary. His presidency was an immense success and his reelection appeared to be a sure thing.

But there were already signs that a powerful new undertow was at work in American politics, and Bush and the people around him were for a variety of reasons, most of them generational, slow to recognize it. But the signs of significant political and social change were there nonetheless. They reflected a certain lack of gratitude on the part of all kinds of ordinary people for the successes of the last three years, and a growing anger -- indeed perhaps rage -- about the state of the American economy. There was also a concurrent belief that George Bush was certainly capable of being an effective world leader, but domestic problems and issues, in this case, principally, the economy, did not matter as much to him as foreign affairs. A number of different pollsters were picking up this undertow of discontent, among them Stan Greenberg, a former Yale professor who was polling for the young would-be Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton, and Fred Steeper, who had impeccable Republican connections and was polling for the Republican National Committee. Steeper was working out of the office of Bob Teeter, a leading Republican public opinion expert, who was one of George Bush's closest friends and political allies and would be among the men directing his campaign for reelection. Normally Steeper would have been polling for Bush directly, but due to a temporary breakdown in polling in 1991 because of factional differences in the White House, he had ended up working for the RNC.

By the early nineties, polling had become an ever more exact and important instrument of American politics, though some old-timers from an earlier political era were made uneasy by it. They especially distrusted those politicians who used it on all occasions for all purposes and appeared to have no inner value system or beliefs that could withstand the alleged truths produced by polling. But used properly, polls could reveal some things. Used properly, they could serve as a good DEW-line alert system for forces that might soon represent important shifts of public opinion. At the very least they could reveal the primacy of issues, and this would turn out to be one of those occasions. Fred Steeper thought he had been detecting signs of a growing economic malaise for quite a while and a resulting public disenchantment with Bush's attempts to deal with the economy. The huge budget deficits produced by Reagan's tax policies had led to a bitterly debated decision in 1990 on the part of George Bush to go for a tax increase. Campaigning for election in 1988, he had vowed not to raise taxes -- "Read my lips. No new taxes," he had said during the campaign. By breaking that promise he had angered many in his own party. The bright and angry young Republican conservatives in the House, led by Newt Gingrich, had broken with him on that issue, and he had got the tax increase through Congress largely with support from the Democrats. But it would become a not-insignificant wound.

By the summer and fall of 1991, the polls had begun to show a potential vulnerability for Bush. His personal ratings still remained high, but there was a growing public restlessness about the direction of the economy and therefore of the country. The economy, then, that was turning into a slow-burning but eventually inflammatory issue for the incumbent. Several regions in the nation were suffering from a recession, and by the end of 1991, the entire country would be declared in a recession. One type of economy, a blue-collar industrial one, was coming to an end, and the new high-tech digital one that would soon replace much of it had not yet arrived with sufficient impact to compensate for its predecessor's decline. The Japanese were producing heavy industrial goods of a higher quality than we were, and America's industrial heartland was being called the Rust Belt. The budget deficit was growing larger every year, as was the trade imbalance with Japan. Ordinary people who did not usually monitor such economic trends felt squeezed and believed they were working harder and harder just to stand still. It was one of those moments in American life, despite the continuing growth of the postwar economy, when economics and politics converged because normally abstract economic numbers were becoming deeply personal.

Steeper had discovered in late 1990 and early 1991 that there were increasingly serious political problems stemming from what was a stagnant economy. The irony of the Gulf War was that it had momentarily changed the lead topic on the national agenda from a growing concern about the economy to pride in our newly manifested military might. That, of course, was of immediate political benefit for Bush, resulting in the quantum increase in his personal popularity. Yet his vulnerability on economic issues was there. Right before the Gulf War, despite the success of the administration in ending the Cold War, the responses to the most elemental question a pollster can ask -- "Is the administration on the right track or the wrong track?" -- had been disturbing. Steeper's polls showed that roughly two out of three Americans thought the country was headed down the wrong track. Clearly there had not been much domestic political bounce to the amazing events that marked the end of the Cold War. But then came the triumph of the Gulf War. A mere two days into the fighting, a poll had shown a complete reversal of that most important index: two out of three Americans now thought we were headed in the right direction.

The Gulf War, however, had only temporarily obscured deep dissatisfaction in the country, particularly about the economy. That was new problem number one. Problem number two was that despite the warm and enthusiastic welcome accorded the returning troops, the Gulf War itself had surprisingly little traction. Yes, the country had sat transfixed for those few days, watching the television coverage released by the Department of Defense -- video clips of high-technology bombs landing precisely on their intended targets. And yes, everything had gone not only as well as it was supposed to, but unlike most events in warfare, even better than expected. The entire country had fallen in love with the troops and their amazingly swift victory. If not everyone loves a sword, then almost everyone on the winning side loves a swift sword. But in truth, it was a war without real resonance. The actual land combat had lasted just four days, and it had been conducted by an elite professional army, thereby touching relatively few American homes. For much of the country it was a kind of virtual war, something few people were engaged in or had sacrificed for. Thus, like many things celebrated in the modern media, it was distant and oddly nonparticipatory; when it was over, it was over, leaving remarkably little trace. People had tied yellow ribbons to their mailboxes or gateposts as a sign of their support for those fighting, but it was very different, indeed, from the time during World War II when small flags with stars were displayed in windows to signify that a member of the family was in service, probably overseas and in harm's way.

