FUNNY BOOKS

Sam Smith

Most Washington journalists graduated with degrees in the humanities or social sciences. As a result they are easily conned by the numbers that buzz like mosquitoes around the capital or just don't bother to question them.

For example, some time ago, Washington pols discovered the decade. You take whatever figure you like or don't like and multiply by ten. If you're lucky you can turn tens of millions into hundreds of millions or hundreds of millions into trillions. The decade figure is misleading in a number of regards including the fact that the people using it aren't likely to be around to answer for any error in their calculations and, further, the accuracy of predicting something ten years from now is inevitably far less precise than estimating next year's budget.

Another major scam might be called the public-private option. Both parties use it. Take healthcare for example. The GOP gives frightening estimates of what public healthcare expenditures will be without ever subtracting the parallel reduction in private healthcare costs. The Democrats, pushing for a mandatory purchase of health insurance for many, simultaneously claim not to be raising taxes. Of course, to the individual involved, whether you write the check to Aetna or the Treasury doesn't make all that much difference.

WHY WASHINGTON DOESN'T WORK

Note: The Review will soon be moving its headquarters from Washington to the shores of Casco Bay, Maine. Here are some closing thoughts about the city your editor has covered for the past half century, including matter excerpted from his books and articles.

Sam Smith

The years I have spent in Washington since covering my first story in 1957 can be roughly divided into two parts: a time when the capital and America were getting better and a time when they were getting worse. In that order.

I use 1980 as a rough turning point. Rough because Watergate, the Vietnam War, urban riots and the disco drum machine all came earlier. Still we had at least partly recovered from the first three by the time the Reagan era began.

Then the city really began to change as I noted an 1981 article for the Washington Post Outlook section. The change, of course, was far from complete as indicated by the fact that the Post was still willing to publish something that began:

Could you stop the renaissance of Washington a minute? I want to get off. I have to run down to People's [drug store] and restock my inventory of Rolaids before reading one more article about how the city is being reborn, revived and revitalized. This city - the Paris of prevarication, the London of dissemblance, the Florence of deceit - has outdone itself: It is telling itself and the world that it is getting better. . .

Washington's . . . autoerotic fascination with power for its own sake threatens to prove that masturbation does cause insanity. . . [It] is the city of real estate dealers rather than merchants, the city where you damn well better not leave home without It, clone of Gotham, sire of scandal so tawdry that it has discredited political corruption, the city in which a day's work can consist of a memorandum revised, a two-hour quiche Lorraine and martini lunch and four phone calls to say you're all tied up.

The two preceding decades had been among the most remarkable in American history, a time when blacks, women, gays, the environment and peace movements made unprecedented progress. There were miles to go, but seldom have so many gotten off to such a good start. Further, we had ended a terrible war and gotten rid of a crummy president.

Washington contributed at both the institutional and rebellious level. It was a time when the capital was on a par with Berkeley and Madison for progressive politics. It was a time, thanks to its members' civil rights activity, that our city council probably had the longest arrest record of any legislature in the country. It was a time when the city became a haven for those who faced a more hostile reception elsewhere in the land. They didn't call it Chocolate City for nothing.

But it was not just the rebels. The establishment responded as well. One of the country's most impressive political scoundrels - Lyndon Johnson - got more good legislation passed in less time than at any point in our history.

Included were civil rights laws, Medicare, Medicaid, the war on poverty, a major urban mass transit program, protection of the wilderness, food stamps, more money for higher education, improved voting rights, a ban on age discrimination in employment and fair housing legislation.

Even that otherwise egregious character, Richard Nixon, still practiced domestic affairs in a tradition of social democracy that we have not seen since. He was, in fact, our last liberal president, an amazing claim until one considers that he favored a negative income tax; revenue sharing; a guaranteed income for children; supplementary programs for the aged, blind, and disabled; better health insurance programs for low income families; aid to community colleges; aid to low-income college students; the creation of the National Endowment for the Humanities; and increased funding for elementary and secondary schools. Today ,someone of Nixon's domestic political tendencies might be considered too radical for C-SPAN - let alone the White House.

How was it that two such personally questionable politicians could do so much good while the sainted Barack Obama is having a hard time even finding the gate and, when he does, keeps getting second thoughts about going through it?

A key factor is that the character of Washington in the 1960s and 1970s was not so much defined by capital spinsters and politicians but by a variegated popular revolt that the spinsters and politicians could not control. And so, under pressure, they did the right thing.

Something similar happened with Franklin Roosevelt who was under even greater pressure from socialists, communists, populists and Huey Long. He felt he had to stay ahead of them.

Consider that his man on the case - Harry Hopkins - got more people
employed in four months than Obama plans to do by 20011. Or that the New Deal's Works Progress Administration built or repaired 103 golf courses, 1,000 airports, 2,500 hospitals, 2,500 sports stadiums, 3,900 schools, 8,192 parks, 12,800 playgrounds, 124,031 bridges, 125,110 public buildings, and 651,087 of highways and roads. We can't even imagine that today.

But it wasn't just the political pressures that made things happened. The mind, soul, experience and character of the capital were vastly different then they are today. Changes that have occurred make it much harder to do anything worthwhile no matter who is the president or who is demanding change.

Of course, you'd never guess it from the media, political rhetoric or academic analysis. But then we live in a time of illusory continuity. Peter Dale Scott put it well in describing Rome as it moved from republic to military empire:

"The institutions of the city were preserved. . . the Senate continued to meet. Tribunes and consuls were elected. Historians wrote about decadence, and moralists vowed to revive the old family virtues. A class accustomed to participate in civic institutions continued to do just that and no more, for generations. People found it preferable to ignore the fact that real power had migrated out of these institutions, into an imperial machine, the armies and the courts of army commanders. The self-respect of the senatorial classes depended on this denial."

I once asked the journalist Stephen Goode how he would describe our era. Without hesitation, he said it was a time of epigons. An epigon is one who is a poor imitation of those who have preceded. Being around epigons is like being trapped at a bad craft fair where everything you see seems to have been made before, only better. Or in Washington.

A culture that has lost its way and forgotten so much is not the same as a flawed society bumbling through history trying to make itself better. A civil rights veteran once compared his era with that of the end of the 20th century by saying that in the 1960s there had been hope that someday the Congress, the courts, and the White House would see the right. Now, he said, we no longer have that hope. And the writer Dorothy Allison spoke of a betrayed optimism that many shared: "I had the idea that if you took America and shook it really hard it would do the right thing." Even Jackie Robinson, well before a strong civil rights movement, recalled that "Never once did I face the immovable."

You don't hear that sort of thing anymore.

Part of the blame clearly belongs to the people and politics involved, But beyond that has been a disintegration of skills, values, attitudes, experience, policies, procedures and ability to play well with others. To understand what has happened to Washington, we must look beyond the political players and their games towards factors such as these:

Abuse of history

Washington only considers history when it finds it useful and then, typically, rewrites it. The grossly exaggerated comparisons of Obama with Roosevelt are an example.

Good news is frequently given an historical profundity it doesn't deserve and bad news is treated as an isolated and atypical event. A classic example can be found in sex stories and other scandals, each handled as though it was the first time anyone in DC had taken a bribe or misapplied their urges.

The indifference to history also buries those who get it right. People like FDIC chair Sheila Blair who argued the government wasn't doing enough to prevent foreclosures. Or Brooksley Born, whom Katrina Vaden Heuvel described in the Nation:

"More than a decade ago, a woman you're likely never to have heard of, Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission -- a federal agency that regulates options and futures trading -- was the oracle whose warnings about the dangerous boom in derivatives trading just might have averted the calamitous bust now engulfing the US and global markets. Instead she was met with scorn, condescension and outright anger by former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers. . .

"In 1997, Brooksley Born warned in congressional testimony that unregulated trading in derivatives could "threaten our regulated markets or, indeed, our economy without any federal agency knowing about it." Born called for greater transparency -- disclosure of trades and reserves as a buffer against losses.

"Instead of heeding this oracle's warnings, Greenspan, Rubin & Summers rushed to silence her. . . Greenspan deployed condescension and told Born she didn't know what she doing and she'd cause a financial crisis. . .

"In early 1998, according to the Times story, one of the guys, Larry Summers, called Born to 'chastise her for taking steps he said would lead to a financial crisis. But Born kept at it, unwilling to let arrogant men undermine her good judgment. But it got tougher out there. In June 1998, Greenspan, Rubin and the then head of the SEC, Arthur Levitt, Jr., called on Congress 'to prevent Ms. Born from acting until more senior regulators developed their own recommendations.' . . . Months later, the huge hedge fund Long Term Capital Management nearly collapsed -- confirming some of Born's warnings. (Bets on derivatives were a key reason.)

"'Despite that event,' the Times reports, ' Congress (apparently as a result of Greenspan & Summer's urging, influence-peddling and pressure) 'froze' Born's commission's regulatory authority. The next year, Born left . . ."

This is a classic Washington story. Greenspan, Rubin and Summers are still calling the shots for an allegedly "transformational" president while hardly anyone remembers Brooksley Born.

In Washington, history is just one more metaphor to manipulate at will.