The different pollsters tracking George Bush in the period after the Gulf War, from March until well into the fall of 1991, found a steady decline in the president's approval ratings, a decline, depending on the pollster, of some twenty or twenty-five percent. That was bad enough, but it was relatively easy to justify -- after all, his ratings at the moment of victory in the desert had been almost unconscionably high. What went up that high certainly had to come down. Much more alarming was that people were again becoming mutinous over the economy, even as the aura of good feeling about the Gulf War was beginning to vanish.

The White House, for a variety of reasons, tended to cut itself off from that ominous trend. Steeper's polls and those of other pollsters showed that much of the country, perhaps as many as 80 percent of those polled, thought the country was in a recession. But the president's economic advisers -- Michael Boskin, who was the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, effectively Bush's own personal economist, Dick Darman, his budget director, and Nick Brady, his secretary of the treasury -- all told him that the recession was over. Some of his political people were furious with that stance; they thought the economists were dead wrong and were underestimating a potentially destructive political issue in order to justify their past advice. Nonetheless, Bush, in the fall of 1991, went public and declared that the recession was over. That was a critical mistake; it put him in direct conflict with the way a vast majority of Americans felt on an issue that was growing ever more serious in the public mind.

This was the predicament of the Bush White House at the end of 1991. It had been Bush's best year in office, yet a powerful political current was beginning to work against him. Furthermore, he was being given little credit for his considerate skill in negotiating the end of the Cold War. In fact, the end of the Cold War was now possibly also working against him, as the release from Cold War tensions accelerated the change in the primacy of issues, from foreign affairs, where the Republicans in general and Bush in particular had been the beneficiaries, to domestic affairs, at a time when the economy was soft and the chief beneficiaries on economic issues were the Democrats.

Among the first to spot this change was Fred Steeper. In December 1991, at exactly the time when the Soviet Union was breaking up and a once-feared adversary was losing its strength, he was holding a series of focus groups with ordinary citizens, trying to figure out how they felt about the issues that would face the Republican Party in the upcoming election year. The results were deadly. Not only was the primary issue the economy, not only did most ordinary people feel the country was mired deep in a recession, in contrast to what the president and his economic advisers were saying, but they were furious with Bush, who, they believed, was not that interested in them and their problems. Even more devastating, there were signs that it was already too late for him to right himself on this issue.

Because of these findings Steeper wrote a memo for his boss, Bob Teeter, suggesting the possibility of what he termed the Churchill Factor or the Churchill Parallel. At the end of July 1945, just after Germany had surrendered, a tired England had not even waited for the war to end in the Pacific before voting out Winston Churchill, its gallant and beloved wartime leader, whose bulldog determination had symbolized England's strength and faith during Europe's darkest hour, and replacing him with the obviously less charismatic Labor Party leader, Clement Attlee. (He is a modest man and has much to be modest about, Churchill once said of Attlee.) The British had believed that Churchill's primary passion was defense and foreign policy, not domestic affairs, and they wanted someone who they thought would pay more attention to their postwar needs.

The same thing might now happen to George Bush, Steeper warned, and it was imperative that the president not bank too heavily on his foreign policy successes in the campaign ahead. The economy was hurting a wide range of people and becoming preeminent in their minds. Bob Teeter warned Bush of much the same thing. But the president was more confident, loath to move against his top people -- his economists -- and still content to believe their rosier economic forecasts. Thus, a critical election year would begin with Americans bothered by the state of the economy and yearning for benefits from the end of the Cold War, and with George Bush under assault from a Democratic challenger for paying too much attention to foreign policy and too little to domestic policy. All of this would take place as the Balkan state of Yugoslavia began to unravel with horrendous human consequences.

Tiger on the Brink China's new elite

Tiger on the Brink China's new elite
CHAPTER ONE
Tiger on the Brink
Jiang Zemin and China's New Elite

By BRUCE GILLEY
University of California Press
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PART I

"Son" of a Martyr, 1926-1970



Leaving Yangzhou



1

The streets were dark and silent except for the occasional squawk from a Liberation-brand truck roaring through Beijing's suburbs bound for the provinces. It was less than two weeks since the lunar new year celebrations of early February 1997. The cold, somber atmosphere of the capital had yet to be enlivened by the rush of migrant workers seeking jobs in the city after the holiday. Inside a second-floor room at a hospital in the western suburbs, Jiang Zemin, China's highest leader, had convened an emergency meeting of the country's most powerful ruling body, the Politburo standing committee. One floor above the gathering lay the withered corpse of a man whose very presence had seemed to hold this vast country of 1.2 billion people together for the preceding two decades. Deng Xiaoping, a little man from distant Sichuan province and grand designer of the country's successful economic reform program of the 1980s, was dead.