Spin

The twisting of history is one part of a larger problem in the capital: a huge increase in the number of people dedicated to altering facts in one direction or another. There have always been public relations hustlers, rampant hyperbolists and verbal disaster recovery experts, but these days what was once periodic patois is now the main vocabulary.

Driving this tendency has been the willingness of the media to bury the who, what, where, when, and how of stories in a swamp of projections, assurances, promises, speculations, assertions and other verbal fantasies. Once the press gives spin as much status as it has, facts don't stand a chance. There is just too much other stuff for MSNBC and Fox to fight over, matter that has the added blessed nature of not requiring the slightest amount of research.

Once you decide that the top news is how various people react to what Character X is doing about Issue Y, you have turned over your news business to the biggest blowhards and liars in town.

There are all sorts of ancillary problems with the broad acceptance of propaganda as a reasonable substitute for reality. Investigative reporting becomes less important, style sweeps away substance and organizations dedicated to finding actual facts - such as the Government Accountability Office or Congressional Budget Office - become far less newsworthy.

A small but striking example occurred in the wake of the Obama stimulus package and bank bailout, both heavily weighted towards the wealthiest and most powerful segments of society. The mainstream media generally did a poor job of analyzing the true effects of these programs, but immediately came to life when Obama and Joe Biden decided to visit a hamburger joint. The end of he Washington Post story was telling:

"The lunch date lasted 34 minutes and by the time Obama and Biden stepped back into their motorcade, after posing for cellphone pictures with the restaurant's staff, dozens of people had gathered outside the restaurant to cheer. The outing was broadcast on national television. And as a public relations move, it appeared to be a success: Bonnie Cosby, 51, a technology consultant who picked up burgers on her way home from work, opined: 'It shows that he's in touch with the people, that he's not up in the ivory tower. He's a real person -- with a burger.'"

This is how we've been trained to think these days - not about how our president is handling foreclosures but whether he is in touch with us enough to eat a burger.

The media

The media's reliance on those trying to twist its message is more than matched by its almost obscene infatuation with political power and its daily manifestations. This has grown dramatically over the past half century.

When I returned to my native Washington in the 1950s, over half the reporters in the country had only a high school education. Richard Harwood once caught the social status of the press well describing his own experience a decade earlier: "We were perceived as a lower form of life, amoral, half-literate hacks in cheap suits. Thus I was assigned to a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Nashville in the late 1940s and, with other reporters, was given lunch at a card table set up in a hallway to protect the dining room from contamination."

By the 1950s, the typical journalist still had far more in common with the typical American than with politicians and similar icons, and this was reflected in how they covered the news.
At the end of the sixties, that began to change. The Washington Post replaced its "For and About Women" section with something called "Style." Worthy as the demise of the women's section was, the replacement had its own problems. For one thing, it fostered the notion that power was not only powerful but stylish. Worse, the press moved from half illiterate hacks in cheap suits to joining the upscale power structure of the city - becoming the first socio-economic group in history to raise its status simply by writing about itself.

As it did so, the media changed sides in the struggle between citizens and those who ruled them. It could never again be expected to speak for the former.

Later, not only did a high school diploma no longer suffice, one even needed graduate school, because journalism - at best a trade or a craft - had decided to become a profession, removing itself still further from its natural constituency.

As reporters evolved from being race horses in the stables of some egomaniacal and often eccentric publisher, to being corporate bureaucrats with deadlines, the Washington media lost its aggressiveness, skill, verve and soul.

And its bosses helped this shift by shutting down beats that covered specific agencies or closing their Washington offices entirely. This may not seem like much but if you don't have reporters closely covering the FTC or HUD, or keeping an eye on what a state's congressional delegation is up to, you're going to miss a lot of news.

Another change I stumbled upon a few years ago while reading the NY Times one morning. Three stories and an editorial were based on investigative work not of its reporters but of non-profit groups that the Fund for Constitutional Government, on whose board I sat, had helped to fund. In other words, non-profits were doing the paper's most celebrated work: investigative reporting. From a corporate point of view, it made some sense: if the stories were wrong the non-profits and not the Times would take the blame and, besides, investigative stories can run up large tabs. A number of non-profits are currently working on how to expand this role in the face of the decline of print journalism, but it is one more sign of how journalism in Washington has changed.

A broader problem is that a thoroughly embedded media treats as irrelevant, eccentric or bizarre anything that isn't on the establishment's table. This even includes matters in which a majority of the public differs from the insiders, such as handling marijuana and single payer healthcare. If today's media had been covering the 1960s and 1970s we might hardly have known there was a civil rights, anti-war or environmental movement.

Paranoia

Just one month before 9/11, I moved into a house six blocks from the US Capitol. When I had first covered the Capitol, a reporter could wander almost anywhere on the grounds except for the floor of the House and the Senate. Capitol cops were often the sons of major contributors to some senator or representative, earning a little extra while they went to American or Georgetown university. And the Capitol grounds were a de facto public park. Unlike the White House, the Capitol still had the strong whiff of democracy about it and you felt good about your country just being there.

After 9/11 such memories faded. The Capitol turned into an armed camp. The Capitol Visitors Center, under construction, was modified to serve as a bunker for members of Congress in case of an attack and the Capitol police force soared to three officers per member of Congress with the greatest number of police per acre of any spot in America. In the end the visitor's center/bunker would cost over $600 million, just slightly less than the city's new baseball stadium. Perhaps the most telling change was when the Capitol police, as a security measure, moved all tourist bus traffic two blocks further away. In essence, the police declared the lives of residents of 3rd & 4th Streets less important than those officials working at or near the Capitol.

I would later tell people that I knew exactly where the war on terror ended: 2nd Street. Living four blocks further to the east, there would never be the slightest sign that my safety was of any concern to the official city.

It was an important lesson that made me realize the War on Terror was not about protecting me, but about protecting those extremely frightened men and women who ran our government, our major corporations and other large institutions. It was not about me, but about easing the fear of some Republican congressman from Idaho who was scared shitless.

I came to think of Washington as being divided into two parts: the free city and the occupied city, the former being those places where you could enter a building without having to prove you weren't a terrorist.

The war on terror, it turned out, was in no small part about the terror those in power felt about those who were angry at them. It is extremely difficult to run a democracy out of a capital so overflowing with paranoia and the measures taken to relieve it.

Loss of reality

I had long believed that part of what good journalism was about was the care and feeding of reality. But sometime around the middle of the 1980s I suddenly noticed that the truth was no longer setting people free; it was only making them drowsy. This realization first came in the midst of a meeting held to discuss a worthy investigative journalism project. We had considered every aspect of the proposal save one and now, unbidden, a heretical question wiggled into my mind, never to leave: did the truth being sought really matter anymore?

At first it was only a sense of unease, a recognition that saying something true no longer commanded the respect it once had, an awareness that journalism was being driven away from the real and towards imaginings, mythologies, and "perceptions," that news itself was disappearing from the evening news and from newspapers, its place taken by inflated and cliched descriptions, commentaries, and analyses of the news for which there was no longer any room.

We were, I had belatedly noticed, embarked upon an age that denied the existence of objective truth and, by extension, the value of any facts that might point to it. This was now an age, as philosophy professor Rick Roderick put it, when everything once directly lived was being turned into a representation of itself -- Washington news no less than anything else.

Culture of impunity

In a culture of impunity, such as today's Washington, rules serve the internal logic of the system rather than whatever values typically guide a society, such as those of its constitution, church or tradition. A culture of impunity varies from ordinary political corruption in that the latter represents deviance from the culture while the former becomes the culture. Such a culture does not announce itself.

In a culture of impunity, what replaces constitution, precedent, values, tradition, fairness, consensus, debate and all that sort of arcane stuff? Mainly greed. We find ourselves without heroism, without debate over right and wrong, with little but an endless narcissistic struggle by the powerful to get more money, more power, and more press than the next person. In the chase, anything goes and the only standard is whether you win, lose, or get caught. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now.

Concentration of power

As typical pasture in the American west, Federal Washington could support about 120 cows and their calves. The tendency to concentrate our view of politics and of our collective selves upon this tiny enclave has accelerated in recent decades in part because of a dramatic shift in power away from fifty "united states" towards an increasingly centralized and powerful federal government. But it has also been encouraged by a conglomerated media that requires news topics as ubiquitous as its own expanding corporate structures yet which still can be distilled into a single face or story.

Thus Congress has lost power relative to the White House not merely for various political reasons, but because 535 legislators are simply too many for the media to handle. TV, in particular, treats politics much as it does wide screen movies; it snips off the right and left sides until the frame fits comfortably within the more equilateral shape of its eye. The edges of our experience are lost and we find ourselves staring at a comfortable center -- which in the case of politics, means we find ourselves endlessly watching the President while much of the rest of American democracy passes unnoticed.

This preoccupation with the presidency not only exaggerates the importance of the position, it distorts the constitutional division of political power, denigrates the significance of state and local government and creates pressures for presidential action when such action may be neither wise nor even lawful. We can not, even out of seemingly harmless celebrity worship, imbue our president with supra-constitutional virtues or powers without simultaneously damaging the Constitution and the democratic system it was established to protect.

Besides, our presidential fetish badly skews our view of our country and the changes occurring within it -- not only elsewhere in government but beyond politics entirely. It trivializes our own collective and individual roles in creating social and political change. And, conversely, it can create the illusion of great change when far less is really happening.

Bribery

Today, every politician in Washington takes bribes, from the president on down. Only please call them campaign contributions.

Most assume that to bribe someone you have to commit a crime. Not so. Dictionary definitions of 'bribe' include both criminal and merely distasteful acts.

For centuries ordinary people knew exactly what a bribe was. The Oxford English Dictionary found it described in 1528 as meaning to "to influence corruptly, by a consideration." Another 16th century definition describes bribery as "a reward given to pervert the judgment or corrupt the conduct" of someone.

In more modern times, the Meat Inspection Act of 1917 prohibits giving "money or other thing of value, with intent to influence" to a government official. Simple and wise.

But that was before the lawyers and the politicians got around to rewriting the meaning of bribery. And so we came to a time during the Clinton administration when the Supreme Court actually ruled that a law prohibiting the giving of gifts to a public official "for or because of an official act" didn't mean anything unless you knew exactly what the official act was. In other words, bribery was only illegal if the briber was dumb enough to give you a receipt.

The media has gone along with the scam, virtually dropping the word from its vocabulary in favor of phrases like "inappropriate gift," "the appearance of a conflict of interest," or "campaign contribution."

Yet, according to various dictionaries, campaign contributions fall comfortably within the definition of bribes. And hardly anyone in Washington talks about it.

Politics of the particulars

Although the media presents Washington as a city grappling with the major issues of our time, much of the town's workday is absorbed by highly specific concerns. The president is worried about the spin to give a statement or appearance. The lobbyist is obsessed with a very particular amendment to a very particular bill. The size of the capital's bureaucracy is necessitated in no small part by the number and specificity of regulations it must administer. And woe to the member of Congress who lets larger concerns surpass the parochial needs of the district.

Thus Washington is awash in the politics of particulars. Go to a congressional hearing concerning something you consider a good idea and you are likely to be startled by the number of people and interests this benign concept will allegedly injure.

One of the best descriptions of how Washington really operates can be found in Thurman Arnold's Folklore of Capitalism. Arnold imagines applying the principles of a contemporary debate to the attempted rescue of Amelia Earhart:

"First, plans would have been made for the use of the best planes to search the ocean. Then, when this extravagance was attacked publicly, cheaper planes would have been used. By the time that this device had received condemnation for inefficiency, the rescue would have been changed from a practical, efficient endeavor to a public debate about general principles.

"Everyone would have agreed that people in distress must be rescued. They would have insisted, however, that the problem was intimately tied up with balancing the national budget, improving the character of people lost at sea, stopping the foolhardy from adventuring and at the same time encouraging the great spirit of adventure and initiatives and so on ad infinitum. They would have ended perhaps by creating a commission to study the matter statistically, take a census of those lost at sea, examine the practices in other countries. What was saved in airplane fuel would be spent on research so that the problem could be permanently solved."

The town's most common skill, its trade of choice, is finding what is wrong with something. For the bureaucrat, this eliminates the need for action. For the politician, it lessens risk. For the lobbyist, it means points with the client. For the public interest group, democracy and justice are at stake. And for the lawyer and reporter, it is just instinctual. All day long, Washington hums with people trying to stop other people from doing something, and with considerable frequency they are successful. At times Washington seems a series of endless loop videos in which policies are debated, lobbied and almost acted upon before the tape repeats itself once more. This is the city that first heard a president call for national health insurance in the 1940s

In an interview with Time's Ann Blackman, HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros described the Washington he had found:

"We'll spend hours talking through a strategy of meeting all the objections to try and move our homeless initiative through the Office of Management Budget and through congressional committees. We'll spend hours talking about how to please this or that person. Meanwhile, it's dusk. And people are starting to bed down for the night -- for one more night in the park outside the window. And we could go on for days talking and never get one step closer to the people who are using cardboard for beds in the nation's capital."

There is no law or corrupt practice that makes it thus but rather something deeper: a primal urge to maintain the equilibrium of the capital. The imperative of the parochial rises to the top. And it keeps getting worse.

Lobbyists

No one knows for sure how many lobbyists there are in town. In 1981, Robert Reich, then a Harvard professor, estimated the Washington regulatory "community" to consist of 92,500 people including lawyers, lobbyists and their employees, trade journalists, corporate representatives, public affairs specialists and consultants. The count is complicated by the fact that many lobbyists escape registration requirements. Said Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity, "No one in Washington ever admits they lobby."

Estimates run from 15,000 to 35,000 major lobbyists. To get some idea of what this means, if each of these lobbyists met just once with each member of congress would result somewhere between 8 and 18 million lobbying contacts a year.

A radical change in lobbying occurred in the 1970s. Business executives who had previously regarded lobbying as something not quite respectable became worried by the success of Ralph Nader. They formed the Business Roundtable, a group limited to the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and devoted to using the immense assets of these corporations -- including their customers and employees -- to affect political decisions in Washington. William Greider reported that in 1970 only a handful of Fortune 500 companies had public affairs offices in Washington; by 1980, 80% did.

By 2005, not only had the total number vastly increased, but a report by Public Citizen found, wrote the Washington Post, that since 1998, "43 percent of the 198 members of Congress who left government to join private life have registered to lobby."

And lobbying is fed by the news. The Center for Public Integrity recently reported that more than 770 companies and interest groups had hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists to influence federal policy on climate change in the past year. "That's an increase of more than 300 percent in the number of lobbyists on climate change in just five years, and means that Washington can now boast more than four climate lobbyists for every member of Congress." The center estimated that lobbying expenditures on climate change last year topped $90 million.

Add to this the disastrous influences that the huge banking and healthcare industries are currently having on our country, and one gains a sense of just how damaging the lobbying pandemic has become.

Numbers

Number-crunchers form another important Washington subculture, led by the uncritically accepted shamans of economics. The latter's success with ex cathedra calculations has encouraged much of Washington to speak so confidently about numbers that one almost forgets how many of them were once only English majors.

The effect of numbers on the city has been profound. At times it seems that there are no governments anymore, only budget offices. The idea of a budget bureau at the federal level only goes back to Warren Harding. As late as 1975, Austin Kiplinger could write that the president's budget officials were outnumbered by those of the various departments and thus "have to be especially sharp" and make up in clout what they lack in numbers. Today, few feel sorry for the White House budget squad, which has not only replaced many of the functions of departmental financial officials but those of the departments themselves.

As the numerologists rose in power, programs increasingly became transformed into line items. Numbers began serving as adjectives, ideas were reduced to figures and policy became a matter of where one placed the decimal point. Thus, what should be a debate about programs became one about arithmetic. It is an emphasis that can produce bizarre results, such as the attempt once cited by William Greider of various federal agencies to develop a cost-benefit factor for human life. The FAA figured it at $650,00 for the purpose of airplane crashes; the Labor Department thought a dead construction worker was worth about $3.5 million, while OMB disagreed, putting the value of a hard hat at only $1 million.

Every day in Washington, many of the best and the brightest occupy themselves computing such figures, defending them before Congress, citing them before a trade association or recalling them on C-SPAN. Adding and subtracting are among Washington's favorite activities, often providing a digital shield against discussing what the figures actually represent. Few speak of numbers with the clarity of Charles Dickens in David Copperfield:

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure, nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery."

Lawyers

The number of lawyers in DC has increased many fold since the 1970s. Today, the city has 276 lawyers for every 10,000 residents, while second place New York gets along with only 20, and Wisconsin 7.
As Jim Barlow, a columnist for the Houston Chronicle once noted, "I subscribe to the locust theory. The locust is a fairly benign form of grasshopper until we get too many of them. Then they swarm, eating their weight every day and devouring the countryside."
This is what has happened to the capital's government and its culture. Part of it is in the law itself and part in the legal perspective that invades all aspects of the city's life, decisions and policy. Lives become more regulated, decisions more circumspect, and policies stunningly cautious.

Besides, as de Tocqueville put it, lawyers are a "counterpoise" to democratic government: "They constantly endeavor to turn it away from its real direction by means that are foreign to its nature."

Take the technology of torts, with its tyranny of precedents and its infatuation with retribution over resolution, which has, in the words of the country & western song, walked across our heart like it was Texas. No politics, no ideology, no culture has been immune. All of American life has been hauled into court. Thus we find in our path not only the endless droppings of corporate attorneys, but civil rights advocates who insist that the law will lead us to love each other, colleges that publish what amounts to a lawyer's guide to correct sex, and public interest activists trying to run a revolution out of the courthouse.

If today's lawyer-leaders had come to the fore forty years ago, the 60s would have been just a lawsuit, not a cultural and political revolution. And few would have understood what Martin Luther King meant when he said, "Something must happen so as to touch the hearts and souls of men that they will come together, not because the law says it, but because it is natural and right."

You can not have a capital with courage, compassion, imagination and vigor when such such qualities must first be reviewed by the attorneys.

Autistic politics

While the capital is filled with extremely bright people, over the past half century the nature of this intelligence has changed dramatically. When I started, politicians - like reporters - were on average far less educated than today. What they possessed, sometimes to a remarkable degree, was social intelligence. The ability to weave knowledge, action, wisdom and people together typified the successful politician.