Sitting on the fringes of the grim conclave, Deng's widow, Zhuo Lin, sobbed quietly, while his five children looked on impassively. Following a script laid down many months before, Jiang declared the order and timing of the week-long mourning activities for Deng that would follow. No one dissented. A few hours after midnight, Deng's long-anticipated death was announced to the world.

It was an inauspicious way for Jiang Zemin to begin his unfettered reign as the "core" of China's new leadership. Chinese tradition dictated that nothing unlucky should happen in the two weeks after the lunar new year, until the lantern festival at the appearance of the first full moon. But then again, Deng's death may have been the luckiest possible way for Jiang to ring in the new year. A panda bear of a man, with big round black glasses and a love for the traditional two-stringed Chinese violin, or erhu, Jiang had ruled as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party since being thrust into the role following the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing. It was already an unexpectedly long stint at the top for someone often compared to Hua Guofeng, the chosen successor of Communist China's founder, Mao Zedong, who had lasted just five years as head of the party.

By the time of Deng's death, Jiang had already achieved the goal of restoring political stability and economic growth to China following the Tiananmen protests. Foreign investors were on track to pour an astounding U.S. $250 billion in direct investment into the country in the 1990s, compared to just U.S. $15 billion in the 1980s. Beijing's voice in new international organizations such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, and soon in the World Trade Organization, was loud and influential. Jiang had also by this time established his own authority over the party, over the government that answered to it, and over the military, which kept a keen but distant watch over the whole country. With Deng gone, Jiang could begin to outline his own vision of China's future.

That future was anything but certain. When Jiang began to rule China without the abiding spiritual presence of Deng in February 1997, he was inheriting a country that one Chinese scholar described as a tree-like structure. The roots were China's traditions; the trunk was the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist thought of the first decades after the 1949 Communist takeover; the branches consisted of the economic reforms pioneered by Deng and their attendant social changes; and the leaves were foreign influences. Yet this hybrid variety needed to evolve into a new species that could withstand the test of time.

Jiang favored a gradual transition. He also tended to borrow useful and successful reforms from others and apply them nationwide. He was not, like Mao and, to a lesser extent, Deng, a man with a clear vision of China's future, but by 1997, anyone claiming such a vision would be dismissed as a fraud or an outright danger. Something of an outcome could be guessed at, though. The resulting "tree" would be liberal in some respects (its market economy and growing individualism), but clearly authoritarian in others (its single-party state and media controls). In many ways, it would resemble other Asian "developmental dictatorships" like Singapore and South Korea. Although it was a less wrenching and spectacular historical change that Jiang was about to preside over, it might be far more important to the great sweep of Chinese history than those overseen by Mao and Deng. China was on the verge of modernization.

Jiang was not the sort of leader disposed to self-glorification, though, even on that frosty evening in a hospital meeting room in western Beijing. As the second eldest son of an intellectual's family from the rich cradle of Chinese tradition along the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, his natural arrogance was tempered by a habitual self-effacement. He had reached his position through a combination of political savvy and public modesty. Like those of his generation who were the first to miss fighting in the civil war that established Communist China, he was pragmatic when it came to the communist creed and more inclined to build consensus than rout enemies. Mourners would stream to Deng's birthplace in Sichuan province following the announcement of the patriarch's death, but the simple gray-brick abode where Jiang grew up in the old part of the city of Yangzhou would remain inhabited by others and unremarked upon by visitors. Jiang, it was said, preferred it that way.



2

The date is 20 October 1996. A torrent of bicycles sweeps past my resolutely planted feet as I stand in the middle of a narrow street called Dongquanmen in the center of old Yangzhou, a sleepy city not far up the Yangtze River from Shanghai. Dongquanmen, the city's former street of notables, still has the yamen, or government office, at its western end--now housing the local party committee. But in contrast to the unruffled existence enjoyed by the dozen or so bankers, merchants, and intellectuals who inhabited its large, gray-brick homes in the early part of the century, the street has now been transformed by the clamor of 125 working-class households and several hundred more living in the alleys feeding into it.

Gazing up at the peeling Chinese characters painted in baby blue on a tile signboard, I struggle to read the "Brief description of Dongquanmen." My eyes scan the faint writing with growing intensity. Bells and hoots from cyclists rushing home for lunch seek to dislodge me from the street. Finally, the promised line: "Party General Secretary [unclear] [unclear] Jiang Zemin once lived at Number 16." Nothing more.

I stop two chuckling students mounting their bicycles as they leave the Yangzhou government canteen, on whose wall the sign is affixed. "What are these two characters?" I ask, pointing to the indistinct pair. The track-suited youths dismount and arch their backs to read the entire line. "Tong-zhi [Comrade]," says one, answering my question. "Jiang Zemin once lived here?" asks the other, startled by the discovery. "Really!" They climb back into their saddles and move back into the lava flow of wheels. "Sure," says the other. "Don't you know? He's a Yangzhou person."



3

The drooping willows and lazy canals of Yangzhou are a welcome respite from the pollution, traffic jams, and stark urban development of much of modern China today. For over a thousand years, they have nurtured an unlikely array of painters, scholars, and philosophers. Walls were first erected here around habitations on the Yangtze River alluvial deposits in the fifth century B.C. The city became one of China's wealthiest at the beginning of the Tang dynasty in the early seventh century A.D. after the completion of the Grand Canal north to Henan province. Historical decline after that was kinder to Yangzhou than to the country as a whole. The salt and iron trades disappeared, and commerce moved to the coast, but more than a thousand years after its initial glory, Yangzhou's beauty remains, its prosperity maintained by its key position at the junction of the Grand Canal and the Yangtze River.

For the young son of a well-off family in the early 1939s, Yangzhou might have been the equivalent of Bath in England or New Haven in the United States. It was a quiet and cultured refuge from the gathering clouds of war and increasing outbreaks of domestic violence: invasion from Japan and attacks on the burgeoning Chinese Communist Party by the insecure Nationalist (Kuomintang or Guomindang) government based upriver at Nanjing.

Jiang Zemin was born in Yangzhou on 17 August 1926 in a book-cluttered house on Tianjia Lane in the old city. His name, Zemin, or "Benefit the People," was taken from the writings of the revered Chinese sage Confucius, who lived in the fifth century B.C. It echoed the name of a young communist, Mao Zedong, or "Benefit the East." At 32, Mao was at this time already teaching peasants in Guangzhou about the Chinese communist movement, which both men would eventually lead.

The swaddled boy was the third of five children and the second son of a prolific writer and part-time electrician, Jiang Shijun, and his peasant wife, Wu Yueqing. We know little about Wu Yueqing. Elders in Changwei, where she is also remembered by the name Wu Xiaoqing, say she died a broken woman in Yangzhou in the 1980s. But they insist that her younger sister, Wu Yuezhen, who was only ten years older than Jiang, played a greater part in his upbringing than she did.

In the Chinese zodiac, Jiang was born in the year of the tiger. King of the wild animals, the tiger symbolized all that was male in Chinese philosophy--brave enough to drive away demons and strong enough to command the obedience of others. It was a common astrological sign for leaders of men.

The Jiang family was respectable, even honored, in Yangzhou. Jiang's grandfather, Jiang Shixi, was 56 in this year and known throughout the old town for his skills in traditional Chinese medicine. The airy medicine shop near Tianjia Lane where he sent his patients to collect their paper-wrapped mixtures of herbal remedies still stands, adorned in front by groups of chatting elders reclining in wicker chairs.

Jiang Shixi was the link to the family past. The village of Jiang (meaning "river"), from whence their surname came, sat beside a tributary of the Shuxi River, which winds its way through the mist-enshrouded Huangshan mountains in the southern part of the poor inland province of Anhui. Life in this tea-growing region was tranquil but unforgiving. Poverty and famine took the lives of Grandfather Jiang's first two sons, born there in the late 1890s. As prospects for his medical practice were better in the prosperous canal area of the Yangtze River, he moved his family of seven to the town of Xiannu, just outside Yangzhou, in the early 1900s.

Settled outside Yangzhou, Grandfather Jiang Shixi at first made a modest living from the medical secrets he had brought from inland. Better work was soon, however, available on the canal system, which was finding new life in the industrial expansion of the early years of the century. In 1915, at the age of 45, Jiang Shixi took a lucrative job as assistant to the Dada Inland Water Transport Company. The Dada company was based just downriver from Yangzhou at Nantong, the marshaling area for much of the cargo flowing in and out of the Grand Canal. Jiang Shixi was the company representative in Yangzhou. His traditional long gown was discarded in favor of a crumpled linen suit made in Shanghai. In the common parlance, he had "jumped into the sea" of commerce.

With five children, aged 1 through 20, the family moved to Tianjia Lane in Yangzhou's well-to-do Dongguan district. Canals and their attendant freshwater wells run everywhere through the old city, which was doubtless a pleasant change from the need to haul water, if only for short distances, in the suburbs. The move also meant that the education of the family would be assured.