This is no longer true, in part because of the rising socio-economic status of politicians and part because of a deep change in politics caused in no small part by the arrival of television.

The beginning of TV-era politics is generally traced to the Kennedy-Nixon debates. It would be a couple of decades before we felt the full power of television to change our politics. By the end of the 1980s, however, it seemed that television was more important than anything.

Politicians no longer talked, conversed or argued with people; now they communicated.

Contemporary communications is quite different from that of discussion or argument. It is more like a shuttle bus endlessly running around a terminal of ideas. The bus plays no favorites; it stops at every concept and every notion, it shares every concern and feels every pain, but when you have made the full trip you are right back where you started.

If you challenge the contemporary communicator, you are likely to find the argument transformed from whatever you thought you were talking about to something quite different -- generally more abstract and grandiose. For example if you are opposed to the communicator's proposed policy on trade you may be accused of being against "change" or "fearful of new ideas" and so forth.

Philip Lader, creator and maitre d' of the New Year's Renaissance gatherings attended by the Clintons for many years, liked this sort of language. Said Lader on PBS:

"The gist of Renaissance has been to recognize the incredible transforming power of ideas and relationships. And I would hope that this administration might be characterized by the power of ideas. But also the power of relationships. Of recognizing the integrity of people dealing with each other."

There is an hyperbolic quality to this language that shatters normal sense of meaning. Simple competence is dubbed "a world-class operation," common efficiency is called "total quality management," a conversation becomes "incredibly transforming," and a gathering of hyper-ambitious and single-minded professionals is called a "Renaissance" weekend.

Key to this language is its disconnection from what it is meant to connect: two or more people. Intelligent as the speaker might be, there is no longer much consciousness of the other person at all or what they might be thinking.

This has striking similarities to high functioning autism or Asperger's Syndrome. Key to the Asperger style is the constant repetition of thought patterns and the imperviousness of the practitioners' thinking to outside fact or argument. The technical name for this is perseveration which has been defined as "the persistent repetition of a response after cessation of the causative stimuli; for example, the repetition of a correct answer to one question as the answer to succeeding questions," an almost perfect description of what regularly occurs on your average Sunday talk show. A less technical but even more generally apt definition is "continuation of something usually to an exceptional degree or beyond a desired point."

How did it happen that we have become cursed with a perseverating elite that endlessly repeats the same thoughts to whatever is said to it, and which insists on pursuing ideas well past any possible usefulness? One theory is that the SAT has played a role, helping to choose an establishment that, while seemingly diverse, is actually disproportionately comprised of those of above average intelligence but who think life consists mainly of coming up with the right answers.

Silently, without argument or recognition, the logic of our nation has drastically changed from experience to propaganda, from the empirical to the virtual, and from debate and discussion to addictive perseveration. Our capital's politics, once characterized by its social intelligence, is now trapped in the endless reiteration of high functioning autism.

Technocratic authoritarianism

One of the dangers with autistic politics is its bias towards the comfort of technocratic solutions. Our assessment addiction in education policy is a excellent example. It requires none of the traditional skills of a good teacher to come up with a multiple choice test that claims to judge correctly both the student and the instructor. With it you can wipe out concerns about social intelligence, judgment, cooperation or applying one's knowledge in a real community rather than on a paper form.

The shift was well described by novelist Jack Butler: "People understood reality as machinery rather than God's own dream of existence, intelligence as information rather than judgment.'"

In Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West the Canadian historian John Ralston Saul argues: "When the 18th-century philosophers killed God, they thought they were en­gaged in housekeeping-- the evils of corrupt religion would be swept away, the decent aspects of Christian morali­ty would be dusted off and neatly re­packaged inside reason." Instead says Saul, came "a theology of pure power -- ­power born of structure, not of dynas­ty or arms. The new holy trinity is or­ganization, technology, and information."

Reviewing Saul's work for the Utne Reader, Jeramiah Creedon wrote:

"The new priest is the technocrat, someone who interprets events not morally but 'within the logic of the system.' Saul's point is that reason alone has no inherent virtue; it is simply an intellectual tool. In fact, when reason is allowed to unfold in an ethical vacu­um, untempered by common sense, the results are apt to be terrible. The classic example is the 'perfectly ratio­nal' Holocaust, planned by the Nazis with 'the clean efficiency of a Harvard case study.' . . . Reason has also created a recur­ring human type well suited to perpetuating it: the leader for whom calculation is everything."

Washington has increasingly moved away from common sense and judgment and towards a technocratic authoritarianism in which data and systems supplant wisdom and sensible action

Obsession with the center

If you ask important Washington people in politics, think tanks or the media where they stand politically, many will say "in the center." A lot of these folks like the center because it makes them sound reasonable and moderate. It also allows them to call other people extremists or gadflies or wishful thinkers for disagreeing with the conventional wisdom of the moment. Some members of the American elite have made whole careers of being measured and cautious. They like to write somber columns asking pompous questions like "Can the Center Hold?" What they really mean is: can they hold on to their power? But even if you do find the center, it's not necessarily the best place to be. My navigation instructor at Coast Guard Officer Candidate School explained it well: "If you take a navigational fix and it places you on one side of a rock and then you take another fix and it places you on the other side of the rock -- don't split the difference." Unfortunately, it's a rule not often followed in Washington politics.

Even the KKK, so often cited as an example of the sort of threat the contemporary right poses, was powerful primarily because it was at the center, holding political and judicial and law enforcement office as well as hiding beneath its robes. In some towns, lynching parties were even announced in the local paper. And in the 1920s, both the Colorado governor and mayor of Denver were members of the Klan, the latter well enough regarded to have had Stapleton airport named after him.

As Jim Hightower has pointed out, there's nothing to be found in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.

Collapse of liberalism

In lining up strongly behind two centrist candidates - Clinton and Obama - liberals surrendered their values for victory and their ideas for icons. With some notable exceptions the liberal has pretty much faded from the Washington scene except as a socio-economic demographic. At the top of the liberal agenda are issues like abortion and gay marriage that, while worthy in themselves, do not speak to the larger constituency liberals used to attract. Most strikingly absent from liberal rhetoric and action are key economic issues of the sort that drove the Roosevelt and Johnson administrations. Liberals are strikingly quiet about the escalation of the Afghan war and its expansion into Pakistan, single payer (save for the unions), foreclosures and unreasonable bank bailouts.

This is a major shift and Washington is much the worse for it. Because its definition has been rewritten, it is easy to forget what liberalism was once about. Here are just a few of the things America would be without had it not been for liberals in the White House a long time ago:

Regulation of banks and stock brokerage firms cheating their customers
Protection of your bank account
Social Security
A minimum wage
Legal alcohol
Regulation of the stock exchanges
Right of labor to bargain with employers
Soil Conservation Service and other early environmental programs
National parks and monuments
Tennessee Valley Authority
Rural electrification
College education for innumerable veterans
Housing loans for innumerable veterans
FHA housing loans
The bulk of hospital beds in the country
Unemployment insurance
Child Labor Act
Small Business Administration
National Endowment for the Arts
Medicare
Peace Corps

Allen Ferguson, President of AFE Inc, in a 1985 talk the National Economist Club outlined the effects of such policies. He noted that the real gross national product rose 546% from 1933 to 1980. Real per capita disposable income rose 233% during the same period. In 1929, one percent of non-farm workers took vacations. By 1970, the figure had risen to 80%. The average work week dropped from around 48 hours in 1929 to around 35 hours in 1980. By 1950, 34 million workers were covered by unemployment insurance; by 1980 the figure was almost 93 million. Social security, during the same period expanded from covering 46 million to 128 million people. And a Congressional Research Service study done in 1982 showed that without the various liberal transfer programs, 24% of the country would have been in poverty rather than the 9% that was the case.

It is a shame verging on a sin that Washington's liberals have so deserted their own heritage.

The club

How one comes to matter in Washington politics is guided by few precise rules, although in comparison to fifty years ago the views of lobbyists and fundraisers are far more significant than the opinion, say, of the mayor of Chicago or the governor of Pennsylvania. This is a big difference; somewhere behind the old bosses in their smoke-filled rooms were live constituents; behind the political cash lords of today there is mostly just more money and the few who control it. Thus coming to matter has much less to do with traditional politics, especially local politics, than it once did.

Today, other things count: the patronage of those who already matter, a blessing bestowed casually by one right person to another right person over lunch at the Metropolitan Club, a columnist's praise, a well-received speech before a well-placed organization, the assessment of a lobbyist as sure-eyed as a fight manager checking out new fists at the local gym. There are still machines in American politics; they just dress and talk better. There is another rule. The public plays no part. The public is the audience; the audience does not write or cast the play.

Official Washington -- including government, media and the lobbies -- functions in many ways like America's largest and most prestigious club, a sort of indoor, east coast Bohemian Grove in which members engage in endless rites of mutual affirmation combined with an intense but genteel competition that determines the city's tennis ladder of political and social power. What appears to the stranger as a major struggle is often only an intramural game between members of the same club, lending an aura of dynamism to what is in truth deeply stable.

Furthermore. . .