Jiang Shixi spent a lot of time in Nantong at his new job, even taking part in the formulation of an agricultural development plan for the downstream city. Like many intellectuals of his generation, he also devoted himself to national affairs, railing first against foreign incursions into China and then against the weakness of the Qing dynasty and later the Nationalist government. He composed several songs lamenting warlord President Yuan Shikai's infamous concession to Japan's Twenty-one Demands of 1915, ditties that he taught to itinerant Nationalist Party musical troupes organized and funded by the better-off merchants. The demands, which gave Japan control over large swathes of Chinese territory, including the Yangtze Valley, seemed to symbolize the sorry plight of the Chinese nation.

Only a few elders along Tianjia Lane still recall the Jiang household. Grandfather Jiang died in 1933, at which point the family home on Tianjia Lane seems to have been sold. But the enterprising doctor left behind two important legacies, which would be passed on to his four surviving children (his lone daughter, Jiang Shiying, died shortly after marriage), and to their children in turn, at a critical time in the nation's history: an intellectual strain that emphasized action as well as comment, and an indignant nationalism aimed as much at the corrupt Chinese Republic as at the invading Japanese.



4

The first beneficiary of this legacy was the eldest child and son, Jiang Shijun, nicknamed Guanqian, or "Thousand-Time Champion." Born in 1895, this little-known man was later to be confined to official footnotes as merely the "biological father" of Jiang Zemin. But he acquitted himself well at school and managed to gain entry into Lianghuai Middle School on Dongguan Street, a prestigious institution founded in 1902 as the first publicly funded middle school in the city.

Jiang Shijun proved an adept writer at the school, which he attended even though the family was then still residing in the suburbs. As the eldest son, he shared the burdens of family responsibility with his parents, however, and had to forsake his writing career to earn a living wage. Soon after graduation, he accepted a job in Yangzhou with the Nantong Tongming Electric Company.

More inspired by the example set by their father was the sixth child, Jiang Shihou. He was later known by the name Shangqing, or "Rising Youth," acquired because his siblings agreed that he was the family's greatest hope of achieving power and prestige. Born in 1911, when his eldest brother was already 16, Jiang Shangqing and his younger brother, Jiang Shufeng, both attended Nantong Middle School for a year in 1927 because Yangzhou was temporarily in upheaval as a result of Nationalist campaigns against local warlords. There they met Gu Minyuan, a classmate who would later become Nantong's most famous revolutionary son, and by the time they returned to Yangzhou, the brothers had been enlisted by Gu into the underground Chinese Communist Party Youth League.

Jiang Zemin was fortunate as a child in that his father held down a steady job, even as his young uncles got involved in the clandestine Communist movement. For within a year of returning to Yangzhou to continue middle school there, Uncle Jiang Shangqing was arrested for his underground activities at the family's newly acquired home on Jiangjia Bridge Lane. His first incarceration, in a Suzhou jail, lasted only six months. His aging father and his older brother hired lawyers who convinced the courts that he was merely a misled youth. But a year later, in the winter of 1929, he was arrested again after entering the literature department of Shanghai's Fine Arts College. It was not until the summer of 1930 that the Jiang family in Yangzhou learned the news. Elder brother Jiang Shijun was dispatched to find his headstrong younger brother when he did not return for the summer vacation. Informed of the incarceration, his aging father, Jiang Shixi, traveled to Shanghai and won his son's release that winter.

Favoring the traditional long Chinese men's gown over Western garb, Jiang Shangqing cut the perfect figure of an engaged young intellectual, with circular-rimmed glasses, delicate nose, and pursed lips. Undeterred by his year-long jail term--during which he contracted asthma and began to suffer from arthritis--Jiang Shangqing chose to remain in the revolutionary hotbed of Shanghai by entering the social sciences department of the city's Jinan University in the fall of 1931.

The young Jiang Zemin's formal education began at about the same time, but his informal instruction had already been under way for several years. In Chinese tradition, a young man's education, and his later self-cultivation, was based on four arts: music, chess, literature, and calligraphy. Except for the chess, which was the least practical of the quartet, Jiang was shepherded along this traditional path from a young age. From the moment he began to recognize the swirling Chinese characters used before simplification was introduced by the Communists after 1949, Jiang was forced by his father to recite an article of classical Chinese literature each day. Often it was the hated "three-character classic," column after column of three-character sentences that encapsulated the rote learning of Chinese tradition. But just as often it was poetry from the Song or Tang dynasties, masterworks of feeling and ambiguity, peppered with handy aphorisms. These would remain deeply embedded in Jiang's memory for the rest of his life.

Jiang was also forced to learn calligraphy, because, as he explained, "in the old China it was very difficult to find a job if you did not have good handwriting." It would never be his forte; although he never misses a stroke, Jiang's calligraphy is described by most as undisciplined and crude. He still uses the complex pre-1949 characters.