Federal Washington has become a culture in which much seems to happen but little gets accomplished. It is a culture in which neither the battles nor the words about them are necessarily real, in which the interests of the federal enclave inevitably proceed those of the country, and in which speaking of something is considered the moral equivalent of actually doing it.

It is a culture that can admit neither to itself nor to the larger world the degree to which its various systems are out of control. Nor can it admit that when it defines corruption only by its most precise legal limits it exempts itself from any broader decency.

It is a culture that has been remarkably successful at isolating itself from the reality it is attempting to govern. The abstract, soulless security of the capital protects it from the pain it causes, the suffering it neglects and the concerns it can quantify but not ameliorate. Here statistics substitute for tears, data for anger, and mechanically modulated voices recounting promises never to be fulfilled serve as a placebo for real hope and joy.

FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: WHAT'S A HUMANITIES

[50 years ago last summer, your editor covered his first story in Washington. Throughout the year, the Review will exhume some of his writings]

SAM SMITH, DC GAZETTE, 1979 - I have to confess something. I have strayed from the civic abstinence I promised on these pages a while back. I have once again joined a committee. But it's just a small committee and I think I can handle it. If not, drive me home and I'll never do it again. Promise.

The committee is called the DC Community Humanities Council. Fifty states and Puerto Rico have such committees - and the funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities that follow in their wake - but DC, through a combination of federal inertia and local indifference, has been years late to the gate. . .

I was invited to serve on the committee by the NEH for reasons that are not entirely clear, but presumably have something to do with what is known in the trade as "community outreach," or, as Senator Scoop Jackson put it even less felicitously the other day, providing another "rung on the spectrum." Since I had complained in print about the lack of a local humanities committee, I thought I ought to put some time where my mouth was. But there was another less honorable reason for my willingness to accept the invitation. You see, what the folks at NEH don't know is that not only did I graduate from college magna cum probation but I was so indifferent to the humanities and scholarship in general that my English instructor once sent me a neatly written card that read: "Mr. Cole requests the pleasure of your attendance at the next regular meeting of his course." Many of the courses I did attend left me thoroughly befuddled. The first hint that joining the fellowship of educated men was going to be a treacherous business came when I returned to my room after the initial day of classes. I settled down to dash off a bit of Max Weber before supper. Ten pages in my heart went into a barrel roll and my hands began to rattle. I hadn't understood one word the man was saying. This exquisite form of panic would return many times over the next four years.

I struggled to separate the thoughts of Locke from the sermons of Cotton Mather; Veblin and Bentham congealed in my brain; Karl Marx was, as far as I could discern, the opiate of sadistic professors; and when I walked into an examination hall I was certain that all around me could balance more philosophers within the margins of a blue book than I. The die was cast early as one of my anthropology professors noted on a paper. "This is pretty good journalism," she wrote of my painfully conceived review of the Naga situation, "but it is bad anthropology." I left the ivy-bedizened halls vowing never to return and, in fact, never did except for an occasional guest talk to the class of a professor or two of eccentric tastes. So for me to be invited to share responsibility for the fate of the humanities with genuine, certified, dissertating scholars was too good an offer to pass up - not unlike an ex-con being asked to serve on a judicial nominations commission.

So of course I accepted. This first thing that happened was a friend, when I told her of the project, described herself as "one of nine people in the city who knows what the humanities are." I passed on the remark to an historian who asked, "Don't you think that figure is a little high?"

Right away I knew I was in trouble. One of the real pleasures of graduating from college is that seldom thereafter does anyone ask you to define your terms. I had been away from the academic world for twenty years and had sort of assumed that in the interim they had come up with handy definitions for things like the "humanities." But apparently we were heading for square one -- back to Humanities 10: "Define the humanities and illustrate by example, citing sources where applicable." .

It all came back. The slush of ideas, concepts, symbolisms, metaphors, imagery, and philosophies through which I had so laboriously slogged during college, and so assiduously avoided since, was underfoot once more and I could feel my socks getting wet and clammy.

I had voluntarily agreed to serve a cause whose meaning and purpose I thought I understood, but which I couldn't decently explain to anyone who didn't understand. I had done so somewhat whimsically and capriciously, in part because I sensed it all had something to do with constructive irrelevance, a subject which has come to interest me after years of excessive relevance and the not totally satisfying product of the same. It also seemed to favor my anarchistic side, since the humanities like to ask questions without providing answers while politics tends to provide answers without asking questions. Further, humanists have a reputation for not doing anything useful, so perhaps if I became associated with them, people would stop asking me to do things that were useful.

But that would hardly do when we had to go out and explain what we were about and why anyone should be interested. You can't tell a sullen scribe from one of the dailies who asks "What do you see as the role of the humanities in this city?" something like, "If you have to ask, you'll never know." So I decided I better find out what a humanities really was before the National Endowment blew my cover and decided that this community outreach business had gone far enough. Here is some of what I found:

The word humanities doesn't mean much to most people. Most people to whom it does mean much work on college campuses. For them it means pretty much what it did when I was in college: it's what you major in if you're not in the physical or social sciences, haven't decided what to do with your life or want to go to law school but would like to learn something first.

Here are some of the humanities: philosophy, comparative religion, history, ethics, literature.

Here is one thing the humanities have in common: you feel a little foolish listing them on a job application form.

That may be one reason that most people who know about the humanities are found on college campuses: no one else will hire them.

There's another reason: Some people on campus feel that the humanities shouldn't be talked about too much off campus. They feel the humanities are a profession and that you should have a Ph.D. to be "in" them. They want people to treat them like physicians and lawyers and CPAs and lieutenant colonels, so they call each other 'Doctor' a lot.

It is confusing because it suggests that you might need a license to think about literature, religion, history or philosophy. This is not necessarily true. It is still further confusing because humanities scholars, when they're not calling themselves 'Doctor,' call themselves "humanists." Off campus, the word sometimes has a different meaning. The woman down the street may be called "a real humanist" because she set up a senior citizen center or organized the heart drive, even though she doesn't know who Kierkegaard was. You can't be a humanist on campus without knowing who Kierkegaard was, no matter how much you raise for the heart fund.

Finally, it is confusing because in many people's minds, a doctor is meant to fix something. Humanist-type doctors are hard-pressed to prove that they do. And in our scientific and technological society, we tend to discount what can't be proved. There is no morality program you can slip into the computer, no antibiotic against cultural vacuity, no certifiable benefits to be achieved through an acquaintance with the past and no minimum daily requirement for literature.

I think a part of what the National Endowment for the Humanities is trying to do is to end some of this confusion. This is good because even though the word "humanities" is not used that much off campus, we use what it describes all the time. We just don't have a name for it.

We practice it without a license and without credit. Some of the biggest issues of our lives are concerns of the humanities. Like whether we accept a politician's definition of "acceptable risk" at a nuclear power plant. Like publicly funded abortions or legalized gambling or how we distribute political power .

These are also political questions and their philosophical, historical or religious core often gets hidden behind the politics, which is too bad because good politics is a poor substitute for a good philosophy, whereas good philosophy can makes good politics.

Our best presidents, for example, were those who convinced people not just of their politics but of its philosophical or ethical base. The New Deal, the War on Poverty, the civil rights legislation and the Peace Corps would never have gotten off the ground if people hadn't accepted the philosophy before the politics.

We need, as Martin Marty said, a place from which to view the world. The media and the merchandisers would like us to think otherwise. They want us to acquiesce in their plan to create packaged consumers for their packaged products - whether it be artificial eggs, a new TV series or a president. They would like us to want more than to be. The thing that keeps us in rebellion is a part of what the humanities are about. This is the revolutionary aspect of the National Endowment for the Humanities. It proposes to fund the dangerous notion that we can still think for ourselves. That we still want to know why we do things as well as when and how much it will cost. That we still have some choices left. . .

Whatever a humanities is, it used to be different. Rod French, a scholar at George Washington University who happens to be both an academic and a non-academic humanist, described it this way in a paper prepared for the National League of Cities:

"At the opening of the modern age, in the city states of Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, humanist scholars and poets handled state correspondence, represented their sovereigns as diplomatic emissaries and wrote orations for great civic occasions. But already in the 16th century, this whole class of scholars began a long decline into disgrace and neglect. Their ambition and poor judgment was responsible in part, but they were also the victims of deep social changes. The rise of the middle class and the democratic revolutions of the 18th century further displaced humanists from positions of influence. And then industrialization placed a premium on a set of new skills. Those who persisted in studying the humanities were forced to the margins of public life. . . .In the Renaissance, the term humanist referred to men (almost exclusively} who dedicated themselves to the study of the humanities. That happened to mean to them the study of the literature and history and politics and ethics and art of classical Greece and Rome. Today, hardly anyone in public life feels they need a humanist and few humanists feel they need a public life . . .

"The only way to get the humanist down from the ivory tower is to drag him into public affairs. If his alleged contribution proves in actual experience to be trivial or ephemeral, then the game is up. If the managers of society refuse even to give his questions a hearing then we can conclude fairly that they are not really friends of the good society."

Here is one more historical note: Tocqueville called the French Revolution the first great event in history brought about by men of letters. The Russian Revolution was another. So, as late as this century, some humanists have been found relevant.

The National Endowment for the Humanities says that all programs funded by state humanities committees should have "scholars involved centrally." Artists can get money from their national endowment without scholars being centrally involved in their sculpture or dance. Governments are more leery of unformed ideas than they are of unformed stone, which may be why federally funded thinking must be accompanied by licensed personnel. I think humanities scholars should have to prove that their ideas are worth something, just like anyone else, but they're on the dole far less than most groups, there isn't much risk that they will turn into a mandarin class in the near future, and they need the money, so what the hell. You can always pull the anchovies off the pizza if you don't like them..

One of the problems with defining the humanities is that it is hard to do anything well without them. A doctor or a nuclear physicist who isn't also a humanist can cause a lot of trouble. One of the purposes of the humanities is to give some direction to the other things we do. The humanities are often at their most potent when they modify something else rather than being just an end. Of course, you don't have to justify interest in the humanities on the basis of social utility. After all, the Declaration of Independence ranked the pursuit of happiness only after life and liberty as a basic right. It hasn't fared so well since. The humanities, among other things, have to do with the pursuit of happiness. As Hubert Humphrey said when the bill establishing the National Endowment passed, "At last the Congress voted for fun; at last the Congress voted and said let's have something that celebrates the rights of man to sheer fun."

But, then again, we may be too late. Newsweek seems to think so. It ran a headline over a book review recently that read: "Albert Camus: The Last of the Humanists." I hope not. . .

So what's a humanities? I can't really give you one answer. But I can give you several. It's asking why before we say yes. It's remembering something someone wrote two centuries ago when we can't remember what we wrote yesterday. It's mistakes we don't have to make because they've already been made and solutions we don't have to dream up because someone has already thought of them. It's how we got where we are and where we might go from here. It's things we can't measure yet know have depth and breadth. It's parts of our culture we might lose like the Indian tribe writing its language down and putting it in a book. It's parts of our culture that we're often slow to recognize as such, like the legislature in Georgia finally making "Georgia on My Mind" the state song and inviting Ray Charles to come down and sing it. It's the moral, philosophical, and historical issues hidden behind the political babble. It's rights and beliefs and their protection. It's preserving the past and the future and not just exploiting today. It's thinking as well as talking, questioning as well as answering. And it's placing human values and culture at the center of our world and making machines and technology and Channel Seven serve us rather than the other way around.

If we talk about things like these, we'll be talking humanities whether we know it or not. And I think we'll be reminded that they really do matter. And have all along.

PERMANENT LINK

The care and feeding of non-profit boards

Sam Smith

One of the hazards of leading a visibly active life is that someone may ask you to serve on their board. In my case, the risk has declined markedly in recent years thanks to a growing assumption that the purpose of a board of directors is to raise money and not to offer direction. Since I'm the sort of person who has a hard time even asking someone to change a ten dollar bill, there has been a lessened demand for my services.

I'm not, however, such a bad board member in the right circumstances. If the body is new, brave and slightly chaotic, I can offer a bit of gratuitous imagination, generate a few laughs and share some pragmatism, a sometimes unfamiliar skill in the non-profit world.

For example, as one of the resident Philistines on the then new DC Community Humanities Council, I developed the exclusive Bang/Buck Ratio, by which I rated, with consummate objectivity, each of the grant requests. I also provided cartoon minutes of meetings and, according to the official version of those minutes, once actually got the group to accept my solution to the perpetual issue of the proper relationship between executive director, executive committee and board:

"The item concerning budget amendments (Section IV,A) was resolved by S. Smith's 'Principle of Escalating Anxiety,' best explained as follows: 'If it doesn't make [the executive director] nervous it's probably okay to let her handle it. If it does, she goes to the executive board. If it makes them nervous it's probably a matter for full council consideration.'

See how simple these things can be?

The humanities council, happily, was new, brave and slightly chaotic. I loved our meetings, our arguments and my fellow board members. Besides, with how many groups can you go on retreat and end up playing jazz harpsichord in some West Virginia condo with a philosophy of science professor who carried around a miniature trumpet in his attache case?

I currently sit on the board of the Fund for Constitutional Government, which would be a delight even if it wasn't helping the cash flow of groups protecting scores of government whistle blowers, uncovering tons of government waste and fighting innumerable would-be censors of the Internet. This worthy organization was founded by Stewart Mott, who also, as far as I can tell, funded much of the 1960s. I was approached by the president of the board, Anne Zill, who suggested that she and Mott come over and have lunch with me. That day I may even have worn a tie and I'm sure I replaced my running shoes with loafers, but it wasn't necessary. Zill and Mott arrived at my office, each carrying a motorcycle helmet. Right away I knew we shared a paradigm.

The fund's board meetings average somewhere between four and six hours in length, shared by some of the most competently eccentric folk I have met in this fair city. Journalism grant committee meetings take almost as long over lunch at La Tomate, as one might imagine of a confabulation that includes Christopher Hitchens, myself and Hamilton Fish Number Whatever He Is from the Nation.

During board meetings we hear reports from some of the most useful people in America (our fundees) as they patiently deal with some of the most contentious people in America (their funders). At one end of the large table sits Mott, who may or may not be wearing a day-glo orange hunting vest, and the chair, Russell Hemenway, who is almost certainly wearing a suit in which each pin stripe has been individually pressed. Hemenway, accustomed to the more sedate ways of the Big Apple, regards us not unlike a grandfather painfully observing his obstreperous, penultimate genetic responsibilities. You soon learn that when Russ stops glaring and stands up that the party is over and we actually have to do something.

Since my wife has been involved in a number of more well-mannered civic enterprises, I have found around the house books on board governance, the well-functioning non-profit and so forth. I get the impression that the authors don't have the slightest idea of what they are talking about. For example, I have served as president of three organizations, helped to start nine and served on the board of 15 and have never had a strategic vision even in the middle of a dark and stormy night.

Here, on the other hand, are some of the key principles of a well-functioning board that I have discovered:

- Ideally, the organization should be new and, if not new, should at least be doing something that is new. You can easily test a group's raison d'etre by attending a board meeting and calculating how much time is spent on matters that, if you had just wandered accidentally into the room, would in no way identify the organization's reason for existence. This includes all discussions of budgets, by-law changes, and most mission statements. The only mission statement I ever liked was that of the Seattle alternative paper, Eat the State. Its mission statement declared that missions had been created by the Catholic church to subjugate the Indians and that "we oppose them."

- A good time to resign from a board is when it discovers that it doesn't have a personnel policy and decides to do something about it. Bear in mind that one of the most important American organizations of the last century was the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. It went some 40 years without bylaws or a constitution.

- In the best organizations, the relationship between the executive director and the board is relaxed, cooperative and productive. No policy directive can create this. There is also a good relationship between the organization and its volunteers, the latter being regarded as assets and not as annoyances. As non-profits strive to be more "professional," as opposed to being acts of grace, then - as Emily Dickinson wrote - "a formal feeling comes - the nerves sit ceremonious, like tombs."

- The best boards have a passion for something greater than the personal interests of anyone in the room.

- Board debates should favor philosophical, political and aesthetic matters. Detailed discussions of finances and structure should be left to committees.

- Boards should be picked in such a manner that the chosen will not bore each other. Preferably, in fact, they should inspire, entertain and enlighten other board members without the latter minding a bit.

- Don't let yourself be chosen as a token anything, unless you plan to parlay it into higher office. Being a token merely allows others to become smug at your expense.

- Retreats should be held with some frequency, ideally in surroundings more reminiscent of summer camp or a Masterpiece Theatre 19th century setting than of whatever it is you are actually meant to be doing.

- All the foregoing will fail totally if the one great principle of board governance is ignored: success is directly correlated to the quality of the food served. This does not necessarily mean expensive food so much as attention to detail and taste. For example, many a worthy cause has foundered on an inadequate selection of donuts. Others have assumed, quite wrongly, that because their cause was noble and pure, their provisions should be likewise. A board meeting is no time for nutritional proselytizing. Or for skimping. Above all, the cookies should be fresh and the mayonnaise plentiful. I have watched once outstanding non-profits wither into obscurity for failing to observe these simple rules.

In short, the best boards are conspiracies of the creative and confederacies of the competent, filled with guerrillas of the good and Aquarian anarchists working for something far grander than themselves. And the smartest among them know that salvation lies not in the proper mission statement but in the right menu.

FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: FIVE YEARS OF FAILURE

Sam Smith


In 1986, I was asked to give a toast at the fifth anniversary celebration of the DC Community Humanities Council. Here is what I said:

Five years ago the DC Community Humanities Council was formed, charged with the diffusion of ideas, the encouragement of thought and the inspiration of rational discourse within this our nation's capital. This was a little like trying to sell Bibles in a brothel, and I think that any fair assessment of what has occurred around us since we began would indicate that we have failed miserably. The best efforts of the council and its sainted staff have failed to halt a national and local stampede towards what is perhaps the most anti-humanistic era of our lifetimes.