This head start in reading and writing helped win the young boy a place in the prestigious Dongguan Primary School, just a few hundred meters from his Tianjia Lane home. The six years Jiang spent in the school exposed him to a stark contrast in proximate calm and distant turmoil. Dongguan Primary School cultivated a happy environment for its young charges. Days were filled with songs and games, which drew liberally from both Chinese and Western traditions. It was here that Jiang developed his lifelong and comparatively worldly appreciation of music. He was a natural musician. Whatever instrument was placed before him, whether the whining two-stringed Chinese violin played off the knee, the erhu, the long bamboo flute, or dizi, or even an upright piano, proficiency came easily. "When I was young I loved playing instruments," he would recall. The piano and Western violin seemed to him to be better developed than Chinese instruments, "because their range is wider." He would also at this time develop a lifelong affection for Western classical music, later calling "Ave Maria" "some really beautiful music" and on another occasion asserting that "it's not good if the Chinese people know nothing about Beethoven's Ninth Symphony."

Although his siblings and cousins never excelled as he did in the traditional arts, Jiang would always attribute his aptitude to his cultured upbringing rather than to innate abilities. "Because Yangzhou is a city of culture, and because of the cultured historical background of my family, I am a true lover of music and literature," he would say.

At home, Jiang reveled not only in the doting love of his own mother, Wu Yueqing, but also in that of his aunt, Wang Zhelan, the wife of Uncle Jiang Shangqing. The two families moved into new quarters on Dongquanmen following the death of Grandfather Jiang Shixi in 1933. In the spacious one-story home, Jiang was the family prodigy. His mother was a simple peasant woman. But Wang Zhelan was able to see the spark in her young nephew and became his earliest mentor. She is said to have loved Jiang most among all the children in the crowded Jiang household on Dongquanmen.

Dongquanmen (now Dongquanmen Street) was Yangzhou's street of the rich. At two meters, it was twice the width of the average street in the old city. The ornately pockmarked iron doors and marble plinths of the houses were the respectable outward displays of wealth and prestige. The irony for Jiang's family was that, just as they reached this distinguished address, the old order on which its distinction was based was about to crumble under the impact of foreign invasion and civil war. It is ironic that the most distinguished street in Yangzhou nurtured the future head of a proletarian state.



5

The din of tambourines and dizi inside the happy confines of Dongguan primary school could not entirely muffle the sounds of war outside. In September 1931, Japan's incursion into China began in the distant northeast. Some months later the Nationalist government in Nanjing was briefly forced to relocate north to Luoyang because of the Japanese invasion. Over the following six years, leading up to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, the insecure Nationalist government would launch sporadic assaults on the expanding Communist movement, even as young students protested that "Chinese should not fight Chinese."

Jiang and his young colleagues knew the heavens were shaking. But Yangzhou remained calm. Indeed, the spontaneous welling up of anti-Japanese sentiment at this time brought a seemingly festive atmosphere to the lives of the young boys. "Long before the Japanese marched into Yangzhou, we were already going crazy," Jiang was to recall. "We saw ourselves as Chinese heroes of ancient times, feasting on the blood of the Japanese pirates in the South China Sea!"

For Jiang, in particular, the events outside primary school were vividly told. His young uncle Jiang Shangqing, already suffering from asthma and arthritis at age 21, returned to teach in primary and middle schools in Yangzhou in 1932. There he founded a Communist Party-controlled journal of Marxist literature, Xin shiji zhoukan (New World Weekly). The following five years saw Jiang Shangqing hounded from one Yangzhou-area school to the next and the magazine shut down by the local Nationalist authorities. Undaunted, he founded another magazine, Xiezou yu yuedu (Writing and Reading), with his old classmate Gu Minyuan and his brother Jiang Shufeng, in 1936.

In December 1936, mutinous Nationalist soldiers in Xian arrested their president, Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), who seemed bent on wiping out Communist forces rather than repelling Japanese invaders. The event was a stunning psychological victory for the Communists and their sympathizers, who had been urging an end to civil strife in order to focus attention on the threat from Japan. As a result of the coup, Chiang agreed to call off the anti-Communist extermination campaign (although not the blockades of Communist-held areas). The event also gave Jiang his first political lesson. Writing the entrance examination to the prestigious Yangzhou Middle School in the summer of 1937, he was asked to write about the Xian Incident. In his essay, he praised the rebellious behavior of Zhang Xueliang, the leader of the Nationalist Northeastern Army, who had taken his superior hostage. It was Jiang's first political statement in writing; given the influence of his uncles and his grandfather, his sympathies were never in doubt, however.

Entrance to Yangzhou Middle School was difficult, even for one as well-bred as Jiang Zemin. The school was compared to Tianjin's famous Nankai Middle School (which educated future premier Zhou Enlai among others) in the popular saying: "In the north there is Nankai Middle School, in the south there is Yangzhou Middle School." The whitestone three-story Shuren teaching hall, built in 1917 and still standing today, was the grandest classroom in the south. Jiang's father and his two young revolutionary uncles had all attended the school or its predecessors, but as its reputation improved throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, the competition to enter became acute. In 1936, the year before Jiang entered, just 10 percent of the 3,000-odd students who wrote the entrance exam were accepted. In Jiang's year, first-year enrollment was expanded to 425, but that was still only 10 percent of those seeking admission. Jiang was among those accepted.