It is an era, to be sure, not without ideas and a sense of history but what ideas and what history. It's as if the worst of the past had been resyndicated and put on Channel 20, with none of the other stations working. We draw from the economics of Morgan, Mellon and the British East India Company, the morality of Comstock, the civil liberties of Palmer and McCarthy, the civil rights of Tara, the lifestyle of Babbitt and Gatsby, the religion of Gantry, the political ethics of Teapot Dome, the business ethics of Ponzi, the gentleness of Nietzsche, the altruism of Ayn Rand, the ecological sensitivity of General Sherman, the spiritualism of Warren Gameliel Harding, the imagination of Rutherford Hayes, the brilliance of Franklin Pierce, the expressiveness of Calvin Coolidge and the evolutionary theories of William Jennings Bryan.

It is an era when we propose to devise the most complex weapons system ever created, but when we go to explain it to people, our government feels compelled to use comic book stick figures on television. We have become the first society to know more about the external world than we do about ourselves. And now we even seem to be losing the ability to talk or write about the problem.

It is an era in which, like the fifties, the man in the gray flannel suit is in the ascendancy, but unlike the fifties, when he was viewed with the ambivalence that the market forces upon us, he or she is now a cultural role model, and, unbelievably, even considered hip, charismatic and sexy.

And it is an era in which we know how to promote, facilitate merge, network, manage, integrate, finalize and bottom line, but are losing the ability to make or to create. I have a nightmare that one day the country will awake and discover that there is nothing left to manage, finalize and facilitate. And there will be no one left to build anything.

So we have failed -- here in the jaws of the lion -- but I would argue that given the powers arrayed against the humanistic ideal, failure has been the only sane and honorable course. And the failure, one hopes, is only temporary. Long ago, John Locke warned of the constant decay of ideas, and how they must be "renewed by repeated exercises of the senses." If not, "the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen."

The print is fading, but, thanks in part to this band of happy humanistic warriors, it could have been a lot worse. It has engaged in repeated exercise of the senses with an integrity, decency, fairness, sensitivity and good humor rarely seen in this town anymore. In a city that is obsessed with style, it is one of the few real class acts. So a toast to the Council for all it has done and will do and to the humanistic spirit. May we live to see it once more.

Retrieving the Democrats' reason for existence

Sam Smith

JOHN EDWARDS has done the Democrats an enormous favor. He has retrieved the party's reason for existence from the attic where it has been stowed lost and forgotten for some four decades.

What Edwards does with the discovery remains to be seen, but the mere removal from storage of the populist notion that Democrats are meant to serve the little guy has a significance that is hard to overrate.

To understand why, you have to look at some of the party's other lost and forgotten history, a history that directly challenges the myths of the moment.

For example, there have only been two Democratic presidents over the past three-quarters of a century who have gotten significantly more than 50% of the vote: Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, each of whom received 61% in one election. While neither fit the definition of a populist, many of their programs - from FDR's minimum wage and social security to LBJ's war on poverty and education legislation - were part of a populist agenda.

Since LBJ, the party has increasingly deserted its populist causes and been trapped between defeat and a tantalizing break-even division with the GOP.

Although current party and media mythology treats Bill Clinton and other Vichy Democrats as symbols of Democratic triumph this is far from the case:

- Clinton did no better than Kerry, Gore, Carter, JFK, and Harry Truman. All of them came within two percent of the midpoint despite markedly different styles and programs. It is fair to say that in each case, party loyalty proved more important than the candidate.

- Michael Dukakis, the unfairly assigned butt of party jokes, did three points better than Clinton in the latter's first election and only three points worse in the second. Even more striking, Dukakis beat or equaled Clinton's best percentage in 12 states including Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and Oklahoma, a record dramatically at odds with the spin of the Clintonistas and the Democratic Leadership Council.

- Democratic losses at the state and national level under Clinton were worse than any seen by a party incumbent since Grover Cleveland. Clinton proved a disaster for the Democrats. What happened in Congress this year was a partial recovery from this disaster.

In short, the only thing that has really worked for the Democrats have been campaigns heavily populist in nature.

American populism has a long past. It began when the first Indian shot the first arrow at a colonist attempting to foreclose on his hunting grounds. As early as 1676, the farmers in Virginia were upset enough about high taxes, low prices and the payola given to those close to the governor that they followed Nathaniel Bacon into rebellion.

One hundred and ten years later found farmers of Massachusetts complaining that however men might have been created, they were not staying equal. Under the leadership of Daniel Shays they took on the new establishment in open rebellion to free themselves high taxes and legal costs, rampant foreclosures, exorbitant salaries for public officials and other abuses. The rebels were routed and fled.

The populist thread weaves through the administration of Andrew Jackson, an early American populist who recognized the importance of challenging the style as well as the substance of the establishment value system. It was a time when it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a banker to get into the White House, a problem bankers have seldom had since.

It was the end of the nineteenth century, though, that institutionalized populism, and gave it a name. The issues are familiar: economic concentration, unfair taxation, welfare and democracy. Critics are quick to point out that they also included racism and nativism, which was true in some cases, but it has been traditional for liberal historians to emphasize these aspects while overlooking the rampant class and ethnic prejudices of the more elite politicians they favored.

In the end, the most debilitating, discriminatory and dangerous form of extremism in this country is found in the middle -- with its cell meetings held in the committee rooms of the US Congress, its slogan "Not Now" and its goal of maintaining the temerity of the people towards their leaders. A true populist revival could change this but the merchants of moderation will do what they can to control and blunt it.

As a party, the populists were not particularly successful, but it wasn't long before the Democrats bought many of their proposals including the graduated income tax, election of the Senate by direct vote, civil service reform, pensions, and the eight hour workday. It's not a bad list of accomplishments for a party that got just 8.5% of the popular vote in the only presidential election in which it ran a candidate on its own.

The growth of an urban left and the influence of transatlantic Marxism overwhelmed rural-oriented populism, which also suffered due to racism and regionalism. European socialism got a much better break under Roosevelt than did the native populist tradition although there were notable exceptions such as the rural electrification program. In the end, however, neither ideological socialism nor pragmatic populism could hold their own against the emerging dominant style of contemporary liberalism, which espoused human rights and civil liberties even as economic welfare was carefully constrained by a prohibition against the redistribution of wealth or power.

The Democrats came to emphasize the worst aspect of socialism, concentration of power in the state, while failing to expend a proportionate amount of energy providing the supposed benefit of the shift: economic and political justice. The growth of the economy, aided by a couple of wars, obscured this development until the sixties, when the forgotten precincts began to be heard from: first blacks, then one mistreated group after another - including young non-college educated whites - until today we find ourselves a country of angry, alienated minorities, bumblinq around in the dark looking for a coalition to wield against those in power.

Here lies the great hope in the rediscovery of populism. More than any other political philosophy it offers potential for those who serve this country to seize a bit of it back from those who control it. It emphasizes the issues that should be emphasized: economic justice, decentralized democracy and an end to the concentration of power.

Populism's hidden army is the non-voter. A study by Jack Doppelt and Ellen Shearer, associate professors at Northwestern University's School of Journalism, found that "Nonvoters as well as now-and-then voters see politicians as almost a separate class, who say what they think voters want to hear in language that's not straightforward and whose sole mission is winning. . .

A review of Doppelt and Shearer's work notes that "In the 1996 elections, 73% of nonvoters were 18 to 44 years old. 39% were under age 30. 48% make less than $30,000 per year. 30% identified themselves as minorities."

And the study also found that 52% agreed with the statement: "The federal government often does a better job than people give it credit for." 83% of nonvoters thought the government should have a major policy role in the realms of healthcare, housing, and education.

While a follow-up study found that nonvoters divided pretty much the same way as voters on the presidency, the fact that they didn't do anything about it was more telling. Besides, we're talking about a huge number of people. If those of voting age simply turned out in the same proportion as they had in 1960, there would be about 24 million more voters, nearly 25% more cast ballots. That's a lot of people looking for some difference between the candidates and some new directions.

But there are also big problems. We have, for example, reached a stage where many minorities have produced enough winners that the greater number of losers not only have to battle their oppressors but the indifference of, and misleading impressions caused by, their own role models. All pressure groups - farmers, labor unions, women, ethnic groups - have grabbed a piece of the cake. But the citizens at the bottom of each of these causes - the poor farmer, the unemployed laborer, the tip-dependent waitress, the slum dweller - has hardly been allowed a bite. We have created the superstructure of a welfare state without providing its supposed benefits to the people who need it most.

Not even the organizations supposedly dedicated to correcting this imbalance have been up to the task. The Black Congressional Caucus remains silent as the toll mounts of black young men sent to prison or to their death thanks a war far more deadly to them than Iraq, namely the war on drugs. The major women's groups are far more interested in Nancy Pelosi than in women working at Wal-Mart. In fact, the most effective women's and minority groups in the country are unions like SEIU and Unite Here, which actually help some of those most in need.

Unlike New Deal and Great Society liberals, contemporary liberalism has cut its close ties to populism and instead is content to driver its SUV to the church of Our Mother of Perpetual Good Intentions. The goal is to believe the right thing, unlike populism, whose goal is to do the right thing. Faith vs. works.

Interestingly, populism - despite its bad rap - has far more potential for creating the diverse, happy society of which the liberals dream. The reason for this is that hate and tension are directly related to people's personal social and economic status. Both the old Democratic segregationist and the new GOP fundamentalist understood and exploited this. They made the weak angry at each other, they taught the poor of one ethnicity and class to blame those of another for their troubles. Karl Rove is just the George Wallace of another time.