The playing fields of Yangzhou Middle School were a symbol of the fervent and worldly nationalism of youth at the time, which might have launched China into a development spurt, as it had in Japan seventy years before. The prestigious academy had already groomed a generation of leading scholars, politicians, and scientists. Most were men, since women constituted at best a quarter of the student body. Zhu Ziqing, a Yangzhou writer who would later be eulogized by Mao Zedong for refusing to eat American-supplied "relief grain," graduated in 1916. Hu Qiaomu, later to become Mao's secretary, head of the Xinhua News Agency, and a Politburo member, graduated in 1930.

Students at Yangzhou Middle School were angling for university. After three years in lower middle school, they rushed through the three-year upper-middle-school curriculum in two years and devoted the final year to preparation for university entrance exams. A university education was certainly the expectation when Jiang marched through the gates along the tree-lined avenue that led to the Shuren teaching hall on his first day of classes in the autumn of 1937. But the invading Japanese imperial army, which until now had been confined to the world outside this peaceful city, was soon marching down the same lane.

In July 1937, Japanese troops stationed near the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing had bombarded the local Chinese garrison on the pretext that they had been refused entry to a village to search for a missing colleague. Within weeks, an undeclared war was raging between the two countries. By December, Shanghai had fallen under Japanese occupation. A month later, the whole Yangtze valley up to Nanjing, including Yangzhou, was in enemy hands. The results were hugely disruptive, but not disastrous, for the young Jiang's education. Classes were halted after just one month, in October 1937. Hopes of resuming at the school under Japanese occupation were soon dashed. When the Japanese marched into town, their first item of business was to find a large walled compound with plenty of administrative offices and dormitories to serve as a command headquarters. Yangzhou Middle School's new campus in the western Dawangbian area was perfect. The sanctity of the school meant little to the Japanese soldiers. The gymnasium's wooden floor was torn up, and the building was turned into a horse stable. Books were burned for fuel or out of spite. And the students and teachers were all told to search elsewhere for accommodation.

This they did, but they had some difficulty finding it. As with many schools and universities, the Japanese occupation forced Yangzhou Middle School to disperse to a series of far-flung "campuses." It was a grand word for what were little more than exiled teaching colonies. One group went to Sichuan province, another to Shanghai, and two were eventually functioning in the Yangzhou suburbs. Students followed their long-gowned teachers depending on their own circumstances. As a Yangzhou native, Jiang joined one of the groups in the city's suburbs.

The first suburban campus was set up in the autumn of 1938 in Taizhou, along the network of canals feeding into the Grand Canal. Buildings were rented at a local middle school and students billeted with local families. Studies sometimes took place in the canteen. This makeshift beginning to Jiang's education proved a false start. In early 1939, the Japanese authorities briefly imposed a state of emergency on the entire Yangzhou area. Classes came to a halt again, and the students were sent home. By the autumn of 1939, the Japanese occupation was more secure. A new campus was opened in Yang Lane in old Yangzhou, just a stone's throw from Jiang's Dongquanmen home. After a two-year delay, and under the watchful eye of Japanese troops, Jiang's middle-school education finally began in earnest.

The disruption had a critical effect on the nature of Jiang's middle-school education, and indeed on his personal development in these formative years. For no longer was nationalism the preserve of idealistic intellectuals reacting to distant events, as it had been for his uncles and grandfather. Jiang and his teachers saw their nation crumble before their eyes. "Those were the days when the Chinese nation was ridden with disasters," he would recall.

The young boy was inspired in this plight by many people, both past and present. Just north of his home, beside the canal that encircled the old city, lay the simple temple of Shi Kefa, a local Ming dynasty official who had refused to surrender to the invading Qing armies in 1645. Although Shi lost his own life, as well as those of thousands of Yangzhou citizens, for his obstinacy, his dogged loyalty in the face of foreign invasion by the Manchus of the Qing dynasty made him a poignant symbol of Chinese nationalism.

"In those days when I was a student in Yangzhou, I was shocked to see and hear about the evil acts of the Japanese aggressors," Jiang would recall. "Each time I saw the tombstone of Shi Kefa with my classmates I felt a strong anti-Japanese and patriotic emotion and became determined to engage in revolutionary struggle."

Of course, some of this rage may be just so much ex-post facto ritual indignation. The takeover of Yangzhou was largely peaceful--in contrast to the unprovoked massacre of civilians by Japanese soldiers in Nanjing. And, as far as we know, Jiang lost no close family members in the war with Japan. Having school halted only one month into his education may have caused hand-wringing among his elders, but for a boy of 11, faced with a disciplined and taxing course load ahead, it may have been a welcome respite. The following two years of roving education may even have been something of an adventure. The variety nights organized by the school to raise funds to fight the Japanese would have been taken by Jiang, strumming his erhu in accompaniment, as good clean fun rather than serious political involvement. Indeed, Jiang later would not harbor any of the instinctive, visceral anti-Japanese hatred of those as little as five or ten years his senior. He even later regretted not having mastered Japanese when it became a mandatory part of the middle-school curriculum.

The Japanese invasion did, however, spur an ardent desire on the part of Jiang and his classmates to reform their country by catching up to the West, just as the Japanese had done. Ignoring the contemptuous Japanese soldiers patrolling the bridges of the city, Jiang and his classmates redoubled their efforts to learn from the West. It was an act of imitation that was supposed to reflect national pride, not flattery of foreigners, the students were told. "Some people often feel ashamed to be Chinese. They say that even when a foreigner farts, it is a great thing," Jiang's railway engineering teacher, Lu Zuojian, would tell his students. "But we Chinese can do anything foreigners can do. We will even try things that they don't dare!"

Whatever the reasoning, the focus on mastering things Western was quaint. Tired old grammar books from England and monstrously difficult calculus texts from America were used. Jiang's eccentric English teacher, Li Zongyi, even led his charges in repetitions of the speeches of Thomas Jefferson and of Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg Address. Jiang was to remember the latter for the rest of his life. He would also long assert that "the English we learned then was better than what even university students of today [learn]." As he later described his middle-school education: "It was mainly an education in British and American cultures."

There were other signs that the national stirrings caused by the Japanese occupation fueled rather than smothered the desire to learn about the outside world. For it was at this time that Jiang began to delve seriously into foreign literature in Chinese translation, in particular offerings from the Soviet Union, which were then widely available, such as Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and War and Peace. He also read Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and Notre-Dame de Paris. Jiang scored best in the sciences, but his own interests, plus "family pressures," as he later called them, meant that he absorbed much literature as well.

Besides Russian and French literature, Jiang also took in a strong dose of modern Chinese literature, which was flourishing during his youth. One of his favorite writers at this time was Zhu Ziqing, a dashing man whose neat, side-parted hair, circular wire-rimmed glasses, and waistcoat concealed a radical within. A native of Jiangsu province, Zhu had grown up in Yangzhou and attended what would become Yangzhou Middle School. While teaching in Beijing, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang in the late 1920s, he helped launch what became known as the "new poetry" movement, which eschewed traditional forms and encouraged topics based on everyday life.

A Communist sympathizer, Zhu would spend nine years from 1937 teaching at the wartime campus of Beijing's Qinghua University in the southwestern city of Kunming, then under Nationalist control. He returned to Beijing in 1946, aged 48, suffering from gastric illness. Two years later, the stomach ailment would take his life, aggravated by his refusal to eat American-supplied relief grain. The refusal would be part of a campus-led protest against the perceived tolerance by the U.S. occupation forces in Japan of resurgent militarism in the vanquished nation.

Zhu explained in his diary that he joined the relief-grain boycott because "we cannot evade our personal responsibilities." For his efforts, Mao Zedong would declare soon afterward that Zhu "embodied the heroic spirit of the Chinese people." Indeed, his death became a symbol for young Chinese like Jiang of the proud obstinacy in the face of foreign pressures that many saw best exemplified by the Communists. The hometown connections Jiang could claim with Zhu Ziqing made the spiritual identification all the stronger. "Zhu Ziqing was full of patriotic moral courage, which makes his writings attractive," a visitor once commented to Jiang. "Right!" came the reply. "I am moved every time I read them."

Zhu seemed to represent two important ideals to Jiang: first, that of the heroic man of letters, a figure his family had taught him to respect, notwithstanding that he himself never became one, having chosen to take up science; and second, the ideal of standing firm on principles in dealings with foreign countries, especially the United States. "Chinese youth should take Zhu Ziqing as a model and not bow obsequiously to and blindly envy the West," Jiang later said. The same sentiments were also expressed by other Chinese writers of the age. "We Chinese have backbone," Lu Xun (1881-1936) wrote famously, a line often quoted by Jiang. "We shall never yield to unreasonable pressure exerted on us by foreigners," he once explained after repeating Lu Xun's affirmation.

Jiang was later to characterize his upbringing in Yangzhou rather inexactly as the "Confucian" phase of his education. To be sure, he was put through the rigors of learning the traditional Chinese skills expected of a nobleman, out of which grew such habits as carving personal seals in fine calligraphy for his classmates. But as we have seen, the combined effects of the Japanese occupation and the worldly nationalism engendered by his teachers exposed Jiang to much more than the traditional "music, chess, literature, and calligraphy" lessons that his description suggests. By the time he graduated from Yangzhou Middle School in the spring of 1943, Jiang was already a cosmopolitan young man, schooled in Western culture and concerned about China's place in the world.