But you won't break this cycle with feel-good rhetoric and rules. You break it by creating a fairer and more decent society for everyone. You don't do it with political correctness; you do it with economic and social equity.

Yet when Howard Dean made his comment about wanting to get the votes of people who drove pickups with confederate flag stickers, he was immediately excoriated by Kerry and Gephardt. By any traditional Democratic standards, this constituency should be a natural. After all, what more dramatically illustrates the failure of two decades of corporatist economics than how far these white males have been left behind? Yet because some of them still cling to the myths the southern white establishment taught their daddies and their granddaddies, Gephardt and Kerry didn't think they qualified as Democratic voters.

The decline of liberalism has been accelerated by a growing number of American subcultures deemed unworthy by its advocates: gun owners, church goers, pickup drivers with confederate flag stickers. Yet the gun owner could be an important ally for civil liberties, the churchgoer a voice for political integrity, the pickup driver a supporter of national healthcare. Further, while liberals are happy to stigmatize certain stereotypes, they are enthralled with others, such as the self-serving suggestion that they represent a new class of "cultural creatives" saving the American city. And from whom, implicitly, are they saving the American city? From the blacks, latinos and poor forced out to make way for their creativity.

The black writer, Jean Toomer once described America as "so voluble in acclamation of the democratic ideal, so reticent in applying what it professes." Writing in 1919, Toomer said, "It is generally established that the causes of race prejudice may primarily be found in the economic structure that compels one worker to compete against another and that furthermore renders it advantageous for the exploiting classes to inculcate, foster, and aggravate that competition."

So what might a populist agenda look like? Let's look at two examples - neither a paragon of virtue - yet far better, and stunningly so, than any of today's politicians in starting programs that helped large numbers of people. Their legacy was not to be found in their own amply noted inadequacies but in the adequacies they made possible for others. In a time of shallow political celebrities incapable of even modest achievement, these men remind us what democracy was meant to be about.

The first was Governor Huey Long of Louisiana. Here's how Wikipedia describes him:

|||| In his four-year term as governor, Long increased the mileage of paved highways in Louisiana from 331 to 2,301, plus an additional 4,508 2,816 miles of gravel roads. By 1936, the infrastructure program begun by Long had [doubled] the state's road system. He built 111 bridges, and started construction on the first bridge over the lower Mississippi. He built the new Louisiana State Capitol, at the time the tallest building in the South. All of these construction projects provided thousands of much-needed jobs during the Great Depression. . .

Long's free textbooks, school-building program, and free busing improved and expanded the public education system, and his night schools taught 100,000 adults to read. He greatly expanded funding for LSU, lowered tuition, established scholarships for poor students, and founded the LSU School of Medicine in New Orleans. He also doubled funding for the public Charity Hospital System, built a new Charity Hospital building for New Orleans, and reformed and increased funding for the state's mental institutions. His administration funded the piping of natural gas to New Orleans and other cities and built the seven-mile Lake Pontchartrain seawall and New Orleans airport. Long slashed personal property taxes and reduced utility rates. His repeal of the poll tax in 1935 increased voter registration by 76 percent in one year. . .

As an alternative to what he called the conservatism of the New Deal, Long proposed legislation capping personal fortunes, income and inheritances. . . In 1934, he unveiled an economic plan he called Share Our Wealth. Long argued there was enough wealth in the country for every individual to enjoy a comfortable standard of living, but that it was unfairly concentrated in the hands of a few millionaire bankers, businessmen and industrialists.

Long proposed a new tax code which would limit personal fortunes to $50 million, annual income to $1 million (or 300 times the income of the average family), and inheritances to $5 million. The resulting funds would be used to guarantee every family a basic household grant of $5,000 and a minimum annual income of $2,000-3,000 (or one-third the average family income). Long supplemented his plan with proposals for free primary and college education, old-age pensions, veterans' benefits, federal assistance to farmers, public works projects, and limiting the work week to thirty hours. . .

Long, in February 1934, formed a national political organization, the Share Our Wealth Society. A network of local clubs led by national organizer Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, the Share Our Wealth Society was intended to operate outside of and in opposition to the Democratic Party and the Roosevelt administration. By 1935, the society had over 7.5 million members in 27,000 clubs across the country, and Long's Senate office was receiving an average of 60,000 letters a week. Pressure from Long and his organization is considered by some historians as responsible for Roosevelt's "turn to the left" in 1935, when he enacted the Second New Deal, including the Works Progress Administration and Social Security; in private, Roosevelt candidly admitted to trying to "steal Long's thunder." |||

The other example is Lyndon Johnson. Johnson's gross mishandling of Vietnam has obscured memory of the fact that he fermented the greatest number of good domestic bills in the least time of any president in our history. Again, some examples from Wikipedia:

|||| Four civil rights acts were passed, including three laws in the first two years of Johnson's presidency. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade job discrimination and the segregation of public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 assured minority registration and voting. It suspended use of literacy or other voter-qualification tests that had sometimes served to keep African-Americans off voting lists and provided for federal court lawsuits to stop discriminatory poll taxes. It also reinforced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by authorizing the appointment of federal voting examiners in areas that did not meet voter-participation requirements. The Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas in immigration law. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 banned housing discrimination and extended constitutional protections to Native Americans on reservations. . .

The War on Poverty . . . spawned dozens of programs, among them the Job Corps, whose purpose was to help disadvantaged youths develop marketable skills; the Neighborhood Youth Corps, the first summer jobs established to give poor urban youths work experience and to encourage them to stay in school; Volunteers in Service to America, a domestic version of the Peace Corps, which placed concerned citizens with community-based agencies to work towards empowerment of the poor; the Model Cities Program for urban redevelopment; Upward Bound, which assisted poor high school students entering college; legal services for the poor; the Food Stamps program; the Community Action Program, which initiated local Community Action Agencies charged with helping the poor become self-sufficient; and Project Head Start, which offered preschool education for poor children.

The most important educational component of the Great Society was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. . . initially allotting more than $1 billion to help schools purchase materials and start special education programs to schools with a high concentration of low-income children. The Act established Head Start, which had originally been started by the Office of Economic Opportunity as an eight-week summer program, as a permanent program.

The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal money given to universities, created scholarships and low-interest loans for students, and established a National Teachers Corps to provide teachers to poverty stricken areas of the United States. It began a transition from federally funded institutional assistance to individual student aid.

The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 offered federal aid to local school districts in assisting them to address the needs of children with limited English-speaking ability until it expired in 2002

The Social Security Act of 1965 authorized Medicare and provided federal funding for many of the medical costs of older Americans. . . In 1966 welfare recipients of all ages received medical care through the Medicaid program. . .

In September 1965, Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act into law, creating both the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities as separate, independent agencies. . .

The Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 provided $375 million for large-scale urban public or private rail projects in the form of matching funds to cities and states . . . The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 and the Highway Safety Act of 1966 were enacted, largely as a result of Ralph Nader's book Unsafe at Any Speed.

Cigarette Labeling Act of 1965 required packages to carry warning labels. Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 set standards through creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Fair Packaging and Labeling Act requires products identify manufacturer, address, clearly mark quantity and servings. . . Child Safety Act of 1966 prohibited any chemical so dangerous that no warning can make its safe. Flammable Fabrics Act of 1967 set standards for children's sleepwear, but not baby blankets. Wholesome Meat Act of 1967 required inspection of meat which must meet federal standards. Truth-in-Lending Act of 1968 required lenders and credit providers to disclose the full cost of finance charges in both dollars and annual percentage rates, on installment loan and sales. Wholesome Poultry Products Act of 1968 required inspection of poultry which must meet federal standards. Land Sales Disclosure Act of 1968 provided safeguards against fraudulent practices in the sale of land. Radiation Safety Act of 1968 provided standards and recalls for defective electronic products. |||||

It is virtually impossible to conceive of any elected official today being as productive as Johnson and Long. Yet Johnson never went to business school; he was just a teacher. And Long took the bar exam after one year at Tulane Law school and then went out and sued Standard Oil. These were not people who are meant to succeed by today's distorted and ineffectual standards, yet they did. In fact, if you want to find anything comparable one of the few names that springs to mind is Harry Hopkins who put millions to work within months for FDR. Hopkins was a social worker by trade. With such leaders, hearts and smarts were the credentials they really needed.

What would a new populist program look like? It might include things like this:

- Universal healthcare with no trough-slopping by insurance companies

- A housing program in which the federal government would be an equity partner with lower income house purchasers. It would be a self-sustaining program as each partner would get their equity back when the house was sold.

- An end to usury in credit card lending.

- Pension protection

- A revival of high quality vocational training

- Election reform including instant runoff voting and public campaign financing

- Expansion of cooperatives and credit unions

It is possible that we have so fouled our own nest that nothing like LBJ or Huey Long will ever be possible again. And there is no guarantee that John Edwards, having discovered the populist treasure in the Democratic attic, will use it well. But there are so few real reasons to cheer about our politics these days, news that one candidate is seriously interested in programs that do the most good for the most people - an almost extinct goal in the Democratic Party - deserves a big cheer. And if he abuses this new found treasure, grab it from him and put it to better use .